Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-bets-prediction-market-441cdeb5?st=HhTZY2

by Vaslo • 1 month ago

469 389 1 month ago

lobito25• 1 month ago

Bait from polymarket to get new users, They should get sued.

Seems like a weird mistake to make. If they're going to bait new users, why not just use bets that did exist? Better yet, why not use users who did make a lot of money?

impish9208• 1 month ago

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-b...

Baljhin• 19 days ago

Seems the gift has already run its course - for me, still getting paywalled. Are such links rate-limited?

rcxdude• 1 month ago

Seems to be a popular means for marketing gambling. There was a scandal of a bunch of twitch streamers doing the same thing for skin gambling websites.

october8140• 1 month ago

Is this fraud?

realJared54• 1 month ago

Yes, it is 100% a misrepresentation of reality to fool the general public into joining a platform that condones deceptive user acquisition strategies.

jordanb2• 1 month ago

I was listening to a podcast and heard an ad for supplements (I think it was collegian). The thing that struck me was the specificity of the health claims they were making in the ad.

There was no "promotes healthy whatever" it was like "this will make your skin younger and eliminate/prevent wrinkles and other signs of aging."

Then the quiet fast-talking guy said that none of their health claims have been reviewed by the FDA.

So that's where we are now. Everything is scams and nobody will do anything about it.

idle_zealot2• 1 month ago

Would it matter if the bets were real and they picked the 0.00001% big winners to feature in the ad? Would that be less fraudulent in any meaningful sense, would it have a different impact on the world?

Is the real crime here that they were too lazy to lie with selective facts?

ceejayoz2• 1 month ago

Would that be less fraudulent…

Is this even a question? Yes, it would be less fraudulent.

jmilloy2• 1 month ago

In the US, the FTC is very clear that faking or purchasing testimonials is illegal. Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising and is a form of fraud. On the other hand, selecting and advertising specific real testimonials is fine. A customer described their actual experience that way, and presumably the consumers understand that advertisers will select especially positive individual testimonials for their advertisements. I can't believe I'm actually trying to explain this, but fake testimonials are illegal because the consumer has no way to know that they are made up. Real testimonials are not "lying with statistics", they're not statistics at all, and are legal because consumers can understand that it's not the median customer experience.

If picking real winners and real winnings to feature in the ad was just as good, they could do that. If not, then yes, it makes an impact on the world to mislead people with that marketing.

Somehow there's a difference between things that happened and didn't happen, and that's a good place to draw a line in the sand of what you're allowed to advertise and not.

baobabKoodaa2• 1 month ago

Is fraud "more fraudulent" than non-fraud? Yes. Wtf man?

ggm• 1 month ago

Would a prosecution have high chance of succeeding?

jcgrillo• 1 month ago

Isn't everything these days? It's all gotten so gross.

matheusmoreira• 1 month ago

Yeah. It's so demoralizing, seeing all these people make fortunes while honest people scrape by. It feels like getting in on the grift is the only way to make it.

m00dy3• 1 month ago

you may be confusing it with deregulation.

aucisson_masque4• 1 month ago

No. There are still people and companies being proud of their work and not doing it only for the money side. I know, shocking..

fer• 30 days ago

I might age myself out here, but, does anyone take influencers at face value, for anything at all, but especially for anything involving money?

aqfamnzc• 30 days ago

Sadly, yes.

blitzar2• 30 days ago

Prior art; “More Doctors Smoke Camels” - 1946

cj3• 1 month ago

I finally gave in to my curiosity and downloaded Kalshi last week to place a few bets on the World Cup.

I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.

They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.

I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.

(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)

This industry is wild.

holistio• 1 month ago

Back in the good old days you needed a few more steps before you got into debt after gambling.

ElProlactin2• 1 month ago

Back in the good old days non-payment of gambling debt was a threat to your knee-caps. Today, you might get cut off from Klarna and have to extend your next auto loan to 256 months.

owlninja• 1 month ago

I read a book this year about sports gambling in the US [1], and it points out how nasty and predatory it is. I think "prediction markets" have even less regulation? I would talk to my sports fan buddies at work and they would say "oh, just how sportsbooks in Vegas operate already", but this is on-demand, in your face, constantly nudging you to bet with dark patterns and "comps". I used to want sports gambling legal in the US, but the way it has gone is incredibly disgusting and is starting to make watching sports almost annoying. The crawl on the bottom is no longer scores, but moneylines...

