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Aside:

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.

“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 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.

> 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.

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.

Not to mention men in their early 20s now hit puberty during the height of the #MeToo movement. Then they aged into their late teens watching Epstein and all the other creepy men taking the spotlight.

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?

Men having to hear about how women dont like being abused are the real victims of sexual abuse.

When the issue was gangs dealing drugs and engaging in street violence, overwhelming majority of perpetrators were men. And they were talked about specifically as a young men issue. It was not confusing to young men.

25M and I live in a state where the majority of gambling is illegal (Texas). Despite that I am having gambling ads shoved down my throat daily on Instagram. I never click on them and I swipe away instantly when I see them, but still get them regardless. All of them are prediction market and mobile game slots.
Ads target a specific sub group. And I think many HNlers are not part of that group. My guess is that ads online target people with more impulsive buying.

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.

More or less everybody thinks the way that you do here. Nobody thinks ads work on them, yet companies spend trillions of dollars advertising. One side is right, one side is wrong. Advertising is a particularly insidious industry.

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.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

> My guess is that ads online target people with more impulsive buying.

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.

Whether or not it works on you, you are not them, and there are millions of people on whom gambling advertising works really well.

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.

You're here, engaged, talking about it. You would never consider it now, but the idea is in your head, and if your circumstances change, they want it to remain there as a possibility. You can ignore it when it appears, but their goal is to make sure you never forget. Enough people become that desperate every day, and they don't want to miss the opportunity to extract from that population.
You may think the ads dont work on people like you, but often data shows otherwise.
I despise advertising too, but unfortunately we are not above their effects (which is why they are so damaging). If you look at cars or clothes or other products and recognize their brand logos or colors or designs, those ads are serving their purpose. Showing you the ad at all and stealing your attention for that moment is their goal.
How the fuck did Texas get this one right but the rest of the USA is in flames.

That being said, things like Nyse Texas paint an opposite picture of the state.

20/50 states don't allow mobile gambling, so Texas is only one of those 40%. Some of those 20 states (9 to be exact) do allow sports betting, but only physically, not online.

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.

I had no idea the age range was so low! In my mind, men or women, my stereotype of an addicted gambler is older because they’re often retired and have nothing better to do. Or at least they’re in their 40s or 50s and are doing it because they’re… bored? Idk, I don’t get gambling personally. But this is a surprise.
It's the same reason young men are drawn to crypto. Younger generations are faced with an economy that prices them out of the housing market, so they feel the need to explore alternative wealth-building pathways if they're to achieve the aspirational lifestyles they've been sold.
Realistically though, with the demographics as they are, aren't these young men just throwing dice to gamble against and take the money of other young men? Isn't this a 0 sum game?

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?

Younger men are into gambling for a lot of reasons. It's just too easy to gamble when you can do it on your phone (especially when you're already on your phone). They don't think hard work will get them ahead in life (they are probably correct, given housing prices, etc.). They are bombarded with ads (during the games you can bet on!), influencers, etc. Gambling apps are gamified and give you a lot of incentives to keep coming back. Gambling is addictive enough...
It started as a joke, we used to laugh at the groups of guys who would gamble their food money doing "feast or famine"they knew it was dumb and so did we. Then the joke slowly moved over to my group of friends doing so and we knew it was dumb and treated it so. Fast forward 6 years and its so entrenched in daily life every single guy I know at least casually gambles weekly on their favorite sports and some do multiple bets per day on games they dont even watch. I bet $20-$50 on MMA which is like 5% of my income each week thats considered low.
I agree. I find men in the 18-30 range being a prime target for targeted gambling ads.

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.

Gambling and scalping (and the combo that comes from reselling things like pokemon cards and other blind box products). They really do seem like the only options for a lot of people to live the kind of life that they've been sold as the ideal.

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.

I think gambling was slowly going that way before crypto, robinhood, sports betting, finfluencers, etc brought it back in big time for young men.
Why would a 40/50 year old gamble on the outcome of a bouncing ball when they can gamble on the outcome of a political candidate they work for or a government agency response to an event they helped orchestrate?
Because the vast majority of 40/50 year olds don't fit into either category you described?
I'm not sure if this tracks internationally, but in the UK sports betting is enormous and young men are included in this. I've got mates from uni I distinctly remember putting chunks of their student loans on the football for example.
Young people have more poorly developed impulse control.
Ad Targeting Confirmed To Exist
These sorts of studies, on medicine, economics, etc. get a lot of coverage in the Guardian and on the BBC.

I'm always left with the impression that they wouldn't give a shit if they weren't affecting women.

I agree that there's very often a "world ending, women most effected" tone in the media, but... doesn't this article explicitly go against that? It's not complaining that women aren't being equally enticed to throw away their money gambling.
You're commenting on a study that says something is affecting mainly men.
Is this surprising? Expected? Simple observation?

Presumably these ads are targeted intentionally to their audience, and this research confirms it.

Given reported gender ratios I'm kinda surprised it's only 2:1. Supposedly 98% of problem gamblers online are male and I think it's like 3:1 in general?
Fork found in kitchen.
An inequality that must be addressed!
The list is long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inequalities
Young men believe, thanks to social media constantly repeating them the same message, that the only way out of a sad wage cuck existence is hypergambling. This text opened my eyes to it https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy
This feels like it sounds nice on paper, but there isn't really any much data justify it... Yes, incomes and inflation aren't lining up. But that has been true for a couple generations now.

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).

It's true, though. The life Homer Simpson had is out of reach.

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.

It's not just social media. At least once every two weeks I get FanDuel sending me garbage in the mail in the form of a giant closed envelope with their stupid purple branding all over it.

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.

Surprising, would have thought the target demo for gambling ad buys would skew MUCH more young male
This probably has to do with how men use the internet. When it comes to addictive stuff, as well as watching ... well ... nudity, but also high-intensity gaming, one can assume that males are more interested and active in this regard in general, on average. So if you are more active or spend more time, naturally ads would target you more.

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).

I pretty much just buy a single lottery ticket now and then when the cash value after taxes would be over 100m usd. Basically it's a ticket to fantasize about the results for a few days, not a realistic expectation of anything.

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.

> To lambasting them when they express any desire to actually form a family.

What is this referring to?

> 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.

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.

91 Clubl
alternative title: 1/3 gambling ads now target women, massive increase