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Glen Maddern's avatar

A neat format for a discussion! But I feel like neither side addressed the practicalities of banning something "on smartphones". The web works fine on a phone, which is why you can have Apple disallowing porn apps on the App Store but mobile accounting for 90% of traffic to Pornhub: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#devices-tech

Imo, banning advertising, particularly during a game, as well as the most predatory behaviours like time-limited special odds offers (actually just ban all push notifications) goes the furthest towards addressing the most problematic cases. You argue for friction in the form of physically attending a bookmaker, but equally you can keep the convenience of using your phone but prevent it from becoming an infinite poker machine by restricting the kinds of bets people can place.

Maybe this is a bit more extensible to gambling-like activities like day trading or crypto? Perhaps a good rule of thumb would be that the outcome of a bet/trade must be at minimum some time period (1 hour?) in the future, to _specifically_ address the psychological mechanism by which addictive behaviours are formed. You'd need to figure out what that cutoff is, but to me that feels like a better place to draw the line than the particular device a person is using.

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