[1] "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling" (2026) by Danny Funt

TZubiri7• 1 month ago

Predictions markets are more regulated than sports betting, because the events being predicted are wider, so they will naturally touch on a whole lot more regulation.

For example, can someone place a bet on an event that X person will be shot? That question now touches on a whole range of laws regarding murder, life insurance, incitation to violence, free speech? That you just don't touch at all in sports betting.

somenameforme5• 1 month ago

A bit of a tangent, but many like the moneylines isn't because of gambling but because it tells you who's the favorite/underdog and by what margin. It's like in the equivalent of a chess game of knowing the player's ratings, which itself can directly lead to a nominal moneyline, but in most sports there's no formal predictive rating system.

mullingitover• 30 days ago

It only really struck me in adulthood: the professional sports, particularly baseball and American football, are basically gambling delivery vehicles. They’re packed with nonstop betting opportunities for the duration of the events. Football games ceremonially start off with a coin toss, which is very much on the nose. The ‘fun game’ aspect of the sports are very difficult to find among all the bettable events.

embedding-shape2• 1 month ago

This was my experience trying out "traditional betting" for the first time with Betfair last Worldcup, and some other platform I tried out before as well. Not sure what Kalshi/others are doing that is so different?

maxbond8• 1 month ago

If you're going to gamble, it's probably for the best that your counterparty doesn't also control the platform. I'm not saying that justifies being able to gamble frictionlessly, but it is marginally less exploitative. Eg, back in the day bucket shops (which sold binary options, like prediction markets do) would increase the spread in proportion to their assessment of your skill such that you would lose even if you were more skilled. In a proper market the platform makes the same amount of money whoever wins.

So, not all that different, but marginally less exploitative. I've never looked at Polymarket but Kalshi and PredictIt slid steadily from things of at least plausible real economic value (a market where it was conceivable [if unlikely] someone would be hedging their insurance contract or something) into total nonsense with no non-gambling function like whether someone would tweet a certain word.

I think prediction markets could serve a similar to a futures markets and have a functional purpose in the economy. It could be useful to generate real time estimates of the probability of some events that no one can control and have real economic consequences, like a hurricane. But evidently that's not where the money is.

watwut7• 1 month ago

They pretend they are "market" and not gambling to avoid regulations.

skywhopper3• 30 days ago

They pretend they are not a gambling operation to get around geographical and age restrictions limiting gambling.

manwithopinions• 1 month ago

The U.S. is quite far behind the rest of the world on sports betting, which means you don’t even need to imagine, we know from other countries that it doesn’t end well. The most worrying aspect is, the current U.S. government has no interest in the regulations that have helped minimise the problems in other countries.

The U.K’s highest earner for a few years running was the founder of a U.K. betting site, she had something like a 500 million salary and there is an entire town’s economy supported by her business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet365

m00dy3• 1 month ago

I personally never met her but Bet365 is one of the most protected sites on the internet when it comes to antibot protections. When I started my company in 2025, I had two customers from UK, they were very much interested in odds for horse races from bet365, mostly realtime. Bet365 knew I was coming for them.

cjrp2• 30 days ago

Her salary of £421 million in 2020 was 50% higher than it was in 2019, and higher than all FTSE 100 Index CEOs combined.

short_sells_poo• 30 days ago

It's really telling about the state of the UK economy that the highest earner's business doesn't make anything but literally drains money from the masses.

TheCowboy• 1 month ago

How were you able to use a credit card when it's not a payment they accept?

chasebank• 1 month ago

They call it 'onramping'. Moonpay is a big one, coinbase has one, onramper is another. Basically Applepay / credit card -> ETH or SOL or USDC, etc, then lose away!

cj3• 1 month ago

I just checked my account.

They accept Visa, Mastercard and Discover via Apple Pay for a 2% deposit fee.

But I also see it says they don’t accept credit card in their help docs. I’m not sure what that’s about.

tills13• 1 month ago

Instant deposit via credit card? Is that not considered a cash advance?

LPisGood2• 1 month ago

It is, and I know someone who found that out the hard way during the Super Bowl.

