Submitted 23 hours ago by ExtremeDullard@piefed.social to technology@beehaw.org
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/technology/meta-prediction-markets-app.html
Meta Has Created a Prediction Markets App
The experimental app, internally called “Arena,” would be independent of Facebook and Instagram. It could compete for attention with Polymarket and Kalshi, the biggest prediction markets.
If it’s unprincipled and it makes a ton of money, count of Fuckerberg to be all in on it.
The petulance is strong with this one.
More than 3.56 billion people visit one or more of Meta’s apps every day …
I question that statistic, which is presented without sourcing. The penetration of WhatsApp internationally makes it plausible, but the assumption here seems to be “everyone who wants to chat is itching to be able to bet with friends and colleagues.” Just as everyone was waiting with bated breath for legless avatars doing … something … in a cartoon environment.
I guess it’s time to change the name of the company to Arena. Failsafe way to get buy-in.
Boasting 3.56bn hits on one’s website, even if it was true (most of those hits are probably search engine crawlers, bots and DDOS attempts), doesn’t mean it’s important or even interesting. I’ve taken close to 25,000 dumps since I was born, and while it sounds impressive, nobody cares and it’s meaningless.
I heard they’re going to start harvesting and selling off all the engineers’ organs. Zuckerberg calls it an “unfortunately necessary next step”.
They’ll need the money for the Llama data centers that are powering all of this, to be fair!
It’s unavoidable.
Did y’all notice that Facebook hasn’t a market leader for quite a while now? Their new products are only to catchup not disrupting or adding anything new.
Have they successfully innovated anything since the original Facebook? All their successful businesses are acquisitions (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus) and everything they try to create are half hearted copies of something else.
Well at least that one will make money…
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 20 hours ago
Crazy how by simply rebranding "gambling" to "prediction markets", it went from being something illegal to something where people can now bet on anything at any time.