this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Nobody saw this coming from three miles away.
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THAT is what they increasingly see as a bad thing for society?
The hell?
Look, don't take this the wrong way, but what Americans think is increasingly not a good guide to take any sort of action in the first place.
That said, I actually salute the real majority of people in the survey that were assaulted with this question and went "the hell are you talking about, get out of my face". Because yes, the results say 43% responded "bad thing for society", 7% said "good, actually", and 50% said "get out of my face" and are the normal ones.
Let this be a lesson not about sports gambling, but about how bad surveys, misleading headlines and moral panics can be used to manipulate large groups of people.
And to be clear, my stance on US sports betting is: get out of my face. I'm more than happy to talk about how the modern online betting industry uses inadequate regulation to bypass pre-existing rules and how this is another vector of the concerns about online regulation of server-side services and their interactions with privacy and censorship.
But "is it a good thing for society" is going in the "get out of my face" column.
Right, and pro sports influences kids, and gambling makes the pro leagues dirty as hell. So you can think it's irrelevant, but it still influences your community.
Am I understanding your comment correctly?:
-You are upset that Pew Research, probably the most well-known public opinion polling company in the world, did a public opinion poll on sports betting.
-You are upset that the questions were multiple choice and not in essay format.
-You think people who refuse to answer public opinion polls are better than those who do.
-You agree that the modern online betting industry (commonly known as "sports betting" to avoid "gambling" laws) is a bad thing
Not really, no. I am upset at the type of binary framing you are deploying here being present even in well established research institutions to push specific viewpoints.
Like, say, having a study series that in 2022 reports a 57% neutral answer headline that result as "few people think sports betting is good" and following that up several years later with a 50% neutral answer as "Americans increasingly see sports betting as a bad thing". That's what you call framing, it's not supposed to be there, and it may not annoy me much, because this subject is irrelevant, but it does annoy me.
I also take some issue with the wording of the question, if you must know, which is "Thinking about the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country, do you think this is generally...". I would question why they needed to remind people that this comes from a regulatory change if they weren't going to report it that way, especially since it forces them to keep the same framing in 2025 when they follow up.
But hey, that's nitpicking. So is the whole thing. But it's still a bad headline and a bad way to frame the results. And arguing from authority isn't going to change that. I'm not particularly impressed or reverent when it comes to Ipsos or Pew's methodology for these, they aren't that complicated.
In my country this sort of bet has become quite popular, too. I wish it became illegal.
Well that’s good, because it definitely is.
I've managed to cut ads out of my world for 20+ years now; when I accidentally end up seeing some now at a restaurant with TVs or something, the amount of sports betting ads is astounding.
I remember when I first saw them around 2019, thinking to myself: Wait, this is legal now?
Yah, I thought that was illegal. Guess not. Should be.
Yeah no shit
I unfortunately was part of that machine for a short while. Without going into much detail, I got in right under the c-suite, saw that every meeting was "act now, ask forgiveness later". The CTO then couldn't keep his creepy hands off of the employees until I reported him, which caused him to toss me under the bus right before he got fired.
No regrets beyond ever being hired there in the first place.
Ahem… now do the stock market.
I mean, they didn't listen to Australians about Murdoch, why would they listen to them about online sports betting?
I'm glad people can see it as such
I told you betting was haram, bro, I told you!
I don't even like it in my wrestling and that's like, the least offensive place possible for it to be
Oh my! Who knew that legalizing an potentially addictive practice would result in financial ruin of millions?
Legalising gambling is a much better solution than the alternative of back room illegal gambling, loan sharks, enforcers and hit men. Shit it's not far back in history.
The problem is it needs to be heavily regulated, like: mandatory industry-funded addicts support services, high tax industry, no advertising allowed (including online), regulated opening hours, system-wide self-ban system for problem gamblers, no poker machines anywhere but casinos, etc - you know, things that smart countries do with success.
I've never been into gambling because I've looked at the odds. I think it's only people who think they'll get "lucky" that waste their money on it. Just use the word gambling rather than betting. For some people it's a terrible addiction and costs them their futures.
I was at work one time, and a coworker won $500 on a scratch ticket. I expressed I was jealous when I was working with his buddy later that day. He said, "don't be, he spends more than that on it a month, he didn't even break even".
The only time I've done any kind of gambling really is back when I cared about Counter Strike more. First, you bet with skins, not money, and I never put much money in. Second, you could actually play it smart because gamblers are stupid. If there's a team that's popular, a lot of people will bet on them, and you'll sometimes get some crazy odds, like an 80+% chance of them winning. In reality, most games are close to 50/50, or they wouldn't be competing with each other. If you find these games where the odds were broken by dumb gamblers, you could actually win.
With that said, gambling requires money to be lost. The company couldn't make a profit if people were winning money, on average. They also aren't just making a profit. They're making a large profit, and spending a shit ton of money on advertising. Once you take that into account you have to recognize that the players are losing an incredible amount of money to the company.