@James has proposed a new product for Manifold.Love. The goal is to add back in the prediction market feature, but incentivize it enough to make it really work -- simple, with lots of liquidity, and forecast something clear and actionable.

My understanding of the current product proposal is as follows:

1. Creating one costs $100/10k mana

2. The question will be something like "Who will I go on 3 dates with?" and resolves to the first such person. (The other answers resolve NO or N/A — the former if you've both messaged each other.) You and the candidates won't be able to bet in the market. Market lasts for 6 months.

3. Will use a clever trick to copy liquidity between answers, so it won't cost anything to auto-add all the people you have liked, or been shipped with, or have liked you. The top candidates appear on your profile in a carousel with their probability. Or, you can go to the /markets page and browse other people that have created markets and their top matches (remember, if you ship them with someone, it will add them as an answer! Then you can bet on them.)

4. Refund for users offered if it doesn't work.

Resolution criteria will be subjective: do I believe, overall, that this was a good idea to launch as a product at the end of the year? Note that I am relatively skeptical to fail-fast narratives of "we learned a lot, but decided not to do anything that looks similar again" as counting in favor of "good idea".

Good idea-world looks like, "Dave, when asked, says he thinks James was right in their debate on Discord about it; Dave and most others who said it was a bad idea now openly admit they were wrong."

(Note: James tweaking the price to $99 but otherwise thinking the product is good doesn't count as bad idea)

(Note: Posted with explicit permission from James)