Will Manifold guidelines prohibit distractions and clickbait in question titles? [ADD COMMENTS] 🏕️🎤💤
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resolved Apr 11
Resolved
NO

I've recently felt like there's too much of this junk going on. Making your question titles clickbait-y is kind of an escalation of an attention-grabbing arms race, makes the browsing experience less good, and contributes to a broken-windows degradation of Manifold's questions.

Specific things I'm considering discouraging, or ask mods to remove, from question titles:

  1. [ADD RESPONSES] -- this just looks ugly

  2. emoji -- so, I do like emoji and want people to be able to customize their titles with icons. (eg I love Notion's ability to choose an emoji to represent your page). At the same time, it's currently very unstructured, inconsistent and thus visually distracting

  3. Mentioning subsidies, close dates, and resolution criteria where gratuitous. (This one is more of a judgement call, of course)

I'm not sure about this change though -- on the flip side, it's important that question creators feel ownership over their markets, and I want to encourage people to experiment with new market formats.

Hacker News submission guidelines, for reference:

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

Market resolves yes if we've decided to add and enforce these guidelines by market close.

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For the record, think this is probably still a good idea, especially now that "Add answer" is prominently featured on the browse page; but we didn't get it into the guidelines in time.

Resolves NO.

I think all of these behaviors are desire paths caused by a lack of tagging + a sub-optimal market browsing UX. There is a systemic solution that wouldn't rely on guidelines and moderation: adding a great tagging system + purging emojis from titles. Tags would easily communicate things like subsidies, free responses, market mechanisms, etc, and they could be turned on/off.

See this discussion and links therein on Discord.

also you can't tell while browsing whether you can add answers or not! It's such a fun hook it should just be a cta on every open-answer question

I've started to experiment a little bit with attention-grabbing in titles (especially with emojis). I'll definitely cool it if requested, although I'd like to think I haven't gone too far.

I agree with @probajoelistic, I think a single emoji at the front can look good, and I've started to use it to denote a category of market that I create like I've seen others do.

My notifications tell a tragic tale:

(Dan made a free response question without saying people could add responses, and so someone missed that it was free response and made their own version of the question with free response)

@Joshua lol I actually think he beat me to creating the market, just his is general to the event and mine is specifically about what caused the collision.

I like emojis when there's some consistency, and they help me differentiate between questions more quickly (maybe just a dyslexia thing?). But I get that they cause chaos

In my defense, I do the same thing with my personal notes:

@probajoelistic Yeah - I think if they're consistent, then emojis are a lot less visually distracting because your brain can adapt to skipping over them (unless you want to). Right now though, many questions don't have them, while a few do, and some have them at the start, at the end, in the middle, or some unholy combination thereof.

(for example, I really like the charityvest and maps icons used in your screenshot; if Manifold had a way for market emojis to always be lined up like that I think emojis would be A+)

some of this stuff is clarifying for the traders-who-don't-read-the-description. I agree we don't need the chaos of YouTube, but likewise we benefit from not being as bland as metaculus imo

@Stralor also historically some of these have been a great way to show off new site features like MC

i only ever did [ADD RESPONSES] bc that is what i saw when i got here , also it isnt clear which markets allow that otherwise. i'd be down for a tag or other indicator

@strutheo Yeah, Manifold adding a tag would make a lot of sense.

Currently the toggles for unranked and unsubsidized add the #unranked and #unsubsidized tags, so flipping the "creator only" toggle should be able to add/remove a tag named "free response" or "submissions open". Then that tag would be visible like other tags are in the market cards:

re: (2), you could do something like notion, where every market has 1 emoji associated with it, which is randomly generated (or you can choose your own).

bought Ṁ1 NO

@saulmunn I feel like most markets here don't have good emojis to associate to them though

bought Ṁ10 YES

@saulmunn yeah something like this could make sense. (it is something additional to implement, maybe a fun hackathon project)

@duck_master many Notion pages don't have good emojis either! But actually having any random icon helps with making a notion page easier to reference, mysteriously.

@Austin also there are only so many emojis to go around. Even if we did all of Unicode we might run out someday

@duck_master The major tags all have emojis, so markets could just show those emojis where they show the tags if the goal is an Emojis For All system.

Only having half the questions have emojis is a weird situation for sure.

lol I was literally about to hit send on some clarifying questions here when your comment popped up. @saulmunn's comment above was about "every market has an emoji" which is confusing to me.

it makes sense that tags have associations I think, but where would an emoji display on every market and what's the utility in the Manifold format? in lists (like topics here or documents in Notion) it helps differentiate between lines and items but I can't really envision what it helps to assign an emoji to each market.

@Austin Also note that emojis on Notion pages are the default but can be removed as desired.