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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.

If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.

We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.

One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.

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We should just make gambling illegal online again, things were fine back when you couldn’t gamble online then, at least in the USA, the fucking supreme corpo guzzlers (formerly the Supreme Court) interpreted the laws according to their owners will and now we have gambling online.

Probation was a thing, too. How did that turn out?

You can’t download drugs and alcohol digitally.

Frankly, being able to buy drugs and alcohol online is probably a mistake, too.

> You can’t download drugs and alcohol digitally

It was almost certainly easier for most people to buy drugs than gamble illegally when both were illegal.

Most states had lotteries before this though. At least those brought in tax money and were designed to be relatively fair. Online gambling can shut down your account and refuse to pay if you get too big of a payout, and their money isn't going towards public schools.

There wasn't some mass movement of people doing online gambling that led to the dam bursting and it getting legalized, though. Courts just made a different decision and opened it up one day and as far as I know there wasn't even mass lobbying about it?

There was mass lobbying, specificially by the taxpayers of the state of New Jersey, via their elected representatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...

Note that it was not a close decision:

> Opinion of the Court

>The Court announced a 7–2 judgment in favor of Murphy on May 14, 2018, reversing the Third Circuit.[25] Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch and in part by Justice Stephen Breyer.[26][27][28] The majority opinion agreed that §§ 3701(1) of PASPA commandeered power from the states to regulate their own gambling industries and thus was unconstitutional. It followed New York v. United States and reversed the Third Circuit decision.

fanduel and draftkings poured massive amount of money into advertising, pumping their numbers to make it seem like gambling was too big to stop.

Prohibition was incredibly successful at reducing the amount of alcohol people drank

And increasing tunneling skills! And increasing car racing! (Though I still don't get oval racing.)

Prohibition had some unintended consequences.

You'll have to ask your probation officer.

Exactly. Gambling in the real world involved friction. That plus a certain social stigma if you gambled outside of “mainstream” casinos.

And this helped weed out all but the most addicted gamblers. Now there is no friction, the platforms are free to create dark patterns to encourage problem gambling, and the vice has zero social cost.

The dark patterns aren't just in online gambling. Nowdays, a lot of brick-and-mortar casinos encourage, or even require, clients to create an account (often framed as a "members club" or "rewards card"), which is used to track the client's activity at the casino and target them with promotions tailored to their behavior. These can be used in some really troubling ways, e.g. by identifying clients who may have a gambling problem and targeting them with promotions to come back to the casino more often, to stay longer, and/or to start placing larger bets.

The worst dark pattern I saw for gambling was in Lithuania: in supermarkets, they sell scratch cards right next to the credit card terminal. If you are a recovering addict, you just can't avoid the trigger, at the worst moment.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to ask you many times not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(p.s. Just to pre-empt the usual: no, this is not a defense of Big Gambling, just an attempted defense of HN thread quality.)

This comment was unnecessary and very distracting from a far more interesting discussion in the replies to the commenter you are attempting to condescend.

There is no censorship happening here - the comment remains visible, he simply asked them to refrain from the inflammatory language.

> There is no censorship happening here

Wait until your account is shadow banned and you post in the void for weeks/months before noticing

dang is the moderator

I'm aware and was expressing my disappointment in that kind of flaming comment coming from someone who's supposed to be the adult in the room.

Usually I agree with your calls on things being unsubstantive, but this one kinda seems fine? I don't think it's flame bait, just emotive language? And the substantive point being made is that online gambling should be illegal.

(apologies if arguing about mod decisions is frowned upon, I didn't see anything in the rules about it)

If it were just the one comment I wouldn't have said anything; the issue is the pattern (note the word "repeatedly").

Fair, the comment history does paint a different picture.

You haven’t said anything, or at least I haven’t seen it. There’s no inbox here and I don’t always read old comments. If you have pointed it out before I don’t care, I haven’t seen it. If you want to point something out, then maybe email me about it the just time you see it, otherwise I’m not trolling through my old threads that often so you’ll have to accept that this is the first I’ve seen you ask.

I’m respect your wishes but you can’t say you have told me anything if I didn’t see it here, sorry Dan but that’s only fair since there’s no way for me to see your message unless I randomly go back.

If you want to ensure people see these messages, then that’s a feature you’ll need to add. I’m fine with you using the email on my account for this purpose, too, but I’m not fine with getting a single message from you here and you expecting me to have seen anything else you’ve said in the past. As far as I’m concerned this is the first I’ve seen you ask me about this.

This is an unusually long way of saying “sorry, I haven’t seen your messages before – will be more careful but could you please email me next time?”

This seems like an unusually good time to mention https://hnrss.org I’ve been quite happy getting replies to my HN comments as an rss feed!

No affiliation, just a happy user. Also not trying to say you must use sth like that or anything, just a piece of software I’ve enjoyed. :-)

These are the previous moderation replies, and you certainly saw some of them, since you responded. Interestingly, sometimes your responses were positive and sometimes rather hostile (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877994). But we're not asking you anything different than we ask of others here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875947 (May 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265350 (June 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36062502 (May 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449790 (April 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190475 (July 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32146436 (July 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29857469 (Jan 2022)

The other point about supreme court is also factually correct.

