Prediction markets are breaking the news and becoming their own beat
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
I feel that once a person starts gambling, they've just demonstrated they are not fiscally responsible. There should be a hard stop on increasing debt through loans or credit cards, and any income should go directly to the dependents and not pass through the gambler's hands.
Gambling is as destructive as DUI and should be treated with the same level of severity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/preside...
Many of these things are not really democratized either, they're centralized systems with a "we empower you" sales-pitch. The opaque and unaccountable central authority has an incentive to pick-and-choose what's possible, and to put their thumb on the metaphorical scales to get certain outcomes.
Kind of like ride-share apps: Any pretense of "democratizing" jobs faded, instead they enabled new flavors of monopolistic exploitation.
Leela: "You mean we can all together vote on the best plan?"
Farnsworth: "Hmm? Oh yes, as long as you do it all alone."
Those are contradictory words
Which makes me wonder if it is actually just money laundering.
Instead, most volume is in sports bets. People just like to gamble.
We shouldn't conflate permitting lotteries which give a lot of people precious hope, with enabling the disease of gambling addiction. Gambling addiction transforms its victims into desperate degenerate messes, who will do anything in order to reverse the outcome of their losses. By popularising gambling on reality (instead of a sandbox like sport) we're creating a future where such people will harass journalists, which further threatens our increasingly precarious relationship with truth.
Today, any bloody dictator, tyrant, or autocrat continues to kill people en masse simply because society lacks a sufficiently effective tool to guarantee the reliable transfer of funds to one of their henchmen should the issue with him be effectively resolved
EDIT: Oh, I initially thought that you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations but not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. Which is not what I said, I only said (implied) that it's not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. I made no representation regarding whether I think it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations.
However, what I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more, because... if ordinary people could trade in assassination markets then they would choose to assassinate the government's assassins, and then the government would not react or respond in any way, so then the government would no longer be able to coordinate assassinations, and the general public would stop using the assassination market, and then the problem is solved. Is that right?
Oh no, I think you misunderstood. I'm not saying you think this is acceptable. I'm saying the elites are ALREADY doing it. And you're expressing your extreme disapproval not of the phenomenon itself, but of the hypothetical situation in which not only the elites but also ordinary people would gain access to such tools (which, of course, would also be very illegal and unacceptable. Well, until these terms still exist).
> I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more
I think we are rather talking about an increase in the number of assassinations to a level that literally threatens the destruction of human civilization in its modern form. Purely because of the irreversible nature of this tool acquisition by society. It's just that at one point in time, society doesn't yet have access to it, and at another, it has, and now it's everywhere, for everyone, and there's no turning back. The entire planet is living in a new socio-political-economic reality.
But this does not in any way contradict the radical democratization of society.
> so then the government
Will there be a government?
I'd like to emphasize that this incentive doesn't have to be an accidental find by the insider either: The "market" can end up facilitating anonymous crowd-sourced bribery by enemies or competitors, who create the potential for profit knowing that eventually an insider will take the other end of the implied deal.
Every time I see someone dismissing these kinds of issues--especially someone whose salary depends on not-understanding it [0] --I imagine how their tune would change if the shoe was on the other foot. For example, if someone created a "prediction market" where people could anonymously bet on unusual deaths or serious injuries of... prediction-market executives.
https://youtu.be/RmUQptXfiWs?t=485
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
Actually, now that I think about it, let's get rid of the minimum, there should be no minimum, all bets even five cents must be fully disclosed and attributed to natural persons, no hiding behind "corporations are people, my friend" nonsense.
>>the real danger of insider trading are company insiders being incentivised to damage the company to make a quick buck.
Damaging the company is illegal as well. Making things illegal doesn't magically stop people from doing what they have incentives to do.
I HIGHLY recommend going onto a sports subreddit match thread during a match and seeing what people say, versus the post match thread, a few hours after the match. The difference in tone is striking. While some people are probably just passionate, I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
I'm a firm believer in 'there's nothing new under the sun'.
> There's already been tales of journalists being harassed to change stories in order for over-leveraged betters to win polymarket bets.
So the only thing that has changed is who is doing the harassing.
> I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
People who are "passionate" about sports have always been the most aggressive and vulgar. I grew up around them, this does not surprise me at all.
Sure but I can't help but wonder if many of them have money riding on the games which makes their anger much more understandable. Perhaps those you grew up around were also having a bit of a flutter.
Can you guarantee a fair trial when anyone can bet on the outcome, including the judge and the defense?
It has changed the outcome of some sports matches. It could change the outcome of far more important events.
The system is already very much like that, we should try to go in the other direction, not make it even more attractive for corrupt individuals.
When someone in charge only cares about personal profit, it is only them that will benefit (and a couple of megacorps), to the detriment of millions, and humanity itself (look no further than the current events).
if I bet $50K that arowthway won't die suddenly then I am sure that probably won't happen, right?
The comparison to stock tickers is apt. Bloomberg terminals started as specialized tools for bond traders. Once financial data appeared on every TV screen, it changed how the public understood markets. Prediction markets are following the same path, just compressed into months instead of decades.
The tension is that news organizations now have a financial incentive to cover events that move prediction markets. This creates a feedback loop: dramatic events move markets, market movements become news, news coverage moves markets further. We saw this with the Hormuz situation this month, where prediction market odds were cited in coverage of the shipping blockade, which then moved the odds.
Whether this is good or bad depends on whether you think the signal (real-time probability estimates) outweighs the noise (gamification of serious events). The Forbes incident with the mass shooting market suggests we have not figured out where the line is yet.
I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
Make a prediction for it: When will Gamma/Data/CLOB require subscription: 2026, 2027, etc.
Almost like the offenders get their inside info straight from the chief purveyor of markets up and down chaos