I'm new on Manifold, and trying to figure out how it works. The site offers various ways to earn M$, to incentivize market creation and participation. I can imagine various schemes to increase my M-wealth that don't seem to contribute anything useful to the site. I'm trying to figure out what the site's policy is toward this sort of scheming.
"Unfair" is in my judgement (but I'm happy to take input). I'm not going to do anything illegal, nor any sort of offsite interaction with the developers (e.g. persuade them to go under the hood and modify my account).
If I don't attempt anything "unfair" by close date, or I attempt it without success, this market resolves to N/A.
If I use some "unfair" method to make at least M$1000, the market resolves to YES if: I am barred from participation in the site, temporarily or permanently; or if the site admins threaten me with such a bar; and the bar or threat is linked to my "unfair" practice.
Otherwise, it resolves to NO. For example, if the site admins change the rules to block my scheme, or if they take away the M$ I earned through the scheme, I will resolve to NO.
Related questions
Depends a lot on what sort of unfair you're talking about. Here's some categories:
Exploits: People have found a number of ways to make lots of M$ via exploits or abuse, as far as I know it has all been "white hat" and disclosed publicly or privately to Manifold. Manifold has paid out bug bounties for some of them, and generally just rolled back any profits that shouldn't have existed. If someone did it with the intent of actually profiting and getting away with it, rather than for the purposes of reporting it, I'd expect a ban or similar action for that.
Scam/rugpull markets (you make a popular market and take a bunch of trader's M$ by betting and resolving it the wrong way): This is explicitly allowed under the https://help.manifold.markets/community-guidelines but will likely result in your markets being flagged by other users as incorrectly resolved.
I think @Boklam might have had in mind things like "place and sell a M$1 bet every day in order to farm the streak bonus" or "create a market designed just to have a lot of users bet on it in order to get the unique trader bonus". Those are both allowed, and other people have already done them.
Wow, thanks for the replies!
Yes, @IsaacKing that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. For example, I was wondering what would happen if a cabal of people agreed to place small bets on each other's markets -- then they could produce garbage markets and collect bonuses off them.
On a related note, I had a lot of trouble finding the site policies when I first joined. By googling I managed to find docs.manifold.markets. Is there a link to that site from this one?
@Boklam There might be a link to it somewhere in the "help&about" pages you can find under "more" in the sidebar, but there certainly isn't an easy way to find it. Manifold is still very much a work in process, and right now their site navigation is pretty terrible. The good news is that they're very open to feedback and operate on a very fast development cycle, so stuff tends to get tweaked and fixed pretty quickly. (Though the navigation issues in particular have been around for many months and haven't been fixed yet.)