JoeMattie• 1 month ago

You think that's wild, look into prop firms some time

ph4rsikal• 1 month ago

The on-ramp in crypto is incredibly well built out. But then, once you are in the fake money world, you will notice that the off-ramp doesn't exist.

consensus1• 1 month ago

I have taken money out of Polymarket and it is quick and easy.

xboxnolifes• 1 month ago

The off-ramp of nearly all of my crypto endeavors has been very easy in my experience. Not always simple, because a lot of parts of moving money on various crypto chains is unintuitive and well in-need of improvement, but definitely easy once you know what to do.

The most annoying part, somewhat surprisingly, is always with regards to United States KYC restrictions. I've had a fair bit of annoyance trying to move crypto off of services that were once accessible to US customers and no longer are.

m00dy3• 1 month ago

on-ramp and off-ramp were the problems of the past. Thanks to Trump, both worlds have merged together now.

baobabKoodaa2• 1 month ago

Off-ramp does exist. Stop lying.

ShinyLeftPad• 1 month ago

Offramp exists it just depends how ugly it is by country. A friend of mine literally travels to another country to withdraw what he is paid in crypto.

rightbyte• 1 month ago

Well try to make a withdrawal and see how convinient that might be. Internet casinos are usually easy to get money into but hard to get money out of.

kortilla• 1 month ago

It works just fine. It’s not a casino in the regular sense because you’re betting against other people, not the house.

Lucasoato• 1 month ago

If everything goes as planned, you won’t have to get anything out.

dehrmann• 30 days ago

I haven't used Kalshi, but I expected it's actually easy because it's technically a futures exchange, so it'll be regulated more like a stock brokerage than off-shore gambling.

infinite_spin3• 30 days ago

There's a lot of proposed legislation trying to expand mobile gambling too:

https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news/114277/massachusetts-ig...

https://sportsbettingalliance.org/take-action/ohio_igaming/

https://sportsbettingalliance.org/take-action/texas/

https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/h...

mastermage3• 30 days ago

WHAT and I have to stress IN THE ACTUAL FUCK

bartread• 30 days ago

Yeah, and also inevitable that a product designed to so efficiently separate people from their money would be overrun by grifters and scammers from the influencer/creator world.

What does make this instance perhaps a bit surprising is that it's Polymarket themselves who are paying those grifters.

They're an incredibly well known US based company targeting US based consumers in a way that is patently illegal. It seems almost unbelievably dumb that they would do this even by the often grotty standards of gambling companies.

They must have realised this would be found out and that, when it was, an investigation and enforcement action would follow? I guess maybe some of the creators will find themselves in hot water as well?

I really don't understand what the long term play is here, other than to be litigated out of business.

Pxtl2• 30 days ago

Let's compare and contrast this to how credit card companies treat sexual content vendors. Remember when a raft of games got delisted on Steam because of pressure from cc companies?

walrus012• 30 days ago

They allow instant deposits with credit card

This is my biggest takeaway, and I really wonder what payment processor(s) they're using, because the chargeback and fraud rate in filling 'real money' into an online gambling account using visa or mastercard must be through the roof.

Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors (alluded to in popular fiction in Industry season 4 recently, for instance).

The back end of how they're able to get money "instantly" into peoples accounts must be fascinating, in a how the sausages are made kind of way.

flexagoon• 30 days ago

Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors

They're called high-risk payment processors and they usually handle all sorts of "legal but sketchy" sectors like porn, gambling, crypto, legalized drugs/vapes, MLMs, etc. It's not even some shadowy darknet industry, if you just search for "high risk payment processor" there is plenty of them which look very professional and even provide official Shopify integrations and stuff.

Interesting that if you go to one of their websites they also handle some pretty normal industries like "furniture" or "travel" just because of the high chargeback rate in them.

fc417fc802• 30 days ago

I wonder what the chargeback and fraud rate actually is in practice given they do ID verification. Pretty difficult to claim you didn't make the purchase depending on what they collect.

jappgar• 30 days ago

I'm assuming they pay high percentages to processors on deposits to cover the losses.

Then they recoup that (and more) in withdrawal fees

willsmith72• 30 days ago

Surely credit card has a terrible fee attached no? Just based on other services

Lio• 30 days ago

It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.

My worry is that social media surveillance could be combined with Polymarket to tailor bets to individuals.

This could be very subtle. You don't really need your punters to always be wrong either. Meaning that sometimes they'd win at the expense of other punters with the illusion they can make money.

