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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

> It amazes me that sports betting is allowed to persist as is. It’s an addictive hobby with similar detriments to addictive substances, yet advertising to children is ok.

This didn't just magically happen. We knew all of these problems, and it was completely illegal in the US for decades because of that. But there was a concerted, highly funded, well organized push among state legislatures over the past few years to get this stuff through, to the complete detriment of society. Pure blatant regulatory capture funded by multi-billion dollar corporations.

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I don’t see how betting on sports is any worse than buying lotto tickets or making risky options or shitcoin trades that the person barely understands.

Part of it is the ubiquity of advertising, and the ability to gamble from anywhere using your phone. Both of which make it much easier to develop a gambling addiction, and much harder for and addict to stop gambling.

Sports betting also has the unique issue of introducing corruption into sports. A league like the NFL has a huge number of players, coaches, referees, and league staff, all of whom can influence the outcome of a game, and all of whom are potentially susceptible to bribes. A notable case of this happening is the "Black Sox" scandal, where the 1919 Chicago White Sox blatantly threw the World Series in exchange for bribes from a gambling syndicate. The more prolific sports betting is, the more likely events like this are.

> Part of it is the ubiquity of advertising

This cannot be overstated.

I like to watch my local hockey team. To (legally) access their games, you must pay $30/mo (or have a cable TV package that includes it). Once you pay the entry fee, you're then to subject to _near constant_ ads for gambling: at least one gambling ad every commercial break (and which translates to ~10 ads just during periods), betting lines and bookmaker logos in scorebugs, full-screen takeover ads with reads during breaks in play, ads for on-network shows covering gambling more in depth, etc.

Oh, and at one point the team had a sportsbook _inside the arena_ (it's since been replaced with a different sponsor).

It's completely taken over sports broadcasts.

I think sports is much easier to understand than shitcoins, and the payout cycles are much faster than waiting for a cryto vehicle to go up over an unspecified period of time.

Zero-day options.

Sports betting is not zero harm, but the rate of harm is significantly lower than the kinds of betting that are legal in parts of the US.

The US is one of the weirdest markets globally in that it legalized all the high-harm activities (because of massive political corruption) and banned all the low-harm stuff. Now they are normalizing, you have the hysterical people who don't really understand why it was banned initially saying that Eden has fallen.

All these things are bad, too.

There are bookies still operating to this day, one in the local dive bar my wife and I frequent. I have no idea who is muscle is but if you don’t pay him you will have violent repercussions. He’s an older guy who chain smokes some sort of pipe tobacco and he’s been there forever.

Is that really better than a regulated industry? Because that’s the alternative when you have prohibition.

Is that really better than a regulated industry? Because that’s the alternative when you have prohibition.

Scale is important. If the "regulated" (I use that term loosely in this context) industry is hundreds or thousands of times larger than the previous unregulated industry, then I could see it being a much worse problem.

And the fact that ads for sports betting have taken over broadcasting and online media for anything even tangentially related, my reaction is that the problem has gotten much worse.

When sports betting was illegal, the US was already the largest sports-betting market in the world.

>Is that really better than a regulated industry? Because that’s the alternative when you have prohibition.

It all comes down to access. The mobile aspect of things can fuel addictions to an extreme that otherwise would have been controllable. There's no reason you can't have casinos or gambling halls or whatever to fill that need. Prohibition obviously isn't the answer. But being able to pop open an app and lose your paycheck in a moment is ruinous to people, and there's an entire predatory industry out there designing these things to trick people like that.

Yes that's better. The mafia wasn't doing hundreds of billions in dollars of gambling business every year. Sports betting is today, and it's growing at double digit percentages.

Prohibition never completely stamps something out, but it's better than opening up access to every 18 year old with a smartphone.

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