Imagine:
You are a new user.
You see this
You are asked the following questions:
What happened here?
Did someone buy something?
What did they buy?
How much did they spend and how much of the thing did they get?
What does "cancelled" mean?
I claim that <20% of highly intelligent people who have voluntarily registered on manifold and are learning about it would be able to answer the questions correctly without help or further research.
This market: YES if this UI is redone at least attempting to solve the problem
Example of something understandable (based on my current understanding of the UI):
"Acceleration [bot]'s limit order of 100M NO@47% was partially executed. They bought 39M worth of their 100M order."
This version explains what actually happened (who bought what). Even here, note that we also don't know who sold it to them which is strange. Or was it the AMM adjusting?
1,000People are also trading
I haven't said this in a while, but the key issue is the choice of the site to not clearly distinguish MANA (cash) from SHARES of a market.
I think SHARES should be denoted like "100N" with N red, or "40Y" with Y green. And MANA cash should be like 20M.
Right now any UI which displays both of them is super confusing since the site used "100M of Y" to represent 100 shares of Y, which does NOT cost 100M.
Proof: imagine a smart new user who sees this:
We are going to ask this user: did Iason spend 50 MANA to get SOME YES shares, or did he get 50 YES shares with an unknown amount of mana?
How confident are you that you can answer this?
To me, I'd rather be like 90%+ confident. But here I would be maybe 30% that a new user could understand this. This is a problem. If we wrote: "Iason bought 50Y for 25Mana, moving the price from 51%Y to 54%Y" there would be no doubt.
This ambiguity is the key issue since the special "M" character sometimes means mana and sometimes means shares.
Imagine going to your brokerage and seeing a history item "you bought 1000$ of QQQ". Even an instant of doubt about whether you have 1000 SHARES or 1000 usd$ worth is intolerable. Yet on manifold every UI fights to make this clear under the artificial restriction that we aren't allowed to use "shares" to tell a user what they actually have and distinguish it from cash.
@PaulHan maybe the user/bot was GOING to order, but then something cancelled it! The confusing thing is that human's limit orders never get marked cancelled when they are executed.
it’s hard to get it right, but the current UI is incredibly opaque.
Because Acc hasn’t been active, I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but historically IIRC because Acc reacted nearly instantly, it was possible for the trade it reacted to to be displayed AFTER Acc’s trade. Which is insanely confusing hr for a new user, it feels like the site is broken. (AFAIK that is only an issue for Acc, whereas the limit order UI is more general)
@capablemonkey I agree, it took me some experience with setting up some limit orders of my own (and falling prey to Acceleration's responses a few times) to understand the syntax of these line items.