You just need them to be wrong, say, 15% of the time and to keep coming back compulsively and consistently over time. The longer the better.

If you're ever around fruit/slot machines you'll notice that they do payout and when they do they make a lot of noise. That hides the fact they slowly cream off a percentage of the money that goes in. In the UK the legal limit is around 30%, keeping it low for new gamblers and ramping up when they're hooked.

With detailed information about punter's lives and no regulation you can weaponise that.

actionfromafar• 30 days ago

Future of AI Fintech

gertrunde• 30 days ago

With "AWP" (Amusement with Prize, as opposed to SWP: Skill with Prize, i.e. quiz machines), they're often set to payout 80-85% of money taken in. (SWP's are usually around 30%).

And at that level they're still pocketing hundreds of pounds per week per machine.

The most lucrative ones I've seen (admittedly ~20 years ago now) were being emptied by the operator twice a week and taking out £600-800 every time, per machine, with 3-4 machines per location.

An eye opening industry - I'm sure there are businesses out there that pretend to be one thing (pub, club, etc), but their primary profit source is gambling.

everdrive2• 30 days ago

it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.

"Would you like to make decisions that are bad for you?" The future is indeed wild, and personal weakness is for sale. This isn't meant as an attack on you, but a lot of people will not be able to manage this sort of reduced friction. People with MBAs will call this "providing value."

kleene_op• 30 days ago

So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months

Are you sure those are the correct figures? That's a 4$ win in your favor if you don't use any of the deposited money and cash it back one year later.

avn2109• 30 days ago

Key point though is that Kalshi and similar prediction market betting apps are parimutuel, unlike traditional sportsbooks/Draftkings etc where punters bet against the house. This greatly changes (improves) the incentives for the house, e.g. they don't ban sharks and search only for dumb money punters, they try much less to prevent you from leaving with your winnings etc. The parimutuel house just takes a flat rake percentage off the top of the sum of all bids, so they just want to maximize the amount of money wagered overall instead of doing shady shenanigans.

I'm not a prediction market user/booster nor a sports gambler, but this is a key difference and a strict improvement from traditional sportsbook apps. If our society is going to have widespread legal gambling, we strongly want it to be parimutuel.

cogman10• 1 month ago

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.

ok_dad6• 1 month ago

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.

irishcoffee• 1 month ago

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

ipython• 1 month ago

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.

dang4• 1 month ago

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.)

lokar2• 1 month ago

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.

morkalork• 1 month ago

Exactly. The corruption and rot is beyond the pale.

EA-3167• 1 month ago

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.

BrenBarn• 1 month ago

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.

j16sdiz• 1 month ago

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.

DANmode2• 1 month ago

The regulation has gone the opposite direction, recently.

It was regulated.

ExpertAdvisor012• 1 month ago

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

bdangubic• 1 month ago

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

what2• 1 month ago

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.

parpfish2• 1 month ago

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

parpfish2• 1 month ago

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.

somenameforme5• 1 month ago

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.

bojan• 1 month ago

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.

csomar2• 1 month ago

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.

kayalan• 30 days ago

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

rjmunro• 30 days ago

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...

chris_money202• 30 days ago

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

xpct2• 30 days ago

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.

Mobius01• 1 month ago

I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.

sooheon• 1 month ago

Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?

edit: to be clear, if companies are committing fraud in their marketing, that should be prosecuted or if regulations around misleading marketing are weak, that should be legislated of course.

handoflixue• 1 month ago

Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?

Honestly, calling it "personal responsibility" when a powerful group is actively working to exploit that flaw seems a little weird. But even accepting that, we outlaw plenty of things because we think society isn't currently responsible enough to handle them.

fl4regun• 1 month ago

Personal responsibility is an excuse for lazy regulation. These things are designed to be harmful, for the express purpose of squeezing money out of people, as efficiently as possible. We know that some people are psychologically and genetically more prone to addiction than others, and that people like that will be extremely likely to form addictions with gambling or drugs when we make those things easy to access.

What would you rather have? More regulated gambling and less addicts, or unregulated gambling and more addicts? Personally, I prefer the former.

aucisson_masque4• 1 month ago

You are promoting gambling to young people, easily manipulated.

That's why you see so many college boy on their marketing video.

It's completely fine when you're old enough to be responsible, and to know that gambling is a degenerate behavior that you can allow yourself sometimes to release the steam, but these companies don't make money from us.

