Recently I lost out on a $40,000 deal for Magic cards due to behavior by someone else that I consider to be dishonorable. I was considering writing up a post about it to share with that community to try to notify them of my perception of how bad actors tend to abuse social norms to get their way.
@TobiasVyseri is concerned that it's mostly going to come off as "whiny", and just look like me complaining about losing out. I agree this is a likely outcome. A big part of the motivation certainly is me feeling upset about what happened and not wanting to be silent about it and just let the other person "win".
The demographic of people it's aimed towards is extremely different from that of Manifold; these are people who have next to no interest in psychology, philosophy, or economics and are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars and many years of their life on collecting rare trading cards.
The text of the prospective post is here.
This market resolves N/A if I decide not to post it. Feel free to try to manipulate this market to NO by making helpful suggestions. (Or manipulate it to YES by making bad suggestions, I guess.)
I won't bet.
1,000
3.00One person seemed to have lowered their opinion of me due to the post, and it's a person whose opinion I value, so that did give me some pause. However I don't think that was enough to outweigh the positive value of the post. (I also think I only found out about that after a week had already passed.)
Alright, the post has been made, hopefully edited to be more constructive and less whiny.
This market will resolve based on how I feel about it on January 12th. I won't place any bets in this market from here on out.
@IsaacKing Seems to be going ok so far. Looking like I'm probably not going to regret it unless something unexpected occurs.
Minor typo in the second to last paragraph - “my” instead of “me”.
I agree with the other comments. The last paragraph felt off to me in a post which seemed clearly to be advocating for more consistency in norms.
The only issue with advocating with consistency in norms is which norms to choose. But hopefully you guys can reach a consensus and create a fairer environment.
Perhaps if you tweaked the post to be more about pushing for better defined norms (e.g. pushing the community to pick and stick with one of the two common options you mention about whether offers should be honored), it would be less likely to come off as whiny / complaining about you losing out specifically. I think giving your personal story as a concrete example can be valuable, but the framing around it could impact the reception a lot.
I don't know if that's the goal that you want to write towards in this post, but if it is I think it could work. You already have a few paragraphs that speak towards tackling the shifty norms, but you could make that more explicit and give some proposals for how the community could operate better, and probably replace your last paragraph since I don't think it aids your argument.
As an outsider, I found the post insightful and interesting, and it's sad to hear that happened to you, but community insiders might react more negatively.
To the exent that you're looking for social sanction, and to the extent that my opinion matters, the prospective post doesn't seem difficult to understand or jargon-laden. It's well-written and makes some interesting points about the dynamics of the community. Only the last paragraph seems at all "whiny", like it's expressing an internal emotional state rather than making a logical argument.
I feel like the post as it stands is very unlikely to change things. It sounds like you are an admin of this group, why not push for clearer, explicit rules about what the expected behavior for buying/selling/haggling should be like ?
If you had a concrete proposal then a useful discussion could take place.
@Odoacre I think that would be a good idea. I've been relatively unengaged with the group lately, and mostly it's just a lack of desire to expect significant effort on it.