What does Manifold need more of to be sustainable as a profit-making entity and useful predictor?
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Plus
69
Ṁ1924
resolved Aug 9
Resolved
N/A
More conservatives
Resolved
N/A
stop giving away Mana like it's candy (streak bonuses, etc)
Resolved
N/A
People familiar with financial markets
Resolved
N/A
People who live or have lived outside US
Resolved
N/A
better tools to support market transparency and reliability
Resolved
N/A
Users with legal expertise
Resolved
N/A
People with more money
Resolved
N/A
GenX and/or Old Internet People
Resolved
N/A
Women, includes female-identified
Resolved
N/A
Direct focus away from inter-user competition
Resolved
N/A
Reduce monopsony dependence on a few large traders
Resolved
N/A
People who are not white or asian
Resolved
N/A
People without a college education
Resolved
N/A
More closeted gambling addicts
Resolved
N/A
For-profit leagues
Resolved
N/A
AI "enthusiasts" and fans of Aella, Destiny and/or spanking any of these three

Open to suggestions as to how to resolve. This is an earnest community of intelligent people and I offer my best suggestions. Add your own.

ETA3: Asking @chrisjbillington if they're willing to do anything to help figure out a fair resolution.

ETA: Taking the suggestion to leave this unresolved. Personally I agree with most but not all of these suggestions.

ETA: Looks like to resolve one I have to resolve all. Created new market for that one.

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@mods you need to resolve this

how about n/a?

kinda amazing how these are all bad ideas other than 'People with more money' and gambling

n/a seems fine

Looks like to resolve one I have to resolve all. Created new market for that one.

Nope, you can resolve one and then reload or navigate away from the page, don't have to resolve them all.

Open to suggestions as to how to resolve

A few options:

  • Your personal view at any time, people can try to convince you

  • Your personal view at some point in the future (say, end of year), that way there can be some hindsight about if any of things were attempted and whether they worked

  • A poll soon

  • A poll at some point in the future to allow similarly for hindsight

Resolving to your judgement in the future runs the risk that you might not be active on the site, leaving it not possible to resolve other than N/A.(you could put a backup option in - resolves to poll if you're inactive).

As for the structure of the poll, since this is an unlinked marker and each optoon can resolve YES or NO, it seems you'd need one poll per answer, asking if it should resolve YES or NO.

Then you should specify whether you'll resolve to percentage based on the poll, or if you'll resolve YES or NO on which poll answer got a majority.

Since this market currently has a close date of April 1st, probably some traders don't expect it to last e.g. to end of year. But April isn't really long enough for much hindsight. If it were me I might do something in the middle, like resolve to poll results in six months.

Would probably lean toward polls rather than asking people to try and convince you, since the latter encourages endless back and forths and is ultimately still super subjective.

@chrisjbillington thank you for the time and thoughts you put into that helpful answer.

@chrisjbillington So I experimented and made a poll. It is unexpectedly popular.

But incentives to create polls aren't great. Someone made a market based on the poll, so they are getting any trader bonuses and all I got was bragging rights. Maybe if "create a poll" were a separate quest, or a tiny trader bonus like 1 mana.

Now some potential to spiral into people not wanting to GO on the show if they expect people are going to yell "Show us your tits" the whole time. Not HUGELY likely but also not beneficial.

I'm not going to put mana in any of these because it's unclear how you'll resolve (maybe a poll would be better for achieving what you're interested in?) but this one in particular seems poorly worded. I think it's a bit too leading to encourage unbiased responses.

@Fion Thanks -- part of why I made this market is to learn how multiple-choice markets work. You are the first person to respond to the "open to suggestions how to resolve" bit. How is a poll different from what I've done here? Why would it be better?

The @Manifold FAQ has worn out its welcome with me but if anyone points me to a specific bit in the part that isn't marked "Not Updated" I'll look. I also know I'm at a disadvantage because so much side discussion is on Discord and other places that I'd need to sleuth out.

@ClubmasterTransparent I agree that the Manifold FAQ leaves much to be desired. (I also think it's not ideal that so much discussion is on Discord. It would be great if Manifold had better built-in discussion functionality, but I expect that would be hard work to build.)

To be honest, a poll as currently implemented in Manifold would probably also not be great because I think you can only vote for one option (might still be a bit interesting to ask people what their number 1 suggestion would be). But I get the impression you want to allow people to "vote" for multiple options, perhaps with different weights. I don't think Manifold has a good way of implementing that.

Just spitballing here, but maybe the best thing is to say that you won't resolve any of these options. (Because it would be extremely hard to systematise them in such a way that we could actually bet on our beliefs as a prediction market.) In that case they would become like the various "stocks" markets that used to exist and maybe still do. I personally never liked these never-resolving markets, but lots of people did/do. But you'd have several of those in a list, and people could move them up or down, spending mana to express their opinion. I don't know whether you'd get anything useful out of it, but it seems like an interesting experiment!

(Another suggestion I'd make would be to make it so that only you can add options, and try really hard to make them unbiased. For example, the one that's currently at the bottom is 'AI "enthusiasts", and fans of Aella, Destiny and/or spanking any of these three'. I mean... what does that even mean? Whoever added that just seems to be having a go at people they don't like.)

@Fion A reply I made at the time got lost. I was the one making the mean-spirited dig. I made the whole market after spending a while trying to figure out this one

I’d add 2 options:

  • recruiting more business users, that are customers of insights produced by the Manifold community

  • Recruiting massively more contributors

@Mattfr Note that this is a free-response multi-choice market, you actually can add these answers yourself if you want to by typing in the "search or add answer box".

Not sure how to phrase this concisely as an answer Keep all the pseudonymous shitposting, but also give me a score I can tie to my real name and share on eg linkedin.

Added answer "reduce monopsony" because I am still today coming across comments about @Mira activity. I honestly can't tell if the whole Manifold economy collapses if they retire to their tent, or not. If so then the site is doomed anyway so I don't understand why the excitement.

I have 0 insight over Manifold financials, is the data available somewhere? I would be curious to learn how much they raised, what their burn rate is and the rate at which they are aquiring users + 3 month retention

@chrisjbillington you have the data to calculate a churn rate of some sort yes?

@ClubmasterTransparent A churn rate of what? I can calculate whatever given a precise definition.

@chrisjbillington A customer retention metric, whatever has biggest bang for buck you feel up to. Maybe users who are active X days v users active after X month, I think there's already a definition of "active" out there. Signups v people who earn X mana. Of bronze members what percent promote. It's not up to me, AFAIK you're a volunteer but an enthusiastic one. Should some useful metric suggest itself and you're feeling motivated to provide it, no one will beef at you for "dumb metric" or "apples to oranges," if they do I'll lower the divine hammer on them.

@ClubmasterTransparent I'll calculate something specific, but Manifold already has retention metrics on the stats page, so unless there is a clear question someone is trying to answer that warrants thinking up a different one, I wouldn't know what we were aiming for.

@Soli you looked here probably, but for the record https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/manifold-markets

Maybe some of you like living in a bubble, who am I to say? Bubbles can be pretty and nice.

EA community and LW community I sincerely apologize for having overlooked lumping you in with the spankers. Not.

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