They make money from the kids overspending because they are convinced they are going to get rich doing that. That's manipulation.

It would be like showing McDonald ads to starving African kids, of course they are going to make the wrong choice when offered food. They can't think rationally in that state.

watwut7• 1 month ago

Personal responsibility: a way to avoid talking about responsibility and behavior of large rich actors.

Yes online gambling and sports management actions are their personal responsibility. And we should blame them for harm they knowingly cause.

charcircuit3• 1 month ago

Every ad is staged like this. The whole point is to make as good of an ad for the product as possible.

Do you think in a food commercial the people eating the product are showing their genuine emotion? It's all acting.

Zambyte• 1 month ago

This is like a food commercial where someone shows an extreme reaction to food that isn't the product they're selling, or acting like they're eating something that isn't food at all. There are laws regarding food advertising that require it to present the real food (though the presentation of it is usually way better).

advisedwang3• 1 month ago

OK but you know that you're seeing an ad. These are ads that are pretending to be users just posting their experiences.

charcircuit3• 30 days ago

Creators are supposed to make it clear that it is add. Usually they add a #ad to their post. But many creators don't understand the rules and don't correctly mark their post as being sponsored.

N_Lens• 1 month ago

McDonalds should show people who choked on a Big Mac in their ads /s

uberex• 1 month ago

I think ads for addictive things like gambling, alcohol, tobacco need to be held to a very high standard, if allowed at all.

arjie• 1 month ago

They are transparently marketing using outrage and bullshit. Pretty good tactic for the market.

AIorNot• 1 month ago

Good luck - polymarket sponsored trumps White House UFC Extravaganza

God I cant believe I wrote that

asdff3• 29 days ago

People in the white house are using polymarket to front run whitehouse actions. Someone made bank over maduros capture.

If you go to polymarket, Iran related bets have a specific subpage on their website no different than the sports subpage.

cm2187• 1 month ago

I have news for you. That burger is the McDonald's commercial? It's most likely made out of plastic. That happy lottery winner? Probably a stock photo from one of the major visuals providers. And I am ready to bet my bankers don't have this hollywood white teeth looking of banks commercials. Since when is advertising real?

OrangeDelonge• 1 month ago

“The truth is most of what you see in food photographs is real. FTC laws state that whatever you’re selling with a photo must be real in the image. To use a familiar example, if you’re selling corn flakes the flakes must be real. But then it gets interesting. You can use white glue instead of milk in your bowl of flakes because you’re not selling the milk, only the corn flakes.”

advisedwang3• 1 month ago

Yeah, but you know those are ads.

wodenokoto• 1 month ago

While the dressed burgers aren’t exactly edible, they are a far cry from being plastic.

McDonald’s Canada famously gave a candid behind the scenes of dressing a burger:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh1UAWLOgU&ra=m

tty4562• 1 month ago

Also, kids get scammed daily on YouTube on Pokemon card pulls with "loaded" packs and otherwise fake pulls for views.

jmcgough3• 1 month ago

The live scammers targeting kids are pretty vile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTPI57GLac

Seems like it's just a game of whack-a-mole, nothing is really being done to stop scammers from making new accounts and continuing their scams.

tty4562• 1 month ago

A lot of it is straight up sponsored by card makers too

andrepd• 1 month ago

There are really only two businesses in the modern economy, fraud and gambling. Some are both.

intended• 1 month ago

This is the other side of the coin when it comes to the push for ID verification.

walthamstow4• 30 days ago

The only defense is parenting. And no, I'm not one of those childless people who tells parents to parent better.

asdff3• 29 days ago

It is disturbing what has happened to pokemon cards in recent years. I remember as a kid no one wanted those packs because it as basically acknowledged by everyone the shit odds of getting something cool like a charizard vs a bunch of stupid cards. If you wanted a charizard, you'd just go to a card show with a dealer who has dozens of charizards and pay them like $20. You would never pull countless packs in effort to get one, everyone thought that was extremely stupid.

gregjw• 1 month ago

a complete surprise to nobody

WalterBright• 1 month ago

The WSJ ran an earlier article stating that unless you have access to a lot of data, computing power, and statisticians, you're going to lose on those bets.

FinnLobsien• 1 month ago

It’s gambling, and the house always wins.

Saline95155• 30 days ago

There is no house on polymarket, it's pvp.

