I think N/A-ing was the right decision here, and I really hope @bandors comes back to this platform, since I think he's an awesome user that adds a lot of value here with cool markets and experiences.

Sometimes bad things happen (in this case, annoying ppl using bots to manipulate a trivial Manifold market) and the benefit of a play money platform like this is that markets can be N/A-ed. It looks like really only a few users (3-4?) actually had a ton of mana riding on this, and it looks like even they agree that N/A-ing was the safe option here.

I'm not sure why people are so mad about this. This couldn't fairly resolve YES, imo, due to Manifold terms of conduct, where manipulating market outcomes with botting is not allowed. But resolving NO also wouldn't be fair since there are decent odds that the market could have actually fairly resolved YES without the bots.

Also, for the record, I had essentially no stake in this, although I guess I lost 19 mana from the N/A lol (trade history below):

@bens Looks like the creator even deleted https://hanta.bandors.org/, so we can't even see if it would have reached 10k at the original end date.

@bens

This couldn't fairly resolve YES, imo, due to Manifold terms of conduct, where manipulating market outcomes with botting is not allowed.

what is this referring to? IIRC, in the previous community guidelines, there was a specific callout that you couldn't violate another site's terms of service to influence a market–that would raise the question here of whether bandors website had a ToS, although i can't find that in the new community guidelines (there's a rule against markets that incentivize breaking of other sites' ToS, but that's different). and while the guidelines have some rules about botting on manifold, i didn't see anything about botting to manipulate an outcome. (maybe there should be something about that, but curious if i missed something in the guidelines).

(i do think this is at least somewhat material to the discussion here, because some forms of market manipulation are clearly allowed/encouraged and some are not, and botting web traffic is clearly poor user behavior from the trader who did it, like violating the more nebulous guidelines about being a good participant in a community, but that's a separate question from "is it unambiguous that the creator must commit to trying to exclude botted web traffic to the best of their ability").

This was sketch at so many levels:

1. Using manifold as advertising

2. Sending the traffic through X instead of directly

3. Botting and possible sock puppet accounts because seriously, who's going to care enough about this market to manipulate it other than the author?

4. It's one thing to use AI tools, it's another to let the AI make a confusing visual design choice you don't know how to correct and then make excuses for it

5. Implying that you're doing a favor by letting phone users access your site at all instead of fixing it

I'm giving my first non perfect rating not only because of the resolution but because of how manipulative this entire market was from the start. User profile currently says he quit and good riddance. He'll be back under a new name but the sketch behavior patterns will follow him whether he goes.

@AlexBokov he was a good user and was one of the first people I met here. He clearly made a mistake here and I understand that but he leaving was not a good riddance

@AlexBokov

Using manifold as advertising

users are welcome (and encouraged!) to do this, as long as it is a valid market with something meaningful to predict (like this). i have to remove lots of spam advertising from the new queue, this is not spam advertising.

Botting and possible sock puppet accounts because seriously, who's going to care enough about this market to manipulate it other than the author?

this is an silly conspiracy theory and a silly thing to say. do you want to formulate a bet on this?

to all traders here who bet more than they could afford to lose on an underspecified market about what will happen to a counter on the internet and then are shocked and appalled that someone might manipulate that counter (primarily @xjp , but it seems like others were similarly invested in this outcome)—i hope people learn the obvious lessons here going forward? if you feel a market is underspecified, ask the creator! if the creator does not reply (or does not resolve the underspecification to your satisfaction), do not trade in it! if a market resolves based on a counter for web traffic, do not assume without clarification that the creator secretly means "i will do my best to attempt for all possibly fraudulent web traffic, and then resolve based on that corrected number", rather than what they literally stated in the description! (resolving based on the web counter, including its flaws).

this is not some strange edge case, it comes up all the time, and i have no idea why this market in particular caused many traders to behave in such embarrassing fashion. the creator is under no obligation to agree with your interpretation of the spirit of the market. if you disagree with the creator, make your case in the comments, leave a bad review, refuse to trade in their future markets, and even call the mods if there is an actual egregious mis-resolution, but don't continue to hound the creator because they disagree with your interpretation.

@Ziddletwix Someone (@Qubits) did ask for clarification about bots, and received and answer that to a reasonable person would be interpreted as "bots are strongly forbidden", which is why people including me traded on predicting organic traffic. Allowing bots to resolve the market YES against that clarification and against the spirit of the market (i.e. not going viral) would have been an egregious misresolution. It sounds like you want Manifold to be a community where people get scammed left and right on arcane technicalities unless they draw up a bulletproof multi page legal contract in the comments with the creator first. Instead of being about actually predicting things.

@Ziddletwix The creator HAS been asked and has given a misleading answer. This couldn't fairly resolve YES, according to @bens above, due to Manifold terms of conduct, where manipulating market outcomes with botting is not allowed.

@xjp

Someone (@Qubits) did ask for clarification about bots, and received and answer that to a reasonable person would be interpreted as "bots are strongly forbidden", which is why people including me traded on predicting organic traffic.

you should quote the actual exchange:

Creator: it would be lame if someone botted traffic to resolve the market.

