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It's actually somewhat easy... If you are creating financial exposure to an event with no underlying risk to it, and the point is exposure itself, you are gambling.

In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.

It's certainly not well defined today; memecoins, prediction markets, sports betting, and more are all toeing the line of gambling.

> What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling?

Legally, it's whether the bet meets the legal definition of gambling as per the legislation applicable in your jurisdiction and any binding case law. There's no universal answer.

But from an ordinary language perspective, the difference is whether it involves an element of skill sufficient (at least in theory) to win in the long run if you possess that skill. For example:

Roulette - generally gambling

Blackjack - usually gambling these days, sometimes not if count counting is feasible

Poker - not gambling

Stock market investing - not gambling

That's fair. A lot of regulation seems to work this way: first you recognize a real harm, then spend years arguing over where exactly the boundary should be

This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows. I'm a responsible adult. I want those things. I make use of them. They make my life better when I'm trying to listen to some music while I work on something or when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show. I do not want regulations coming along and making all of my products worse due to heavy-handed regulation.

Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.

I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.

Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.

Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain

I think a better take is:

> Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230.

If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liability as clearly that's not _their_ speech.

So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people.

Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.

Mix this with "...of User-Generated Multimedia Content", and you might get closer. This excludes music platforms, for example (although, Band Camp and Soundcloud might have some issues with that, admittedly).

But isn't that just product design and Improvement?

I think you have to figure out when this is in service of the user's intentions or not, and that's where it gets tricky.

Apparently you can't trust users revealed preferences and have to use something else.

What product does not listen to how users use the product to design the first or later version of a product?

> beyond “natural” ones like chronological

So a mail s/w that pushes up mail that it deems important?

How do you distinguish engagement maximization and usability maximization?

> Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted

So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.

Agreed.

https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/

How would you prove this? What if the product was not intentionally designed to be engaging but ends up being more engaging than TikTok?

But a substance is not a specific product or a corporation. Maybe you could call "infinite scroll" the substance, but then you're playing whack-a-mole with whatever new interface they cook up. But then we end up with a long list of "disallowed" software features which might not be inherently addictive

Those are relatively new and the president's children have financial interests in them, so they won't see any regulation any time soon. But it's certainly possible they will be regulated in the future... if we ever have a less-openly-corrupt government again.

It’s such a joke. But we also need to find ways to study and measure non-gambling digital platform addiction like 15 years ago. Thanks to algorithmic consumption, we’re nearing a whole generation of adults that have no idea how to navigate their societal agency and 3 trailing generations that had once learned and since forgot.

If we set the barrier to entry in prediction markets to an equivalent of an age/height check on entry, it would be well north of "yes, I am a mom-and-pop first time investor, I have never been here before, I know nothing except what some spammer told me and claude"

Somehow the "you can afford to lose your entire stake, you aren't leveraged, this isn't a con you fell into" is missing.

(thats aside from "you aren't an inside trader with privileged knowledge because of family ties to the WH, are you")

He said 'if you need info on people at Harvard just ask'. Called people who gave him information 'dumb fucks' (so, who's the next person on HN that's going to dare to reply to me that he was 'making a good point'? Do you see the Google founders saying that? Even as a joke?). Killed the competition of Instagram and Whatsapp. Copied every single Snapchat feature. Wants AI friend profiles for people. Hijacked emails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 . Free Basics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198

List goes on. Socio.

> does it have to be answered in general?

100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.

> It's hard to answer in general, but does it have to be answered in general?

Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.

Who is “we”? They’re absolutely regulated in most of the world. Smarkets has a UK and Irish gambling license.

I find it very convenient for music discovery for example. Maybe start by making it opt in and give parents control over their children's feeds?

>There was a moment in time when Instagram use to show this disclaimer "You're all caught up with the posts".

This still exists and I get it every day. It is the floor for my feed. I have to refresh or close the app and reopen to fetch more.

Addicts are your most loyal and exploitable customers.

Things will keep getting worse in the US as long as the current nothing is anti-competitive policies endure.

I've never seen a NAXALT fallacy used for the concept of engagement metrics before.

It's not relevant to this discussion that in certain contexts, useful engagement metrics exist that supposedly aren't toxic, because it doesnt apply to the current context. We're clearly talking about the larger systemic issue of companies maximizing all engagement at all costs, and the consequences of such a policy.

I think the major issue is, people still have the option of those older forms of feeds, people just don't like them.

New social media competitors (ie Tiktok) have won users by having even more powerful algorithms rather than other options.

Chronological feeds tend to be gameable by growth hacking. Still better than a lot of things.

One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.

It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.

I build a safari extension to do just this (block all content that isn't explicitly subscribed to by the user) and it's a remarkably better experience. This is my hot take that most people seem to disagree with: the vast majority of culture wars we are having today would not exist without content recommendation algorithms.

Absolutely! :D