The Gambling Epidemic

A quick project you can do yourself without me forcing my results on you:

Go to the YouTube search for “gambling epidemic”.  There’s a wide variety of videos to choose from.  Many are very recent and a lot of them posted to the platform well after the “I’m a magic sports decoder with gematria” boom started.

I haven’t made it a point to go through too many of them, but there are two themes I found I want to share.  Since my research isn’t that extensive I can’t claim that these are common, but I have seen them more than once.

It’s not just the rise in numbers, but what’s concerning for the video makers talking about the epidemic is the young age of the new crop of addicts.  From a gematria perspective this isn’t too surprising.  The targeted demographic seems to be aimed at high school age students.  A perfect age for a rebellious youngster to find the core message of magic solutions and not realize that it sounds too good to be true because it is too good to be true.  As part of a rabbit hole of bad ideas to get lost in, gematria has always been a constant source of advertisement for gambling sites.  Customized ads will throw you a Draft Kings or online casino ad at the start of the video just because, for example, the latest sports celebrity death gematria was the topic of the video.  One of the sources of rabbit hole exploration is games targeted to this demographic that have “loot boxes”.  Although these can be just cosmetic additions to brag about a player character’s look instead of paying an in game microtransaction for a weapons upgrade, the model the designers followed to use this as part of the game is literally based on the flashing lights and sounds of brick and mortar casino games.

And completely without surprise, we know it’s going on and nothing is being done about it.  Firmly within the camp of we are on our own socializing the youngsters without expecting any meaningful content moderation from social media platforms.  And as I’ve often said keep in mind that expecting meaningful content moderation at this large scale is naive.  There are too many moving parts.  Bad actors deliberately taking advantage of loopholes, innocent but gullible folk not having a clue what’s going on, and algorithms designed to replace human labor - all make for a ridiculous mishmash of rabbit hole entry points and mazes.

Personally, just yesterday morning I was watching a video that had absolutely nothing to do with gematria, sports or gambling (it was on a channel dedicated to disturbing videos on the internet I’ve been frequenting).  And I got this banner:

Nothing too extreme, except I was thinking of posting a comment to the video, and this banner appeared directly over the comment box.  Scrolling up and down the ad followed the comment box.  I could tap and hold my finger on the screen and move the ad away from the box, but upon releasing my finger the ad retreated to covering the comment box completely.  Closing out the video and reopening it brought the ad back.  I finally had to exit out of the video completely, reload it by searching for the channel and video again to make it disappear.  A lot of work when it may seem simpler to just get lazy and click on the ad, download the sports betting app.  And that’s exactly what they want.  I was frustrated enough I never did post my comment.