Reply: So you are expressly forbidding/discouraging it? Do you have anti-bot protection?

Creator: I think it's technically criminal to pay for bot traffic, so I shouldn't have to expressly ban criminal acts.

Is this a good answer? obviously not! when asked, a creator should clarify how they plan to resolve this market, not provide this non-answer where they (wrongly) state that something is illegal. but if you think based on this exchange that the creator has obviously and unambiguously committed to doing their best to audit the view count and remove any that they suspect to be botted, i am telling you very bluntly that that was a poor reading of the exchange (as subsequent events prove, FWIW), going forward you should be more careful about assuming creator intent and require actual clear clarification before you invest much of your net worth into a question, and if you don't adjust your approach you will continue to be burned by this in the future.

i mean this as genuine advice because below, you said this was "stressing [you] out". i understand that this it is stressful that a large chunk of your net worth hinged on this creator's decision. it is a bad idea to put yourself in this position, because it is not possible to regularly use manifold without disagreeing with a creator's resolution—both because many markets are badly run, and because reasonable people have substantive disagreements about genuinely ambiguous topics.

i do not think bandors ran this market well. but many commenters behaved much more poorly than he did, which is disappointing. @jack 's comment is a good example of how to constructively disagree with a creator, and argue for your preferred resolution. the drama over this market is extra silly because the scenario is just so typical—any metric that tracks activity online is susceptible to manipulation, and (1) in some cases there are safeguards built in, (2) in some cases the creator might apply their subjective judgment to address that manipulation (as many wanted Bandors to do here), and (3) in some cases it just resolves based on whatever that number says, because that's all we've got. all are common approaches that creators routinely take. it is perfectly reasonable to believe that (2) is the better way to run this market. it was not reasonable to believe that Bandors had unambiguously committed to (2), based on the market description + his comments so far. it was badly underspecified!

@Ziddletwix Future reference for everyone trying to quickly find Jack's comment: https://manifold.markets/Bandors/will-my-hantavirus-tracking-website#yhohlnpusyn

(Has Manifold made it harder to link to comments directly? If I do not intervene, the direct link is replaced by a market link.)

@Ziddletwix I will be more careful in the future. At the same time, I wish I didn't have to be. I want Manifold to be more pro-social and less adversarial than it actually is. I wish it went without saying that a market creator would resolve N/A as soon as it became clear that many (most?) traders were trading on a reasonable interpretation of their words that they didn't intend, because that's the considerate thing to do. And also, as I wrote on Discord:

The thing is, the reason I'm on Manifold instead of real money markets is because I want to play the game of predicting some aspect of the external reality rather than worrying about all the possibilities of tricks and manipulation in a dog-eat-dog market where anything goes and you have no recourse. I definitely considered the risks but thought that the comment about bots was good enough assurance not to worry about it

It's fun to predict whether a site will go viral based on the current organic trend, the news cycles, the nature of the virus, etc. That's complex and interesting and it takes skill. It's not fun to predict whether someone will on a whim spend a dollar to trivially game the outcome.

I wish Manifold was, as a hard community rule, committed to protecting as much as possible the integrity of the game of predicting those external realities (hantavirus, social media dynamics), as opposed to playing the metagame, except obviously on fun or meta markets where the metagame is the whole game and everyone knows that.

@xjp that is a totally fair desire for the site! and ~most creators agree. but not all, and manifold is many things to many different people. it is not a complete free-for-all—mods will step in for egregious misresolutions. but almost every market has some gap between (1) "the spirit of the substantive thing we probably actually care about predicting" and (2) "the literal number we cite". there is no shortcut for asking the creator how they view the situation, and everyone resolves this tension differently.

FWIW, while I think ~most users do agree with your general interpretation that the creator should try to prioritize (1) over (2) when possible (even if there is endless disagreement over how to actually achieve (1)) , I think many site users would disagree with this part:

the game of predicting some aspect of the external reality rather than worrying about all the possibilities of tricks and manipulation in a dog-eat-dog market where anything goes and you have no recourse.

users on the site like to say "every market is a bounty", and while this particular market was just a case of trivially botted views, the statement here is stronger, and applies equally to more substantive forms of manipulation where people put in effort to make the event specified by the market occur. it is not "anything goes", but manifold is not going to say "traders cannot try to influence the outcome of a market via their own actions" anytime soon, and thus you always need to worry about this.

I wish it went without saying that a market creator would resolve N/A as soon as it became clear that many (most?) traders were trading on a reasonable interpretation of their words that they didn't intend, because that's the considerate thing to do

while this is a usage of N/A i personally use, it is not safe to assume that all creators agree with this statement! for a variety of reasons—some just don't like using N/A so freely, some don't think the opinions of the traders should matter so much, etc. i do not think "resolution is based on the consensus of the traders" would be a good way for the site to run, and it's not how the site is run. the opinion of the creator matters a great deal.

and more broadly, in terms of "what manifold should strive for", while i agree that (1) (the spirit of what we want to predict) is a better way to generally run a market than (2) (the literal number), i do not want a manifold where every creator is beholden to the assumptions traders make about what the creator surely intended. sometimes i just want to predict a number! and when i want to predict the spirit of something, it is trivially easy to flesh out the description to explain that intent (you don't need to legalistically explain every potential complication, this market description could literally just have been "it will resolve based on my best guess at the true number of unique visitors to the site—i'll try to exclude obviously duplicate/botted traffic").

