I guess this is also an unofficial announcement of Leagues which will probably start on May 1st! Over the course of the month, you will be able to compete with other users to see who can earn the most mana from actions taken during the season.
At the end of the year, all people working on Manifold will take a Yes/No vote. If the majority vote Leagues as the most impactful new feature from 2023 this market will resolve Yes. A split vote resolves no.
Sneak peek of leagues here: https://manifold.markets/leagues
This month won't count towards anything, but next month everyone will be reset to 0 and put into groups of 25 similar to those currently existing.
Users have to earn mana, only counting bets and bonuses made since the start of the season, to move up the ranks. They will also be rewards and other incentives.
If you are interested in seeing our design process for this feature you can see here: https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Public-Leagues-0cc7640e6f7e40f1bf5f33c923b14f05
Related questions
🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ2,986 | |
| 2 | Ṁ2,924 | |
| 3 | Ṁ1,655 | |
| 4 | Ṁ1,367 | |
| 5 | Ṁ946 |
I mostly just think that engagement is significantly more important than most other aspects of the website, at least from the perspective of the business. I prefer multi-binary to leagues, but multi-binary is ultimately "just" a bunch of binary markets in one place. People made systems of binary markets before and it worked okay. I think quality of life improvements are important, I like quality of life improvements, multi-binary is really good, but leagues are a fundamentally new aspect of the site that has consistently led to people making markets, changed how people use the website, and made them use the website more often. I don't know if the analytics page is still up, but the "leagues" tab was something like the third most visited page on the website. People check their league scores, they care about their league scores, and I think it's pretty clear that leagues make people spend more time on the website. I don't think any of the other additions have been as consistently popular since they were added, e.g. the newsfeed. Multi-binary is very popular, but it's not clear to me that it causes more people to use the website, use the website more often, or make and bet on markets that they would not have otherwise made.
@Sailfish Multibinary Markets are a genius, unique draw that Manifold has over every other prediction market.
Leagues is cool, I have often been the person who cares most about leagues out of anyone on the site. But if it didn't exist, you could gamify Manifold in a dozen other ways.
You could have more quests, you could have more emphasized leaderboards with prizes, you could have more cosmetics, etc etc.
If Multibinary didn't exist, a huge amount of site-wide events and most viral markets would be way, way worse. Parimutual markets are a war crime, but I bet people still would have made them for speaker of the house, OpenAI CEO, Person of the Year, etc. And it would have been /terrible/.
I think good multiple choice markets are Manifold's best feature, Leagues has no chance against them.
Honestly, I think all the work that’s gone into multiple choice markets, especially individually resolving options, is the biggest impact. So many creative ways those markets are getting put to use! I would love to see a timeseries of markets created over time by type, I bet they are rapidly rising in popularity.
@MattCWilson Yes! I completely agree having multiple option on a same market makes it so much more readable and easy to share!
@MartinRandall The more I think about it, this seems like the ultimate pump/dump learning tool for market manipulators 🤔 See which type of comments are best at manipulating the market...
@MartinRandall I only meant it as an interesting side-effect. On the whole I like it and expect it to be more useful for people who are more open with their info, but I speculate quite a few traders are more the silent type who might eschew this to retain an advantage.
I still like the idea of inter-league, and league competition the most as features go.
@parhizj The cognitive dissonance of “betting yes on a comment I agree with, when the comment is describing why one might take a no position, when I’m already long in the market in question…” 🤪
Should manifold.love count as a "new feature" when we are taking a vote?
Right now I'm leaning towards it not being an option.
@SirSalty I think since it's likely
the two sites will interact with each others at one point, more than they do already
people start hearing about manifold.markets through manifold.love (I've introduced a friend to manifold.love, and for them manifold means the love version)
it should count?
@SirSalty I think it should. It has its own website, yes, but it's still the same core product. The markets that drive it all are even themselves hosted on Manifold. It's just a wrapper on top of a Manifold user account.
@epiphanie_gedeon @IsaacKing hmm this makes sense to me, now leaning slightly towards manifold love will count as an option in the vote.
Counterargument: If someone not on the admin team had created a third-party application on its own domain name that just uses a Manifold user account to get probabilities, that would not count. So the only reason to count manifold.love is because of its name or creators, neither of which seems like it should be a determining factor in whether something counts as a "feature".
@SirSalty I’d say that it doesn’t count as a “feature”, just like it would be weird to say that the site manifold.markets is a feature of Manifold Markets.
@SirSalty Distinctions here are fuzzy, but “dating” feels like a broad enough new category that I would call manifold.love a “product” in its own right more than a “feature.” It could stand on its own right as an offering, entirely, and develop a userbase that doesn’t otherwise interact with manifold.markets at all.
“Features” tend to be things that don’t qualify as standalone products in their own regard - so “direct messages” and “mana payment request links” are “new features” in that regard, imo
@MattCWilson OTOH, Steve Jobs famously once said “Dropbox is a feature, not a product”… 😄
@SirSalty I don't think it should count. Manifold.love is a new product that has its own site. In the future, we expect many sites to incorporate our markets; that doesn't make them a "feature" of the core platform.
While I agree that leagues in their current form are great for many users, for people who care more about long term markets, they're not a great incentive (as they currently exist). Also, I don't always want to compete with others for profit or leaderboards, and that shouldn't "demote" me.
I'd really like a "opt out" of leagues feature where you just toggle it at any time and your preference is saved for the next leagues season, and you'll be included/excluded from the list at the time of league group creation.
Looking at random bronze leagues. I think leagues may be negative for retention among people in those leagues, ie new user retention. It's basically sticking newcomers in ghost towns and hoping they feel a sense of community.
@MartinRandall Good idea. It is worth considering making it so that users need to place a bet to be assigned a league (auto assign the masters though). Add a comments thread/league chat for the league group too so people can share their markets related to the league.