[mint5]

“It’s clear that Polymarket and Kalshi host these markets to serve bettors, not to produce useful information. Take Kalshi’s “Best AIs this week?” markets, which not only cover too short a time period to be useful in any decision.”

Yeah the site is clearly optimized for betting at the expense of the purported purpose.

Looking at polymarket, wagers that could yield interesting odds are generally turned into meaningless junk by contrived timelines or other technicalities that aren’t at all related to the core thesis of the wager. I.e the flashy thing the wager talked about wasn’t the main contention of the odds, an artificially constrained timeline or other not useful technical detail is what the wagers hinge on.

It’s also strange how so few had advance cutoffs. The person with “info” is incentivized to hold their bet to the last minute, so even accepting the premise that the markets provide info, the wagers seem structurally designed to give that info when’s it’s too late to be of use. If the wanted to fix that it would be easy but they don’t. It’s as simple as forcing long run wagers to have a gap between the wager period and the resolution time point.