Presumably these ads are targeted intentionally to their audience, and this research confirms it.
And as much as I hate that this is what is happening, I feel like that's what I'm going to end up being forced to try after 15+ years in working software development jobs, given how badly the companies want to replace us with LLMs. Hasn't gotten to that point yet but I'm shocked every day we're not laid off.
It is about how those men want to feel.
And yes of course I’m joking. If you’re spending money on these get rich quick schemes instead of dollar cost averaging into an index fund, you’re being irresponsible. That’s real advice.
The real threat is that it wont stop there. Some will go to $100 a week, $500 a week and so on, because that is how addiction works.
For all the rationalizations, they do it for the feeling it gets them. And those feelings will drive higher stakes even after you have gambling debt.
Maybe that means a lot in 10 years, but... is it that impactful now? More impactful than gambling surely, and perhaps this is a bit myopic, but I feel like you wouldn't even be able to buy any new car with that amount 10 years from now. Hopefully it'll still count as an emergency fund.
We saw the value of money halve over like 4 years while everyone who had money made bank. It's tough to be hopeful that any amount saved is going to go far in the future tbh. $41k is about 1/10th of a down payment on a half-duplex, assuming you're keen to borrow the remaining $1.1m.
Definitely don't gamble though, that message I can get behind.
In Australia, it is also not just in app/browser ads either. Gambling promotion is very normalised and entrenched.
The major sports on news and sports shows have the odds showing who is likely to win. Some sports analysis shows (especially on pay TV) even go as far as providing overs/unders for line betting or "possibly wins" from multi-bets (bet $100 and you can win $123,000 with this combination).
Around the sports grounds - all covered in ads. The scoreboards have odds. The team and competition mobile apps all have odds. Even commentary on the radio has ads inserted regularly during a call: "Player A runs up and kicks a goal, and they are now level with 10 points on the Elon-Musk SpaceX Scoreboard. An amazing goal, it's a candidate for the Anthropic goal of the week." During quarter/half breaks, they give more options to bet on. Due to this, I prefer mostly to listen to commentary on public broadcasters as they are not allowed to contain ads at all. I find commercial radio trying to insert brand names every second sentence rather than providing expert analysis.
Similar to loot boxes for teens. It's building up habits for future gambling addictions. Mostly FPS games - that are prominently targeted at teenage boys.
I think a lot of gambling related material is targeted at the ages below legal gambling age with the specific purpose to get people to start gambling from legal age, however that would be hidden of course. Similarly no one becomes an alcoholic or smoking addict overnight the day they become of legal age for that substance, there is a buildup period.
Gambling addiction is way more damaging the younger you get in touch with it.
Or is it more young men vs the establishment where the establishment wins the vast majority of the time but occasionally a young dude makes the right longshot bet?
Um, no, it’s not. It’s notoriously hard to estimate exactly but annual consumer surplus in the US alone is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars.
Also, everybody benefits from a society that chooses qualified people for a position, and gives everybody an opportunity to get a job. But that is also something that shows over time and many processes, and it is harder to see in the moment.
Nepotism is the zero-sum version of applying for a job. Only the power to take away from others is accounted, no qualification required just raw power. Which nepo-baby gets the government contract, the board position, etc. is a zero-sum game and participants behave like what it is. Betrayal, lies, etc. is part of that game.
Seems like the latter - except that not only describes how people perceive gambling, but the entire economy considering startups, silicon valley, the current crop of tech billionaires and how they made their fortunes, etc.
So, why not gamble on crypto, NFTs, or prediction markets? Might as well go for the longshots since everything is a longshot anyway
The gamblers, however, will see a future where they have paid $5.00 for a $0.03 ticket and still won the lottery a couple dozen times in a row because they deserve it so they will buy all tickets they can right now ending with 3 —because that's important.
Even when you think you have a legitimate insight so the book is mispriced for your actual odds, you should consider the risk.
Risk management is foremost.
What happens if I lose the almost certainly sure bet?
This may come as a surprise to you, but in the real world, there are not few people whose business is making you think you have an edge on your "long shot".
Even if you showed me the perfect ad, I probably would not buy it. Because if I need it, I probably already bought it, and if I don't need it, I won't buy it. So there is not much money being made, ergo we get shown ads for the other type of person.
As Jeff Bezos says, "when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."
https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript/#chapter6_amazo...
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Yes, ads work, maybe not in the way the advertiser thinks but they work alright.
Or an ad about an ISP with IPv6 support, at the very least it would make me check if my current ISP finally added support, and consider options otherwise.
Or one about some new colocation service that happens to open near my location, you bet I'd check out their website and maybe even pay them a visit.
(I don't watch TV, but my point stands.)
There's a dial between ad relevancy and ad yield. Gambling ads are probably high-yield because of high LTV, so advertisers will spend more, even if impressions don't generate many clicks.
I don't understand why people comment "I am not the target audience" so often. No, you're not, but the target audience definitely exists.
