Re-resolving this to N/A. The question and description clearly lead to a YES resolution, but the creator changed the criteria in a comment so that it resolves NO.

The market creator's resolution-changing comment was not made in good faith:

• it was intended to trick traders

• it was not a clarification. A clarification should attempt to resolve ambiguity (as understood by the creator), but the comment just changed the question to something else

I understand that this is a protest market against the way the Google chat bot market was resolved, which also had comments that altered the resolution criteria. But the above two points do set this market apart from that one. (Incidentally, I think the creator of the Google chat bot market has done a poor job in their role making the resolution criteria clear and has mislead many, but I don't think doing a poor job is sufficient for intervention.)

Our community guidelines hedge a bit by saying Manifold "typically" won't overturn a creator's resolution. This is now one of those cases where will overturn it in favor of N/A. We'll continue to update the guidelines, informed by real cases we encounter such as this one!

@JamesGrugett Why don’t you resolve the Google chat bot market as N/A then?

@JamesGrugett There was no ambiguity in the initial description of the Google chat bot market, and the initial clarification comments made by the market creator pointed at the criteria according to which the market should’ve been resolved to Yes.

@ms How about people who placed bets before the clarification comments though?

But I’d also agree that if you go by the clarifications it’s supposed to be resolved YES anyway.

@esusatyo I mean both the initial title/description and the initial clarification comments of the Google chat bot market pointed at the interpretation/criteria according to which it should’ve been resolved to Yes. The issue there is with the people who placed bets long after- when the title and description were changed and the initial clarification comments forgotten

@ms Will the Google Chatbot (June) market be re-resolved to N/A?

@JamesGrugett The market creators comment was pretty clearly not made to trick traders, it was made to test what you would do. Which makes your actions inconsistent. You haven’t done this for other similar markets.

@ShadowyZephyr Please send me other markets where this happened!

@esusatyo I agree the Google chat bot market is pretty similar, but the original question said "by the end of June", which I think was ambiguous. The criteria should also rely on the how the creator understands it. It may have been even more ambiguous to the creator if English was not their first language.

@ms The first comment I saw from Rai about the timing did clarify at the end of June. That does seems like a clarification to me. And there was no intent to trick traders.

@JamesGrugett I was mainly referring to the Google chatbot market. The resolution criteria were changed, because in the beginning it was made to seem as if the promotion of Bard would count, and then the creator changed the resolution criteria in a comment that overrode their previous comment, which is even more confusing.

I'm sure there are other examples though. I remember some other re-resolution decisions I thought were odd and I'm sure there were more before I joined Manifold.

@JamesGrugett how to you make a manifold market trading bot?

@JamesGrugett

If the market creator forgot what they meant when they’ve created the market, it shouldn’t give them a right to hard-fork the market into being about a completely different question. The market title and description were clear in what they meant. The initial comments were pointing at the same understanding.

If you can re-resolve markets to N/A, I don’t see why you haven’t done that for the google chatbot market.

I’d be ok with having to trust market creators with admins having no power over market resolution. I’d be ok with admins enforcing correct market resolutions. I’m not ok with admins intervening based on interpreting identical actions of market creators as “intentional” or “unintentional”, even when the effect on the market participants is the same. This inconsistency discourages me from trading on Manifold

@ms Stop trying to ruin my payday 😩😭

@ms That comment by Rai didn't clarify the ambiguity about what "by the end of June" meant. (He may still have been thinking, yes if at the end of June.)

@JamesGrugett “by end of June” is obviously not “at end of June.” Even if Rai made a mistake in their English, it’s not fair to punish traders for interpreting it in the most logical way.

@JamesGrugett this initial comment seems to be a reasonable stance 👍

@ShadowyZephyr Are you sure? https://manifold.markets/Alice/will-threads-have-more-daily-active

Will Threads have more daily active users than Twitter by the end of 2024?

34% chance.

@JamesGrugett I would interpret this as only one day needing to have more users. The fact that there’s no clarification means it should resolve N/A if they have more users for one day but not at end of 2024.

In rai’s case, it said by end of June, and there was no clarification about if it really meant by or at (until mana was already lost), therefore, market should resolve N/A.

@ShadowyZephyr @JamesGrugett I would interpret it as the same, and so does GPT-4.

@Feanor @ShadowyZephyr I agree with both of you that one interpretation makes more sense than the other.

But you must understand that Manifold is not trying to adjudicate every ambiguity to ensure the best experience for traders. We instead give creators that role (it wouldn't be feasible anyway with tens of thousands of markets or hopefully millions).

There's a higher bar for us to step in — when deliberate trickery is involved. I think that higher bar was crossed in this market.

Thanks for the discussion. I think it's healthy to figure out where our disagreement is.

@JamesGrugett I don’t think deliberate trickery was involved in this market, which seems to be the source of the disagreement. The clarifying comment was at the top and I don’t think anyone missed it.

I’m not sure only re-resolving trick markets and leaving ambiguous markets/ markets with mistakes in their criteria is a good policy either.

@JamesGrugett deliberate trickery was involved in the sum of shares Catnee/Jonny Big Boy markets.

I agree that Manifold shouldn't have markets where the purpose of the market is to trick traders.

@ShadowyZephyr It was bad faith, full stop.

Apparently comments override title/description. I’d easily recover my google chatbot mana now if I were depraved enough to exploit this.

@ElmerFudd A lot of the time it’s more about the amount of controversy re-resolution would cause relative to the regular resolution and not about comments vs description