List of ones I'm aware of:
If it's an actual ragequit, they must follow through and not continue using the site significantly afterwards. (It's ok if they change their mind due to new developments, as long as it was originally credible as described below.)
It it's a threatened ragequit, it must seem credible. (Not a known troll, recently placed a large bet, doesn't have a YES position in this market, etc.) If they later change their mind that's fine, it still counts.
Simply quitting Manifold is not sufficient. It must be a "ragequit"; a hasty emotional decision made out of anger at themselves for having just done something stupid that cost them a lot of mana.
I'll include past instances as well, so please let me know about any you may have seen before.
By the way, if you're a ragequitter finding this market, please know that I'm not making fun of you, but rather trying to collect examples of why Manifold's current dynamics are potentially harmful and care must be taken. See also:
1,000
3.00@CodeandSolder Sorry to see you go! What sort of benefits did we provide to you and what more benefits do you think we could provide if we could build whatever you wanted (in the context of manifold)?
@ian I complained a few times about MM being really bad as a tool for learning to be a better predictor, from calibration being unusable if you ever do something other than straight predictions to very little liquidity in most predictive markets meaning that moving the probability by half is a 20-50 USD cent bet.
On the other hand non-predictive markets like the 100k one that was the last event in this are very profitable encouraging the "number go high" part of my brain to completely waste time on them.
Also, not my problem but probably a problem, the team for some reason wants to waste time on stuff like unlisting each new "will I see a lion" market a known scammer makes and arguing if every new exploit is really against the rules in the name of wild west style freedom instead of focusing on what the site wants to be and pruning all else
I'd assume there are more users who did something like that but didn't announce it, you should be able to pull some stats on large gambling/scam-adjacent losses followed by usage discontinuation
And, as I suggested before, I'd hire 2-3 in-house market creators to create guaranteed safe high quality predictive market and subsidize them heavily, even instead of daily bonus. You could likely get somebody with a PhD in a related field in a lower cost country like Poland to do it full time for <$15k/yr
@ian also, as many people pointed out, Manifold seems to have a fundamental missions statement problem, apparently wanting to be something that can be summed up as a "resolving market with bets provider", which encompasses drastically different use cases and customers that get negative value from being on the same platform, all with a tiny (though quite talented) team
If it was up to me I'd narrow the scope, at least of the default user experience to predictive markets, disallow all other sorts of nonsense there, make a general rule of "no funny business or else" and ban everybody who I estimate to be net harmful to that mission with relatively little warning
I don't have that much related experience but from what I know users are really easy to lose and the retention rate and growth stagnation seem to confirm there is an issue there
@ian like, there is a reason AlphaBay isn't trading in yahts and your local yaht vendor in industrial amounts of hard drugs (okay, I don't have evidence he isn't that I think about it, but you get the point), market specialization is not only good but necessary
you could also, for example, make degen.markets for the other stuff if you think it deserves to exist somewhere /hj
well, not that exact one as I just bought it but a simmilar one
@ian also the idea of anybody making a market on anything makes a lot more sense with a small community, if it's the same 100 people you have some social relation with or at least know by name "will I go on a date with a cute guy this year" has some theoretical value. For a new user who doesn't care of doesn't and must likely updates them negatively about the site, even disregarding resolution risk
Things that rely on users knowing (at least of) each other scale really poorly and, again, statistics reflect this
Seems like there are at least a couple examples in this thread: https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-the-whales-win-this-market#uMuWoSyEAR0FgN60ELPk
@Mira Oh, hmm, good question. You didn't make any public posts to that effect, you just disappeared.
What was your reason for doing so? Were you upset at yourself for losing that much mana?
@IsaacKing No, I got bored of Manifold, since I'd have to log in every day to spend my loans on spam markets to optimize for ROI, so I decided to dump it in a whalebait to make it fun and then quit.
Then I came back to bet big on GPT-4 markets, since people seem to be really bad at filtering through hype. Made almost half of it back already, and as soon as there's official announcements I expect to make the other half back.
Galen was running a donation campaign, and his profile's in good humor("Trying to dig out from minus 659,563 points."). So probably neither of us should count, since they were intentional losses.
@Mira And of course people dig through my profile and look for the markets I have the largest positions in. But they don't know about my offsetting hedge positions and pseudonymous alt accounts, the mechanics and interactions of which are beyond their capabilities to track.
@IsaacKing Yeah, I was going to post that one. I clicked on their profile, and it says the account was deleted, so I definitely think it counts.