I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side quest.

I don't think this needs regulated if the people involved are responsible and having fun. No chickens died for sure, which is probably why these articles focus on the more serious bets where people are dying (and not weather).

There's a classic type of British bar-bet that is based on basically anything somewhat random. Wodehouse had lots of examples of it - betting on what hat the next lady to walk in would be wearing, things like that.

The key was they were local and person to person in person - not online.

You and I sitting at the bar get into an argument/bet about what the low today will be, and the bartender bookies the bet before he checks what the low actually was - that makes a certain amount of sense.

Putting it online and making it accessible over TCP/IP opens it up to all sorts of scams and manipulation.