Dilettante_11• 30 days ago

You don't need Colossus-level compute or a genius-level IQ to evaluate the question "Will the steam machine cost more than $700 at release", or "Will 2026 be the hottest year on record".

weird-eye-issue8• 30 days ago

Sure but that level of confidence is what would also eventually wipe you out because gamblers are not necessarily known for proper risk management. You could win 10 bets in a row but then it would only take one bet that you had 100% conviction on for you to lose and you get wiped out

bjackman• 30 days ago

You are not evaluating those questions, you are evaluating the probability of that two things happening, and you need to evaluate it better than the other people to win.

There are no easy questions, the difficulty is set by the skill/investment level of your competition.

mortsnort• 30 days ago

The betting topic is only a part of the equation. Should you bet $100 to win $5 on the Steamdeck price? Should you sell your bet before the Steamdeck even comes out?

rzwitserloot• 30 days ago

You cannot bet 50/50 on that question. Hence, you aren't actually asked to evaluate whether the answer to the questions you posted is 'yes' or 'no'. You are instead asked 'is the actual chance of it happening higher or lower than the current breakeven chance as posted on Kalshi / Polymarket'.

csomar2• 1 month ago

I made an article a day back how Polymarket is not exactly fair when it comes to market resolution (https://omarabid.com/polymarket-bet/) They actually don’t decide on market outcomes, they outsource that to UMA which is as opaque as it can get.

Consider the probabilities in polymarket as the prob. of the polymarket market itself outcomes rather than reality.

Saline95155• 30 days ago

Also UMA holders who get to judge do participate in markets.

felooboolooomba2• 30 days ago

Not a stretch to call that a conflict of interests.

KeplerBoy2• 30 days ago

Wow, this is so much worse than i thought.

felooboolooomba2• 30 days ago

Yes, an recent example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Polymarket/comments/1ubxixr/am_i_in...

flowerthoughts2• 1 month ago

The alternative would be to ask both sides of the bets to record a video, and tell them to only post winning bids, but to pay out to both sides. Is that really better? Classic tactic by the bet picking gambler gurus and is impossible to confirm.

I guess Polymarket too will learn to be more subtle now.

tecleandor• 30 days ago

There's no "both sides" of the bets in this case. All the bets researched by the WSJ were fake, none of those bets was ever placed.

flowerthoughts2• 30 days ago

Yes. That's not an argument against my point: they could achieve the same biased result using recordings of real bets. Be happy they (maybe) haven't yet, because that conartistry is much harder to show.

Don't trust anything anyone says about probabilities of real-world future events. We still can't even predict the weather a week in advance, despite huge computational resources being thrown at it.

aucisson_masque4• 1 month ago

He compared the videos to fast-food commercials, where food can appear more appealing than it does in real life.
“We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said.

The cope is real. They all know they are destroying lives by promoting gambling to young people and eventually some of them are going to overspend and get addicted. But yeah, it's just like an ad for a burger

jjcob2• 30 days ago

The burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives. But with burgers most people blame the victims. In my opinion it's all the same. Gambling, junk food, drugs, guns... Lots of money to be made, lots of lives destroyed.

noisy_boy2• 30 days ago

The burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives.

I think it will take quite a while to wipe out one's life savings eating burgers.

expedition322• 30 days ago

It is time to admit that the Chinese were right when they built their great firewall.

You either protect yourself from America or your civilization is lost to the void.

TFNA2• 30 days ago

Online betting was huge in several other developed countries first. America got late to a trend. If anything, a Great Firewall in the USA would have protected it from the trend.

karel-3d2• 30 days ago

Does China have online gambling banned? I don't know

asdff3• 29 days ago

Gambling is extremely popular in china despite the firewall and laws around it.

aucisson_masque4• 29 days ago

America was much better on betting a few years ago, it's been very recent.

I would have thought that trump giving so much to christians, he would be against betting but there are things that are beyond my understanding.

mastermage3• 30 days ago

the fact that apps like Polymarket seem to be legal is absolutely crazy to me.

Zealotux• 30 days ago

I was baffled to see gambling completely take over advertising in CSGO years ago with no one batting an eye, Valve also had its share of responsibility with loot cases but they have such a great reputation it's difficult to call them out on that.

xpct2• 30 days ago

Since ublock stopped working on twitch, I've learned that all ads they show for me are localized gambling ads, and it's sickening.