There’s no flame bait here just some swearing and rough language. I’ll cut back because you asked (once, I’ve not seen your responses other than this one), but I don’t think I’m out of line.

Also if people were downvoting my comments it’d be different but it’s just you for a frw recent ones down modding then, because before you get here they were up or even. Moderators should focus on those truly displaying bad behavior, I’m just swearing and saying relevant things.

I have a very long history of good comments here, arguing otherwise seems suspect, honestly.

I’ll back off like you say but I don’t agree at all. I’ve read the guidelines and tend to follow them.

Edit: I see like 3-4 questionable comments from me, two of who’ve are barely questionable. I get what you’re saying about the language but it’s really amazing you’ve targeted me here today, this us such low hanging fruit here, don’t you have better things to deal with? I’ll write better comments but I’m just really annoyed at your characterization of my behavior, it is very unfair in my eyes. I’ve done very good comments for ages and emotional language like this is rare for me. I expect better from mods here.

I appreciate the expression of feeling here! I know it sucks to get upbraided by moderators (and we don't enjoy it either). But it's definitely not personal. The moderation response would have been the same regardless of user, since we're not focused on usernames to begin with.

What attracts our attention are, in this order: (1) a post that breaks the site guidelines; (2) the other comments by that account; (3) whether we've posted moderation replies to that account before. It's true that that the username is what links (1), (2), and (3), but what we're paying attention to is mostly the content.

I think one factor here may be the tendency, which we all have, to underestimate the provocation in your own statements and overestimate it in others [1]. Those two distortions compound into quite a skew [2], and makes it easy to feel like one is being singled out or treated unfairly [3].

Beyond that, when you run across other posts breaking the site guidelines and going unmoderated, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the moderators are biased or secretly agreeing with those other posts. But this is a mistake. Overwhelmingly the reason for this is simply that we didn't see those other posts. We can't moderate what we don't see, and we don't come close to seeing everything on HN (or even 10% of it) - there is way too much. [4]

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Was the commenter wrong?

The court ruling was a good one, and anticipated. The federal government can either allow all gambling, or ban it all. They can’t pick and choose states where it may be allowed.

Before online gambling went wild in the US, most brick and mortal gambling was one of three sources: (1) Nevada (Las Vegas, etc.), (2) Atlantic City, New Jersey, (3) Native American tribes. There were also some other odd locations, like river boat gambling on the Mississippi River or "cardrooms" in California. As a result, most Americans did not live close to a casino. Now, you can do it from your smartphone.

And federal law said states other than Nevada and New Jersey had to ban gambling. The court said they can’t do that. They could ban gambling nationwide in federal law.

Exactly. The corruption and rot is beyond the pale.

for a while i was using the sports gambling apps to make lots of little bets.

it was fun to put $0.50 on a game I normally wouldn't watch and tune in with a real rooting interest. i never bet more that $1 on a game because I knew that I would really dislike losing 'real money'.

the fact was that the stakes were completely irrelevant to me. the value came from definitively and publicly taking a side. if you're the fan of a team, you do this in every game. but with these little bets it's a way to sign-on for a little slice of being a fan in every game.

and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform. people love chasing worthless internet points (reddit upvotes, HN karma, etc), so why not build a platform that gives you points for betting?

you could let a chunk of the population scratch the itch they get to gamble without creating financial risk. they can still brag about their wins.

I'd do something fairly similarly, but in a sort of emotional hedge. If in a fight I was really rooting for one guy, I'd put a relatively small amount of money on the other. Ok 'my guy' lost, but hey - dinner's free tonight! It's also quite remarkable how often arbitrage opportunities come up where you can put bets on both sides with a guaranteed win. You'd think they'd all get eaten up by bots, but that's not at all the case.

Those are the dark patterns.

Give a player that is hesitant a good opportunity to place a pretty much guaranteed winning bet and try to get them to cross their threshold. Once crossed, it’s much harder not to cross it again for most people.

> and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform

We have that in the Netherlands and we do it massively for every World Cup and Euro. The app my friend groups are on, Scorito, has 1.5 million competitors for the current WC, in the country of 18 million, and that's not the only app.

Normally a group would make a small buy in, like €5, where the winner takes all, but this year the legal department at work forbade that, se that sort of gambling Is actual illegal.

>gambling sites

I think I’d probably go farther. Next time you’re in a corner store or gas station, pay attention to who is wasting their money on scratchers or other lotto tickets.

You shouldn’t be allowed to gamble unless you can prove it’s disposable income.

we prevent people from gambling on early stage startups and risky investments by limiting investment to "accredited investors". same thing should apply to gambling.

