Polymarket is what happens when a Vegas sportsbook and a Reddit comment section have a blockchain baby and decide to raise it on Adderall and push notifications. It’s marketed like a bold experiment in “information discovery,” but mostly feels like a place where tech bros speedrun moral decline by asking themselves, “Is this tragedy bullish?” then high-fiving when liquidity improves. It turns every global event into a scratch-off ticket for people who think empathy is a soft fork and insider trading is just being “early.”
The UI screams “serious financial product,” but spiritually it’s a dorm-room whiteboard covered in doodles of candles and “YOLO” written in dry-erase tears. You’ve got people placing $500 on geopolitics who still need Google to find the nearest ATM. Every time a new market launches, it’s like the site is saying, “We noticed reality still had a tiny bit of dignity left, so we fixed that.” Polymarket didn’t gamify the news so much as hostage-tape it to a roulette wheel and ask, “Over/under on humanity learning anything from this?”