Also, I think a lot of people don't really understand how advertising works. For instance one of the most famous, and effective, ads was Apple's 1984 ad. [1] The goal of advertising isn't necessarily to make you impulsively go click 'buy now', but rather to subconsciously instill certain motivations, drives, and associations within you. That's a 60 second add, ran at Superbowl pricing levels (to say nothing of the rest of cast being directed by Ridley Scott and more), where only about 3 seconds of it has anything directly to do with what's being sold.
That being said, things like Nyse Texas paint an opposite picture of the state.
That said, this means very little when a different type of gambling ("prediction markets") is somehow allowed everywhere because of the corruption of the current administration, with the son of the president being a "senior advisor" to both Kalshi and Polymarket, completely circumventing state-wide bans.
On the other hand, I use e. g. ublock origin so thankfully most of those spam-ads that are of zero interest to me, I never get to see. Contrary to evil Empires such as Google with its "acceptable ads" propaganda crap, I never felt any downside to perma-banning ads from my life. (Does not work 100%, but the reduction I got via ublock origin and others is enormous - and that's great.)
Unfortunately some people are really susceptible to ads and addictive behaviour. I know someone personally who got into that, and subsequently also debts due to feeding that gambling addiction. It is very hard to break out of that cycle once you get in, depending on how the brain operates; similar how some can not stop smoking. Thankfully I never got into any of that because I also never fully trusted my brain, so the better strategy was to consistently say nope. But the brain of people operates differently, some really have a very hard time to avoid patterns that feed them into an addiction system, and ads also try to exploit this (another reason why all companies relying on ads should be removed, starting with Mr. Google, the AdCompany Number #1).
The school system gives boys worse grades. Once you're a man, women expect their partner to earn more than they do, while women want the same pay as their male colleagues. It can't work.
Visit any Safeway and you see plenty of regular normal everyday couples where the man is not a billionaire, and the lady is not a 15-years younger nymphomaniac.
People pair up with their colleagues all the time, despite the internet telling you that doesn't happen anymore. And they don't mind that their coworker makes the same money.
When you're in your 20s, none of your friends have houses, high paying jobs, etc. So home ownership isn't really a priority. You're not aware of the generational gap since all of your friends are experiencing it with you.
Young people, especially men, are not great at planning for the future, b/c they think they will be young forever.
I think its just men are bored. Dating sucks. Going out is expensive. Betting at home is wayy more fun than being rejected by women (on apps or in a bar/club).
I'm always left with the impression that they wouldn't give a shit if they weren't affecting women.
Geeze, are we putting a lot of potholes into the road of life for men.
Alcohol, legal weed, illegal drug wars that went no where, prescription drugs that were vastly over-prescribed, schools that were underfunded for decades, the near death of the male teacher, nearly no 'good' male role models, the death of the African-American father, the now near death of any American father, hyper-pornography in your pocket, tinder and the end of dating, and now hyper-gambling, video games infinitely more rewarding than real achievement, the total collapse of male third places, the end of labor jobs that gave men identity and structure without a degree, the school to prison pipeline and the poliece that have to turn routine discipline into criminality, gutting of vocational education, social media optimized for women's social dynamics that leaves most men villainized, the crisis in friendship, the death of male initiation or rites of passage, antidepressant over-prescription, the collapse of religious and fraternal institutions, etc.
The throughline is that nearly every structure that gave boys meaning, community, accountability, and identity has either collapsed or is being actively dismantled by buildings full of PhDs.
I hear the the young women say 'Men Suck' and are just doing away with them.
They should, it makes total sense.
And we're at fault.
I think this is under appreciated, in part because it’s incredibly hard to fix. There’s a void where the US cultural image of masculinity used to be. As an adult man, I couldn’t really describe what a prototypically masculine person looks like or does or thinks anymore.
There’s a loss of identity there that we haven’t really rebuilt.
I wouldn’t point entirely at the PhDs, though. There were some real issues that were called out (inability to communicate, over reliance on anger as an emotional outlet, etc), but the identity could have stayed largely intact.
The killing blows were from segments of men who doubled down on the most negative aspects of masculinity, and made the rest of the men flee from that image of masculinity to avoid any association. I would rather drop masculinity from my self-perception than be associated with Andrew Tate or Logan Paul or whoever else.
I don’t think I know any men that have “modern masculinity” (whatever that would mean) as part of their core identity. They’re either clinging onto a Chuck Norris kind of masculinity, or just don’t have a strong gender component of their self-identity. They’re not feminine, they just don’t do anything to be “manly”. Being “manly” matters to them about as much as whether they’re a Coke or Pepsi person.
To be clear, I referencing the PhDs that are more concerned with getting you addicted to things, the STEMy ones I guess, not the ones talking about gender and the like, the humanities ones in that dichotomy. But still, great point here.
> The killing blows were from segments of men who doubled down on the most negative aspects of masculinity, and made the rest of the men flee from that image of masculinity to avoid any association. I would rather drop masculinity from my self-perception than be associated with Andrew Tate or Logan Paul or whoever else.
Not knowing those guys personally and looking from the outside in, I'd say that those two are really just broken people with traumatic childhoods and father figures. I won't get too in the weeds there, but their success comes from pain. And to be very clear, they are shitheads that actively choose to make the world worse - they deserve no excuses, the condemn themselves - but they do deserve explanation.