I believe some countries/casinos in Southeast Asia have policies that you either have to show a foreign passport, or put a deposit of $500-1000 down to enter the casino, that you get back when you leave, with the theory (easily exploitable, I'm sure) being that you can't leave the casino penniless.

I'd say this goes for more than gambling. Since digitalization, we've removed a lot of friction from depraved behavior, and regulation hasn't caught up to it yet.

The regulation has gone the opposite direction, recently.

It was regulated.

Have to remember that regulated gambling also has lobbyist so unless regulated gambling is invested in these apps they are likely trying to get them banned or also regulated

That will make things worse unless you reign in crypto. If you regulate Kalshi, people will use the unregulated polymarket which is already illegal in the united states.

This would just push everyone to unlicensed casinos/bookmakers . Means no tax revenue + even worse player protection.

make this severely illegal with minimum two decades behind bars and what how they disappear… this is a very solvable problem which no one wants to solve

Good luck with cross-border enforcement.

Also the operator is completely legal/compliant with it's jurisdictions laws as they allow us players (many now blacklist the us, but some not )

So they won't accept any foreign judgement . That's why most countries rather target their infrastructure (psps/banking etc ..)

Even Eu countries had/have severe problems with Malta (due e.g Article 56A of the malta gaming act, which shields the operator from foreign judgements)

Make the websites unconnectable from the US. Make domestic ISPs not route the traffic to the site else jail time for the executives. Make VPNs not route traffic to the site else jail time for the executives and being null routed by domestic ISPs.

If you really want to crack down on it, then it could be done.

In the ancient days of 2011, this was done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

Because they know it will not work.

People have spend decades in prison for selling weed. Now it's legalized in more and more countries. Making things people like illegal rarely works, and it's far from a "solvable problem". Don't get me wrong, gambling is very bad, but if we were to analyze it statistically I think alcohol is way worse for society at large. And we all know how making alcohol illegal went.

Legal weed has been a disaster in the US, 20 million addicted (almost daily use/daily use) versus a few million before it was banned.

Note that I'm not in favor of either weed or alcohol being as readily accessible as they are now, but there are a few things making that claim a bit dubious. The first is that obviously people are less reluctant to self-report using weed if it's legal. Secondly, the causation could be reversed, i.e. there are other factors in society contributing to both higher usage and larger general support for legalization.

In any case, my point was that simply making something illegal with the threat of "decades in prison" isn't a very good solution. Gambling, drugs, social media, etc. are all "big business", there's money to be made because there's a demand for it. How to solve that I don't know, but just prohibiting it doesn't seem like a good fix.

You made that claim up. There was a study of Some 22 million people around the world being dependent on marijuana. You are severely overestimating US addicted people.

What about this: that policy was huge success, because unlike gambling, weed is fairly harmless.

https://apnews.com/article/marijuana-cannabis-alcohol-use-di...

Close to 18 million in 2022, not exactly 20 million.

And the disaster part is where exactly? Their or their close ones lives being negatively impacted are where exactly? The original claim was "addicted" and "disaster".

The world has 22 million of people who are addicted and their lives are negatively impacted. The logical implication here is that these people are not negatively impacted.

These comparisons misunderstand, or perhaps underestimate, how markets work.

Demand for cannabis and alcohol is ubiquitous, strong.

Demand for each individual betting market, diminishingly rare.

Good luck finding the bookie at work or in your college class taking $10k in action on whether the Shah of Iran is still the Shah next week…

Banning the clearnet-based convenience, scale and breadth of market participants these services offer would immediately put a huge dent in most markets - non-sport especially.

Whether the black market and cryptocurrency-based sites outside of the clearnet would start to fill in, remains to be seen.

There has never been anything near the scale of Poly or Kalshi on “darkweb”.

Seems very disproportional. Reminds me of that TNG episode where the penalty for every offense, no matter how minor, is the death penalty.

Most of their practice are illegal already. The problem is lack of enforcement.

We are not suing polymarket. We are not suing the marketing company. And we don't want online censorship.

IMO, the marketing company / media company should be sued. -- They are (relatively) easier target to sue. Many are US based and not going anywhere. With enough luck, this might give us a better internet with less SEO bullshit.

sports gambling has been going for several years in UK and several other countries. i dont remember anyone getting murdered over a lost bet.

It's been going for centuries in the UK. There have been murders:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/father-jailed-fo...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/gambler-murdered-woman...

It's a bit hard to find good stats, but it's at least 1 or 2 a year, it could be more like 10 - plenty of domestic violence is caused by money problems, and those problems can often be gambling related.

There's a lot of suicides - between 250 and 650 people each year according to gamblingwithlives.org https://www.gamblingwithlives.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01...

Just another hearty dividend thanks to corporate personhood and Citizen's United. Rarely has a single decision so thoroughly broken our system, but the regulatory capture is plain to see these days.

Citizens United gets a lot of flak, and it wasn't good, but it's far from the only factor here. We can at least go back to Buckley v. Valeo which gave us the idea that "money is speech". Corporations are a problem, but money is a bigger problem.

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