For example, only 5% of your total loans can be in one market, so your losses are less easily correlated and it’s hard to suddenly go hundreds of thousands of mana in the red after months of unprofitability
Taking as given that yeeting all your mana at one market is to be discouraged, and discouraging that being the goal of this idea, I'm not convinced it's a good strategy to achieve the goal. I bet most people who do that would probably not realise they could get a loan in the first place, and/or not claim enough loans to hit a cap were one implemented.
Overall the loan system is kinda complicated anyway; adding more nuance to it seems like a bad idea for that reason (in a world where manifold is trying to broaden appeal!!)
Taking as given that yeeting all your mana at one market is to be discouraged, and discouraging that being the goal of this idea,
That's not the goal? People can choose to put all their mana into a single market—it's not really how Manifold wants people to use the site for a wide variety of reasons, but it would nonetheless be bad for the site to actually block you from doing so. The question is simply how much they loan out the position for people who bet their account on a single market.
I bet most people who do that would probably not realise they could get a loan in the first place
Why would you think this? People with a large fraction of their net worth in one market routinely made use of the free loans they were offered, just like any other user. Why would they be different? (We don't need to speculate, Manifold had loans for a long time and people with a large fraction of their net worth in a single market unsurprisingly made use of the loan system and leveraged their accounts. When LK-99 resolves many accounts will go negative because of this.)
@Ziddletwix OK, if I've inferred the wrong goal from the various throwaway comments I've seen about it, then the main thrust of my comment isn't really relevant.
What would you say the main goal driving the suggestion is?
@draaglom (e.g. is it to reduce the rate of accounts going to negative balance? or some sort of distortive effect of liquidity reinvesting into the same q? or?)
Why would you think this? People with a large fraction of their net worth in one market routinely made use of the free loans they were offered
No doubt that's also true. I was assuming that the median person matching the description would be a new user who joins manifold, spends ~all their mana on one or a few questions, and then occasionally returns - noticing loans exist much later or not at all
@VitorBosshard adding friction matters even if work around a wirh effort are possible.
Empirically, many of the cases where accounts put a large share of their net worth into a single question have only used a single question, not many duplicates. If a 5% cap of net worth cap per market was added, would they try to create obvious duplicates to evade it? Maybe? But a mechanic is still helpful even if with great effort you can find exploits/work arounds
@Bayesian but there is a cap already or? like, you can't just get infinite mana, or you mean specifically that certain markets would be capped differently than others?