🏅 Top traders

Resolves NO

ie (#users_with_markets/#users) went down over the month as market cost increased. not too surprising

The Discord discussion moves pretty fast, so I'll leave a comment here with my concerns about the change.

My concern: Increased market price -> (1) incentivize more of what Manifold is already best at (US politics, AI, tech, etc), and (2) penalize attempts to expand Manifold into new areas

When I introduce Manifold to someone, it tends to go in two ways. If I show them (1) a typical popular manifold niche (e.g. LK-99, AI scenarios, etc), their eyes glaze over, & (2) if I show them a weird market that fits their niche interest, they go "OH", and suddenly want to see what other markets are out there

Example: My gf doesn't care about most of what this app covers, but was surprised/delighted by delighted this Love is Blind market https://manifold.markets/goblinodds/what-will-be-true-of-love-is-blind, she's checked it a bunch (told me what to bet on), & has now mentioned it to a bunch of her friends. but making markets in new niches is NOT profitable (even under the old system). and it's a bummer that when they search for other LiB markets, they don't find any.

Example: There's an Age of Empires 2 tournament this weekend. @AmmonLam made some pricey markets (16 options!) to guess the identity of the players. https://manifold.markets/news/hidden-cup-v-markets-aoe2 I'll post this on reddit this weekend (last tournament's reddit post got some good sign-ups, although I think this one is a bit less likely to catch on). but these markets are not going to be profitable, or get many traders. But they offer a small chance to actually draw someone new in.

TLDR: I think Manifold benefits most from these markets that experiment with something new (even though they're nearly guaranteed to have little traction at first), whereas optimizing for # of traders means you will target the stuff that Manifold is already best at (I think the app is already fantastic for US politics, and I don't think those questions need much help).

I'm bummed by the change because I want Manifold to grow into new areas, and I want more users to make more markets. Any price increase will be very asymmetrically felt: I can afford it just fine (& won't change my habits), but new users will be more wary of making their first markets.

Caveat: I can't possibly comment on Manifold's business model. If somehow this change is expected to convince more people to spend USD on the site, I don't see the connection, but also that's totally fair. I can only comment about my experience as a user.

I said this when we were discussing the prospective changes a while back, but this will hurt smaller and newer creators more and will make the processing of growing by question asking all the more difficult. If I started anew today, I would certainly not have been able to grow as quickly as many of my earliest markets were duds. Some of them were multiyear things which still aren’t resolveable (or profitable) 4 months later.

Betting NO here on vibes and hoping that they raise the trader bonuses in kind.

Not sure if this is a good metric to meassure effects of the market cost changes, since new users have 3 free markets (unless that also changed).

Eliza has a similar question that probably is less affected by that, good point though

I guess I want to distinguish the case where a few users start making hundreds of markets, vs where lots of new users start making more, or less, markets, but had not considered the 3 free markets thing

New users get 1000 mana now yes?

@VAPOR Always have. Used to be 500 today 500 in a few days. Now you can click around a bit and get 1000 really fast so you can spam-bet on Tumbles markets and then delete your account.

@Eliza oh.. great change..

@Bayesian I was shocked to see responses so quickly, I thought at first you used python on your main account to make trades but I guess you were just in the market at the time I traded

@Eliza I thought it was 500