Meta’s internal R&D team has long been trying to build new stuff that allows the company to expand outside of its titanic trios of Instagram and Facebook – with varying success. While Threads is still gaining traction, and the Ray-Ban smart glasses collab is a work in progress, the metaverse platform Horizon Worlds, its crypto platform Libra, plus various platforms like Workplace, Facebook Gaming, and Lasso were all expensive flops.
Seeking a new way to grab the eyeballs of users, the New York Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg – who holds extraordinary decision-making power at Meta – has apparently ordered a new experimental prediction market app called Arena to become a top priority. According to the NYT, initially, the app would be game-like: “users would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video-game-like points system instead” – although apparently Meta has not ruled out “the eventual use of real money betting.”
The cynical view of prediction markets is that they operate in a liminal space: very close to being gambling (but they’re not regulated by the US gambling commission) and very close to being financial markets (but they are trading on “predictions” that, unlike stocks in actual companies, have no intrinsic value). The very cynical view is that the whole space feels a lot like crypto and NFTs: softly-regulated, quasi-anonymous, and based on a lot of extrinsic value – and thus, a good way to lose your shirt if you put real money into it. Meta’s predictions app, if it ever appears, however, is just for fun – to start with, at least.
