kokey

I think modafinil is preferred nowadays, less risk of friendly fire etc.

Got to dash to bed, so hopefully I can make this quick.

I've worked for a very large online gambling company for the past couple of years, and will stop doing so a couple of days from now. I think this kind of thing is normal in the industry. First you have an industry where many land based casinos have little competition because of license restrictions making it hard for new entrants, and many online casinos had little competition because they were brave enough to operate in a legal gray area that any well run business wouldn't dare enter. That's apart from the fact that it's a type of business that takes money quickly off the majority of people who mistakenly think they're luckier than probability theory determines.

The industry is slowly maturing and the margins are getting lower. For land based casinos it's purely because of the credit crunch. For online casinos it's both the economy and because of increased legislation and the enforcement of it.

What you end up having are two things: One is that many of these companies were founded by people who would likely fail in other businesses but somehow ended up in this one that made lots of money easily. For online gambling this includes a lot of young entrepreneurs who did well but actually have no experience in how to keep a business running when margins are considerably tighter. The second thing is that just like the actual product, people in this business have a bit of a gambling mentality themselves. They took a risk and it paid off.

What is happening now is that as the profit margins are coming down dramatically, you have budget constraints so a lot of cuts are being made. Then you have people with no experience in making things more efficient when margins are lower, so the cuts are generally in the wrong place. It's all due to a lack of experience or even the ability to manage budgets and risk properly which is incompatible with a high risk gambling mentality.

The result is that you have lots of people with no experience and no contribution getting high paying jobs not doing much, and this lasts for a while before the company is really able to weed these people out. People with real skills and experience are surrounded and outnumbered by these types. It's hard to fix. It actually requires a dramatic culture change which is a very hard thing to pull off in companies that have been enjoying very big revenues and have people involved who developed egos over this and can't let go.

One good thing comes from this. It means there's a lot of gaps in the market for companies that can offer a better product with lower overhead. We'll see both this happening, and the big players merge and consolidate to get some efficiency gains.

It is actually surprisingly good on it. The regulators somehow understand the economics better, even better than 'net-neutrality' campaigners themselves. 'Net neutrality' is essentially a probably misguided attempt to deal with the symptoms of the lack of competition due to regional monopolies on the most widely deployed broadband mediums in the USA. 'Net-neutrality' is popular with both regional politicians and the operators themselves since it focuses on quality standards for all networks, basically raising barriers to entry to competitors. In Europe it's not been so hard to understand which part should be treated as a common carrier, like a utility, and where the competition should be. Unfortunately in the US it appears that this kind of common sense existed when the local loops were unbundled in the phone networks, but for some reason never moved on to other mediums. Net neutrality campaigns seems to focus on something I call 'quality fixing' which is a bit like price fixing. Price fixing leads to scarcity, 'quality fixing' will just lead to higher prices in the absence of competition. The first wave of net-neutrality like regulation in the US has resulted in caps, which wasn't a thing before. If you look at broadband around Europe, caps never existed before in markets that had competition from early on, in fact it was an invention that comes from the developing world where government monopolies on telecommunications were the norm. Net neutrality campaigns has been going on since 2003, and always cite examples like internet providers charging extra for certain sites, etc. However, it's been 13 years and the only example that we can see of anything kind of like it has been zero rating. Yes, the lack of Net-neutrality laws will bring us more of this scary prospect of someone charging even less for something in certain cases. I have stopped pulling my hair out about it, fortunately in Europe the regulators seem to 'get' it, but I do feel sorry for the US.

Thank you. This is certainly one of the more enlightening comments I've read in a long time.