See this link for detailed description of the incidece of market manipulation:
https://manifold.markets/DesTiny/will-my-profit-be-above-1500-by-the
Such controversy will likely hit @DesTiny and @IsaacKing 's reputation.
Will @IsaacKing lose his trustworthy-ish badge before Jan 31st?
Resolve to Yes if @IsaacKing's trustworthy-ish badge was removed at any point before Jan 31st. (Even if the trustworthy-ish badge was reinstated at a later time, this market still resolves to Yes)
Resolve to No otherwise
1,000
3.00@AlexLiesman This was about portfolio value, not profit, but same idea. (Though there are fewer norms against portfolio manipulation than profit manipulation.)
@IsaacKing I think you missed the point. I, and others, think you have gone against the norms but the great thing about norms is they're frequently unwritten.
@AlexLiesman My impression is that most old-school manifolders don't think Isaac broke any social norms. It'd be interesting to see how people's perception of Isaac's actions correlates with their sign-up date. But I'm not sure we can get a large enough sample size...
@Yev how would you find out someone's sign up date? I think I started nov 2022 but honestly I don't remember...
@StevenK Unfortunately not; those are cut off when they added portfolio graphs. I joined the site in February, but my graph only goes back to June. And I think new users have their graph backfilled to the same date.
@IsaacKing Forrest's graph goes to November, so I think it's not backfilled and June ends up being a lower bound on how old the account is.
@AlexLiesman You don't have to quit the site, just avoid these kinds of markets! If we all do that it will sort itself out eventually.
Btw you can see someone's signup date via the API. I'm running a poll related to this now, it should definitely be possible to look at the results for older and younger accounts, although I don't think I'll have time to do that analysis myself. I agree with Yev that it seems likely that most old-school manifolders think it's fair game, while newer manifolders think it's scammy.
tl;dr: Market manipulation in general is considered ok if the manipulation itself isn't directly harmful. But manipulating profit fraudulently is considered harmful and against the rules. This specific case is pushing the boundaries of what is allowed and probably should not be allowed in the future, in my opinion.
Taking action to cause a market to resolve a certain way (aka market manipulation) has a long record of being considered fair game (obviously assuming that the manipulation isn't directly harmful). Examples:
/ManifoldMarkets/total-donations-for-manifold-for-go - Joel earned a massive profit by donating 5k to charity to cause the market to resolve that way.
/CarsonGale/will-anyone-propose-marriage-via-ma - Yev made a marriage proposal to earn profit on this market
/jack/will-there-be-an-easy-way-to-genera - I created the market to propose an idea for someone to implement and provide some incentive to do it, and A wrote the bot and collected profits for it.
There is definitely a spectrum of how much these questions are supposed to be about acting to change the metric vs predicting on the metric without trying to change it. As I said earlier, manipulations that are directly harmful are bad, but even non-harmful manipulations might not be in the spirit of a market if the market was trying to measure a quantity, not change the quantity.
In this specific example, the metric being manipulated was a user's profit. Manipulating profit fraudulently is considered against community norms and against the rules (the admins can and have taken action against such abuses), but what counts as fraudulent might be subject to some debate, and I think this particular case isn't clear-cut. I think it's definitely pushing the boundaries, and I wouldn't do it myself, and I'd also prefer that the community agrees not to do explicit profit manipulation like this again in the future, but I wouldn't necessarily sanction people for doing it this time.
@MartinRandall If Isaac would collude with another creator and manipulate another market for profit, would that cause you to update the probability for Isaac to manipulate his own market?
@Courtney I actually don't see much correlation there, but I understand that others see otherwise.
@MartinRandall And manifold doesn't give a good definition of what domain trustworthy.ish covers. Seems like a lot of people interpret that as trustworthyish as a market creator. But some might think the badge also speaks to whether the user is trustworthyish as a market participant or in other ways where he interacts with other people in the platform (e.g. in the comments)