Perpetual Roulette ft. Matt Zarb-Cousin
Added 2024-08-09 10:29:15 +0000 UTCActivist, campaigner and co-founder of Gamban app Matt Zarb-Cousin comes on the show to talk about how online culture has become consumed by the gambling industry, and the ways it affects our online and offline experiences.
Matt tells us about how the gambling industry has expanded on the internet as a way of avoiding further regulations, and the new 'games' the industry has built to keep people addicted for longer periods of time. Matt also explains how the techniques and strategies employed by the gambling industry are being adopted by social media companies, game developers, dating apps and the reasons why government agencies are struggling to keep up with them.
Follow and support Matt's work at Gamban, here: https://gamban.com/
Watch Tom Nicholas' video series on gambling, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuTQbOo3Y30&pp=ygUVdG9tIG5pY2hvbGFzIGdhbWJsaW5n
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Comments
In Sweden we have a state owned monopoly on meatspace gambling, allegedly as a form of harm reduction and maybe actually working as such to some degree. I think we've had the 20kr (~£2) stake limit on video slots for a good while, to say one thing in their favor. But it's also been clear that it hasn't been able to deal in any way with the advent of online gambling. The state company is now in all available media channels making advertisements that put a lot of emphasis on the exciting rush of playing scratch tickets and how much easier your life could be with a big win, footnoted by a small disclaimer about "responsible gambling" that's no better than what online casinos have been legally obliged to put in. Since a few years back, the online casinos run out of Malta and Gibraltar have also been legally inducted as allowed exceptions to the state monopoly, tax-paying entities that have to pass some nominal inspection criteria and look up someone's income (but not credit history) before accepting a new account. I'm extremely skeptical to how much harm reduction that decision could provide, but I read it as resignation to the fact that there's no way the state could have waged a war to ban them outright and win against the plethora of ways people have to get around technological limits. They save that futile battle and the authoritarianism required to even try for porn and narcotics, but I digress. It's really fucked how much power these companies have to keep abusing people's shitty social conditions and base instincts, but we can't just lay down and give up, so I'm glad we have people like Matt to keep trying to make a difference. Very insightful discussion, thank you for this episode.
Elaine Åhlfeldt
2024-08-10 10:29:32 +0000 UTCWhen I’ve used dating apps, the main reason to pay for them was that they would only let you do a certain number of swipes per day, and if you’re in New York City the app can be basically unusable with that number of swipes. That is, if you’re a guy you will not get any meaningful number of matches with the limited number, and if you’re a girl all your matches will be guys who swipe right on everyone because the match rate is so low otherwise. Like, when I was under age 30 I could get literally over a hundred Tinder matches in under an hour—though the way the algorithm works most of them would be a backlog of people who had already swiped right on me—and 99% of them would never message me back. (I would message every match with “Hi [name]!” as a way of acknowledging that I was actually using the app and not idk being spammy by always swiping right.) For Grindr, which doesn’t use swipes, though, the main reason to give them money is that they use interactive minigame popup ads that you actually have to play for like 30 seconds in order to dismiss. (There are a handful of other quality-of-life improvements like being able to filter results and see a larger base number—both very useful in a big city!—but the minigame ads were the biggest annoyance I can remember.) (The main apps I’ve used are Tinder, Grindr, and OKCupid, and of these OKCupid was probably the most usable, though it felt like a lot of work. I haven’t used any of these in years, though, and I imagine they’ve only gotten worse. When I’ve paid for them it’s only been for a couple months at a time before I got sick of it lol)
Elsie Hupp
2024-08-10 04:46:01 +0000 UTCRandom thing: the LUFS normalization on this episode seems slightly lower than normal, though it might just be me.
Elsie Hupp
2024-08-10 04:27:14 +0000 UTCIn my experience most people seem to view paying for dating apps as cringe. possibly because they let you harass people in that way
Nemo
2024-08-09 20:39:25 +0000 UTCThis sounds like a fun discussion, but before putting it on, I just want to share that I read the description and typed Gamban into the Google play store search bar. Got a sponsored top result for a video slots app before the thing I was trying to find. It's like poetry.
Elaine Åhlfeldt
2024-08-09 15:09:58 +0000 UTC
