Is it legitimate on Manifold to make comments intended to push the market in (what you believe is) the wrong way?
E.g. if you want others to bet YES so you can then bet NO at the higher price, or sell out your existing YES shares.
Option 1 means that this is always considered bad behavior - your comments should only ever be intended to make the market more accurate. (Of course, you can and should bet before you comment!)
Option 2 means it's OK as long as your comment does actually provide value to traders on the market, regardless of your motive. E.g. you share news that does legitimately raise the YES probability. You expect others to weigh it more strongly than it deserves (in your opinion), but you don't actively slant things to cause that; it will just be their own reasonable opinion. Or you make an argument that you believe a smart reasonable person might sincerely make, with phrasing like "a point in favor of YES is..." that doesn't imply you agree.
Option 3 allows more: presenting selected partial information that gives a distorted picture, arguing with feigned sincerity (but using true facts), and all the other ways of misleading-without-lying.
Option 4 is that Manifold is just an adversarial game environment like Diplomacy; say whatever you can get away with.
1,000@mods if any of you guys would like to weigh in on this, I'm all ears. Ofc the poll is about community opinion, but your perspectives would be valuable as context.
@AhronMaline "Allowed" is tricky wording. In practice, I am not aware of any case where a user has faced any meaningful discipline for a deceptive comment on a market they are trading in. Thus, empirically the answer would be "Always OK", if what defines "allowed" is "formal disciplinary action".
From the Manifold community guidelines:
Users strive to be excellent to one another.
This is the general guideline that articulates good commenting behavior. Clearly, intentionally misleading people in the comments is not striving to be excellent to each other. For myriad reasons, this is not actually enforced. However, I'd note that a user's "general pattern of behavior" is taken into account in other areas (e.g., if someone violates another site rule, if they have been a positively contributing member of the community they are invariably given more leeway than if they have been routinely sharing low quality misinformation in the comments).
Manifold is a community, with no particular concrete payoff for winning lots of mana. The primary penalty for sharing bad/misleading comments is that the community will think less of you for it. I personally do not see why anyone would prefer the trade-off where you earn a bit more mana but you antagonize the community—no one else cares about mana except the Manifold community!
Deceptive creators are a different category, and you are held to a higher standard on the markets you will resolve—actively misleading traders on your market is very clearly against site rules (& can lead to action in practice).
(just opining here as a user, not as a mod/etc)
@Ziddletwix Yes, of course there can't be an enforcible rule about this! I'm asking about the norm, what people feel is acceptable behavior, versus a reason to be annoyed and look down on someone.
Case in point. I have a bad position now that I am sticking to because I got plausibly spoofed by something called Maltese Herald, that the American Fighting on the side of Russia is already dead, I may have misled others, but I am sticking with my own position as well, so I am taking damage too, if it turns out he is alive. Won't bail on it unless I know for a fact that he is alive.
Oops. I misclicked. Meant to vote Other. In my opinion each should have their own moral code. I don't think I want to impose my moral code on another. Personally I wouldn't but would accept that I am unreliable myself and my comments might lead someone to think I am tricksy, although I make a good faith effort to be accurate. Certanly have misled by my comments, inadvertently, and been likely spoofed by unreliable sources.
People shouldn't take the argument of a single person in the comments as their only source of truth anyway; If you get tricked by that, it's your problem.
Even if no one ever makes disingenuous arguments, people will push for the incorrect side of the market in the comments because they believe what they are saying.