By the end of September, will Manifold fix the market-creation UI to default to the correct ending time rather than one minute before it?
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Ṁ524
resolved Oct 1
Resolved
NO

Right now if I select a new market to close "this year", the ending time is actually set to one minute before the year ends, and I have to manually fix it. Same issue for the other options "a day", "a week", etc.

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predictedNO

C'mon @ManifoldMarkets, you can come through last minute!

It's really interesting that you see that as a bug. To me it's the exact functionality I would expect. The minute after 11:59 PM, Dec 31st, 2022 is 12:00 AM, Jan 1st, 2023 - so by manually extending it that one minute you are causing the market to close just after "this year", not "this year".

For that reason, I'm pretty confident they won't change it because I suspect they also see the current functionality as intended.

One minute is a completely arbitrary amount of time. You could use the same argument to say it should close 1 second before the year ends, or 1 hour, or 1 week. There's no "last point" in an open interval.

I agree it's technically inaccurate to say that the market closes "this year" if it closes at the first point in next year. This problem stems from the poor wording chosen on the market creation page. Saying that the market ends "this year" isn't defining any particular point in time. It could pick any point from January 1st to December 31st to close the market, and would still correctly be closing the market "this year". The best solution to this would be to change the wording on the market creation page to say something more like "closes at the end of the year".

The current wording is already wrong in several other ways as well. It says "market closes in this year", which isn't even a grammatical sentence. The other options are grammatical but wrong in a different way; if you select "market closes in a day", it actually means "market closes at the end of tomorrow", which is usually much more than one day away.

I agree one minute is completely arbitrary. But it's convenient for fast market creation and matches most people's expectations, I assume. If the UI allowed choosing timestamps with resolution of seconds, then one second would work just as well. I would be surprised if this was changed.

predictedNO

@Omar Closing at the correct time would still be just as convenient for market creation, wouldn't it?

@IsaacKing as you said, there is no "last point" in an open interval, therefore there is no "correct time", so one minute before midnight is as wrong as any other option, but it's intuitive enough to be practical.

I agree with you that if this was rephrased to "market closes at the end of the year" and the market closed at exactly midnight, that would be more correct. I'm not sure if more intuitive though. I'm hypothesizing that seeing 01 / 01 / 2023 00:00 would make people pause briefly because that date is next year, what does that mean?

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