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Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay
Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."
I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."
There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.
My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?
I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.
I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.
Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.
Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.
Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.
But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.
It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.
And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.
Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.
The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...
Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.
Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?
I find that I agree with you across the board, but one footnote on my annoyance with the current state of affairs:
I feel like these online services already do this. They advertise, but they close with a line about gambling addiction. Everyone is simultaneously bombarded with advertisements for gambling and admonishments about how you need to be really careful. To me, this feels like the worst of both worlds, where we legalized something that's apparently quite destructive for quite a few people, but with the caveat that everyone has to be antagonized about how dangerous it is. I bet $2 on Josh Allen to score a rushing touchdown because I think it's fun. Leave me alone. Stop telling me over and over and over that I'd better watch out about how addictive it is. Either let people ruin their lives or don't, but don't do this stupid in between thing where we all acknowledge that it's ruining lives and therefore everyone needs to hear about that.
Overall, I guess I just increasingly believe that the typical person should pretty much not be extended credit on much of anything. They just don't seem to be able to conceptualize how credit lines work, what interest is, and so on.
For me, it is fine. I can gamble once a week a couple of dollars and it is fun without causing me any harm.
But I can’t help but note the business doesn’t really run on people like me. I don’t make the house enough money. It is dependent on the whales. Those guys lose a ton of money. I the business is unseemly.
Yep. I have a reflexive dislike for ANY business model that is entirely reliant on a small number of customers spending 10-100x of the average to stay profitable.
Has at least something to do with me being EXTREMELY sensitive to attempts to hack my psyche, which is the hallmark of such places. Oh, your game is "free to play?" Pardon me if I don't want to spend mental effort resisting the 1001 ways your game is constantly trying to convince me that spending in-game money is more important than food.
On the other hand, when I play such games I do not feel having to expend any particular mental effort to resist shelling out cash, any more than I feel compelled to take any Nigerian princes up on their offers. If you're not in the susceptible target audience, those games really are free.
But it kind of feels like free riding off of people who are destroying themselves.
'Zactly. On the one hand I don't mind free-riding by, say, using ad-blocker on sites where I was never going to click the ads anyway.
On the other, I really don't like to think that I am getting something for free because somebody else is vastly overpaying relative to the value they're getting. It is easy to imagine they're some rich loner who has endless spare cash, but it is still a predatory model. Also, in game settings, the 'free' players are arguably there just to be easy opponents for the overpowered paid whales. Not really a fan of playing the role of disposable mook so some other guy can live out his power fantasy.
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