DontchaKnowit2• 29 days ago

Thank donald trump jr

RaSoJo• 30 days ago

I blanket consider any post by these "influencers" as paid for.

But my biggest fear is for my kids. I'm doing my best to teach them about the duplicity that exists in this world, and that's precisely why I'm against blanket social media bans for under-16s.

By the time kids turn 17, they've hit the rebel stage. And that's exactly when the freedom to access social media arrives. At that point, they won't listen to parents. They are going to get soo badly burnt.

This is why I advocate for controlled, early access to social media for children. As a parent, I can monitor what they follow and teach them to distinguish right from wrong.

But with these blanket bans, that's taken out of my hands entirely. They grow up sheltered in a picture-perfect world...and then, boom.

onetrickwolf• 30 days ago

Is this paid for by Meta or something?

Dilettante_11• 30 days ago

Yeah, if I don't make my six-year-old drink with me every once in a while, he's never gonn learn to hold his liquour!

BLKNSLVR• 30 days ago

Facebook and Google really have a lot to answer for. Where's the regulation that's been increasingly needed for the last decade?

snowpid• 30 days ago

Its called DMA and DSA. Much hated by many American HNlers here.

trumpdong5• 30 days ago

Digital Markets Act and Digital Devices Act in the EU

jmyeet• 30 days ago

This is a well-trodden path.

A few years ago crypto gambling really took off. The big fish here is Stake. Back when Twitch still allowed slots, there was a flood of slots streamers. Ultimately this led to Twitch banning gambling. This was such an issue that Stake created their own live streaming platform (ie Kick). That should tell you how lucrative it was.

But what came out was that there was different contracts the streamers had. Some were paid a hefty fee and they got to keep any winnings. Why anyone would choose this is beyond me because over time your expected return is negative. The other option was that you could "gamble" with fake money. None of it was real. And none of it was disclosed.

I never understood why people would atch someone play slots all day but some people did. I think psychologically it's a bit like mukbang where people live vicariously through someone else's gluttony. With gambling, the psychological hook is so strong that it can be triggered by watching someone else gamble. But that's just a guess. Luckily, I've never been bitten by the gambling bug. It's one of the worst addictions.

I think fake gambling in particular should be illegal or, in the very least, disclosed publicly.

mihaic• 30 days ago

How is this not gambling? I mean, any mobster bookie could simply claim prediction market in this case, and simply take a cut. Where is the line drawn? On how much money the organizers give to the Trump family?

wiseowise• 30 days ago

Unregulated gambling website is fraudulent? Jesus Christ, how did that happen? I'm baffled, completely shocked!

skc• 30 days ago

We're living in the golden age of the grifter

nlitsme• 30 days ago

I think when you voluntarily view ads, than you have to accept being lied to.

everdrive2• 30 days ago

So too has nearly everyone else who is peddling someone's interests. Social media currently exists to bend you to someone else's will. This was always true in some sense: newspapers, television, radio, etc, but I'd point out a few things:

- This is precisely what made television such a bad experience. You could really feel the hand reaching through the screen to shake you. Demanding that you feel one way or another. Particularly with commercials, but of course with everything else as well.

- The mediums of television and radio were heavily gate-kept (even with the advent of cable) compared to the internet and social media. You didn't have the insanity of Twitter accounts from east Asia spamming BBC (not the news channel) propaganda, or Russia, Iran, and others attempting to inflame racial hatred, etc.

It's not a wholly brand new thing, but the reach, scale, and variety are so much greater that it might as well be brand new.

tgtweak• 30 days ago

It's the same for all the gambling platforms - they give creators and influencers privileged accounts that win more than they lose so when they stream it looks like they're not losing constantly.

quietsegfault2• 30 days ago

Isn’t that auditable by gambling regulators?

derwiki2• 30 days ago

Is it illegal? What gambling regulators are working with polymarkets?

castwide• 30 days ago

Alternative link without paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/they-looked-like-t...

aussiegreenie• 29 days ago

So Polymarket did marketing....what a shock.

ne11nn• 29 days ago

this reminds me of the social media "turbolearn ai" slop. i feel like the vastness of this form of marketing is becoming the new ai slop on social media.

damnesian• 29 days ago

All businesses that make their fortunes from gambling must deceive to get people to participate. It's such a major red flag.

Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators

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