To me, their fame and fortune is a 'right place, right time' phenomenon. Without the systems of addiction and anger that social media creates, we would never had heard of them. The place to set blame is not on the 'influencer' but on the system that created him. Tate is responsible for himself and is damned by his own hand, but Zuck is man (and his ilk) who intentionally created the conditions for Tate to grow.
> I don’t think I know any men that have “modern masculinity” (whatever that would mean) as part of their core identity. They’re either clinging onto a Chuck Norris kind of masculinity, or just don’t have a strong gender component of their self-identity. They’re not feminine, they just don’t do anything to be “manly”. Being “manly” matters to them about as much as whether they’re a Coke or Pepsi person.
Yeah, I don't know what 'modern masculinity' would mean either. It is quite fractured these days. Perhaps that is intentional or a side effect of the 'algorithm'. I'm very much still a novice at 'men's studies', but what I have learned is that being 'a man' is something that males must pursue actively. Unlike with women and menarche, males must continuously prove their manhood (there are very few cultures that do not do this). Man is an active verb, so the saying goes.
I don’t know about this, but guys like this exhaust me. I figure skate, which is a stereotypically feminine hobby by association with its predominant participants (women). Of the few men who I do see figure skating, I rarely question their masculinity. If anything, I often notice it because I see how their unique strengths manifest in the sport through power and agility. It’s reflected in the height in their jumps or the speed in their spins. They do a thing I also happen to find interesting, the best way they can do it their way, and they don’t make a big deal about it. That’s attractive! It seems pretty masculine to me.
I can only hope that when men are alone with each other, they’re occupying each other’s space because they feel comfortable with each other, not because they’re proving anything. That’s how I choose friends, anyway!
Also, rinks are a third space. Now that I think about it, they’re arguably for men more than women. Maybe that’s a coincidence? It’s hard to say.
> Unlike with women and menarche, males must continuously prove their manhood
I don’t personally find this to be true from the womanhood side of things without further clarification. Simone de Beauvoir famously said “Women are not born. They’re made” and I still find this to be true today even though many things no longer default to being for men. I think I probably “perform” womanhood for other women more than I do for men, and as I said above, that doesn’t necessarily make them like me more or vice/versa. It’s more of a common ground thing.
To add to that, the 'gang' also seems to be a human male universal. In that, a gang is the unit of status male humans interact with. The laws and 'honor' of the gang is what matters. These 'gangs/honor bands' can be quite different too, with typical results when they come into conflict with other groups like this (usually violence).
I'm not saying that we need to continue with 3000 years of this. Look at modern medicine, for example. But I am saying that if we are going to tear down this patriarchy system of 'gangs/honor bands' then we have to replace it with something viable for those participants. Right now, it seems to me that most males are desperate for a return to a more tightly held and conforming system than one that we have been making.
On the figure skating angle: My SO is a figure skater too! It's a very interesting place to observe masculinity and status. I'd venture to say it's one of the few places left in western culture that celebrates beauty and grace in the heterosexual male form. Ever since industrialization and Napoleon, the male fashion has outright rejected beauty. Mostly, I think, this is because male fashion follows that of military fashion, and as war industrialized and systematized in set uniforms and the invention of clothes sizes, male fashion then became, well, drab. You might find a bit of color and pattern in homosexual male fashion, but the heteros are just bland by and large. Grace is just wholly left on the road as well.
Figure skating seems to be the one place where grace and beauty are still alive for hetero 'men'. The Raspberry's recent Olympics outfits were decidedly a return to beauty from Chen's mall-ninja shirts and black pants. In fact, I would propose that the media's reaction to Ilia's nerves further cements my point that he must 'prove himself' to regain his 'honor'. Most of the reaction being that he 'has time' still, and not to worry. As if he is now on a quest that he must fulfill like some 5 act plot or movie.
Super necessary and important movements but it had to be confusing going from a 13 year old to a young man while being barraged with how evil men can be.
In 2018 I was in my mid 20s living in San Francisco and "white men are evil and are the problem" was the accepted stance. Like disagree with that statement at your peril. In my mid 20s I could contextualize it as a passing a phenomenon, but could a 16 year old?
As I found out, they're so determined for it to reach you that they even plastic coat the envelope and the paper inside. Can't even get the minuscule joy of burning them.
I've never been one to really gamble... the few times I'm in Vegas I usually set aside a fixed amount for gambling and usually can stretch it as long as I need to... mostly because friends/family are playing. I'd just assume go see a stand-up comic.
I think that men, and in particular "cis white men" have gotten a pretty bad hand from larger society the past few years. From treating boys like broken girls in elementary school to pushing them increasing out of higher education circles, without a good vocational system in place. To lambasting them when they express any desire to actually form a family.
What is this referring to?
I believe as a cis white man myself I am uniquely qualified to say everything that you stated here is bullshit. It's just pure propaganda pushed by people that are manipulating you into working longer for less. Even under the 'pro-cis white male' government things have materially gotten far worse objectively.