Lots of people create polls on Manifold. They're usually one of two types, both of which have problems:

• A Keynesian beauty contest, where the option(s) with the highest market share wins. This means the incentive is to bet on the option you think will win, not the one you want to win, making the outcome unlikely to accurately reflect people's preferences.

• A poll in the comments, where people type out their vote and the creator counts them up at the end. This is a proper poll, but there's no benefit to running it on the Manifold platform; you may as well post a link to a Google form or Twitter poll. This type of poll doesn't allow people to express how much they care about a certain option, nor does it reward better predictors. It's also a hassle for the market creator to have to manually count up all the responses, and sometimes people leave ambiguous comments.

I think there's a better way to run polls that solves all of these issues and is in keeping with the ethos of prediction markets: Pay-to-vote polls.

The way they work is simple: People vote by betting in the market, but the market resolves to an option that is not part of the poll. Anyone who voted is guaranteed to lose their investment. This means that the incentive is to only vote if you actually care about the result, and to set the amount of your vote in proportion to how much you care.

There's a flaw in this system though, which is that there's still a small incentive to predict the most popular outcome; you can bet on it early and then sell your shares later once it becomes more popular. A solution is to N/A the market rather than resolving it. This also means people get their mana back and there's much less cost to participating in the market. There is still some opportunity cost of having the mana tied up for the duration of the poll, which I expect will still be enough to stop people from voting if they don't care about the outcome.

(If Manifold ends up deciding to implement native polls, they could get the best of both worlds by implementing a new type of poll market that's the same as regular markets except it's impossible to sell shares after they've been purchased and the mana spent on the poll just gets burned once it closes.)

This market is an example of the N/A version of this system. If you think this is a good system and people should adopt it for their own polls, buy YES. If you don't like it and think people shouldn't use it, buy NO. This market will resolve to N/A after it closes.

(It's not a great example, because the outcome of this poll doesn't actually determine anything, so there's little incentive to vote in it. Consider it more of a proof of concept.)