@Bandors Thanks for finally doing the right thing. I don't think you were being fair or reasonable in trying to rules-lawyer this distinction between illegal vs. legal bots. The integrity of the market was clearly compromised and I wasn't the only one saying so. Honestly, you caused me a lot of unnecessary stress over this. I won't leave you a bad rating, which is my token of gratitude for resolving early enough to save my leagues standing tomorrow.

That said, I think we can all make smarter moves next time. Ask more questions, give more detailed answers, and never leave any small ambiguity to fester.

Wow, looks like I missed all the excitement. As the 2nd-biggest YES holder (still don't know what Seaman's deal is), I got in with a lot of mana early because it seemed like there was a reasonable chance for it to hit naturally as well as YES holders having an asymmetric ability to increase the count through sharing and potentially botting (before Bandors' initial clarification). With how popular it already was at the time I felt that there was a good enough chance people would get it over. I agree with the N/A though, botting seemed like it was explicitly disallowed earlier and is against the spirit of the rules enough to justify it.

Honestly at this point i feel Super lucky to get out of this with the N/A, i thought i was gonna be broke lmao. @xjp and @prismatic can have a consolation 100 managram from me, I remember them as being the main NO holders across the time

@PhilipDowdell Thanks for your very fair minded comment and for supporting the N/A resolution even though it could have been in your interest to push for allowing a YES via bots. And if you feel lucky, imagine how I feel not losing my 76k mana! I was sweating for a while there.

@PhilipDowdell same!
@xjp wow! I didn't bot it but I feel lucky and i'll send you 250M as a consolation managram.

@100Anonymous Thanks!

wait why did I lose mana?

@jatloe this is a display error, basically. All mana from NA's is returned. You always come out even, save for extremely rare and probably bug-originating circumstances. This will happen almost every time a market NA's but you're fine

Fine, I will N/A this market

I think that it SHOULD be 'let to ride' but I don't want the hit to my trader rating

Rip

@Cactus There's no winning move lol

@mods Please N/A this market. The market creator is insisting on counting fake views that he himself confirmed were bots, after originally stating that bot traffic was illegal and obviously not allowed. To quote an earlier exchange:

@Qubits: So you are expressly forbidding/discouraging [bot traffic]? Do you have anti-bot protection?

@Bandors: I think it's technically criminal to pay for bot traffic, so I shouldn't have to expressly ban criminal acts.

This is clearly an affirmative answer to the question about forbidding bot traffic. To a reasonable person it sounds like "it goes without saying that it's not allowed", not "it's fine if you find a way to do it that's not illegal".

Additionally, the market is about the website "going viral" and counting "unique visitors", both of which imply real humans and not bots. So not only is the creator's newly proposed interpretation contrary to their previous clarifications that traders bet on, it's also blatantly contrary to the spirit of the market.

Many other traders have also confirmed in the comments that they were misled by the title/criteria and the creator's comments into believing that bots would not be counted, and that they wouldn't have bought NO otherwise (as I wouldn't have). Nobody would buy NO on this market if spending a few cents on fake requests would easily resolve it YES.

And to be clear, this is not a hypothetical issue at this point. Another Manifold user already admitted to using bots to create this huge spike in traffic when the view count had otherwise been essentially flat for weeks:

Thanks!

@xjp I'm not N/Aing this market. The counter is the source of truth. People could be legally sending requests from houses all over the world. Also, if the argument is my counter is not a great source of truth, this market would have been n/a from start. Truth be told my counter doesn't work with ipv6 if we going off of total true visitors we already hit 10k

@xjp I would only ever ban something if it's criminal

@Bandors There's literally no way any trader could have known that, or reasonably interpreted your comments to mean that. If you wanted to allow bots, you should have said so when directly asked whether they were forbidden. But nobody would have traded on your market, because it would be a useless market not having anything to do with your website actually going viral.

@xjp There is no way to know what is a real view or a bot view either way, people could have been more sneaky. Under your premise, this market would have been NA from day one

@Bandors There are lots of ways to know. A user admitted to creating the spike of 576 views, so those are obvious. We can also tell it was fake because there was no hantavirus news or social media post that would have generated the traffic. You yourself posted proof of the bots consistently having zero interaction time on the site which clearly sets them apart from real humans.

Again, if you wanted to make a market about the counter where bot traffic is allowed that's perfectly fine. You just have to make a new market that says so up front so people know what they're getting into. And don't say essentially "yes, obviously" when someone asks you to clarify if bots are forbidden.

@xjp Spikes you can see, sure, but it could have easily been slower and no one would have noticed. I did not at all say "yes obviously" you are straw manning me

@xjp Whoa, comments I made caused drama.
I didn't bet much on this market, but nice to see it N/Aed with this.