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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

this is a false equivalence. Amazon and Meta have caused plenty of damage, companies in our capitalist economies are bad etc. But shipping you books or connecting you to other people isn't inherently evil. There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is. It's been a vice in virtually every culture for thousands of years. It's akin to peddling drugs. The practice itself is corrosive and destroys people.

It's one thing to acknowledge that any for profit company in some way behaves badly, but you can't change the world. You can choose not to sell poison.

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> There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is.

I think this is waaaay too black and white. Gambling can be fun, and there isn't anything wrong with enjoying gambling in a healthy manner. It is very comparable to drinking, I think. I refuse to apologize for enjoying the occasional drink or the occasional game of poker.

I like a poker game with friends, I enjoy sitting at a blackjack table for a few hours sometimes. I have even enjoyed entering a few poker tournaments.

There is a line between a poker game with friends, or even a professional poker industry, and a sophisticated tech company operating a nationwide low-friction gambling app, incentivized to optimize harming its users as much as possible. This line was enshrined into law until recently.

I agree, which is why I think it is going too far to say “anyone who works in the gambling industry is bad”

I have no problem with gambling as long we are absolutely sure its not done by children and teens, heavily regulated, strong limits (e.g. one play per day), required training or community memberships at addiction groups and things like that.

I didn't finish the full registration but Polymarket basically didn't ask about anything besides email and new pass. Maybe later when someone wants to bet but it should be harder and take a week at least like a cooldown effect, and never more than 100 EUR at a time.

There are many ways to heavily regulate it so that a few people can enjoy it at times occasionally but help those people who need it and make it very hard for them to come back. But then the income iwould be so small it wouldnt land on the news anymore.

PS: Not an expert in gambling and addiction, my concrete examples might not work but still I haven't seen other efforts so that was my point.

Between these I think Amazon is less bad. It's a monopoly & monopsony which causes a lack of innovation and (eventually) higher prices but it's also a much more efficient way to sell things and it doesn't destroy the fabric of society or anything. Meta though is just as bad if not worse than any gambling site out there. Its products are optimized to destroy your attention span, feed you polarizing content, destroy your mental health and waste hours of your time every day all while ironically making you less connected to other people because users won't get off their phones and have a conversation.

Amazon is not a monopoly. See Walmart, Ebay, etc. Lots of companies sell products online.

> (eventally) higher prices

I have not noticed Amazon charging higher prices than others. The difficulty in charging higher prices is competitors emerge.

Amazon extracts a lot of the value of a purchase from the seller's take. Sellers risk sanctions if they sell a product cheaper thru their brand website.

It's normal for wholesale prices being at 50% to 60% of what the retailer will sell it for. It's always been like that.

And those wholesalers would not do business with you if you undercut their retail price.

Amazon's practice is normal throughout the industry.

I know this because my business in the 80s would wholesale my products through mail order retailers.

Honestly, i think apple is worse wrt gambling then either meta or Amazon . Apple has been allowing and pushing “gamble-lite” products for years on the app store. So much gatcha game slop on there it is genuinely unusable for me. Even worse, they are now optimizing ad revenue for those that pay to push their crap into ads u cannot skip.

I seriously doubt mr jobs wouldnt take one look at the app store home screen and puke in disgust at how awful it is.

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