Will I misuse any API key entrusted to my Manifold search engine/dashboard before 2026?

1kṀ505

2026

chance

ALL

I recently added the ability to place bets directly from my hybrid search engine/trading dashboard. This is much more convenient than having to load each market and bet in it individually, but it requires people to trust me with access to their account.

This market covers only intentional misuse, not accidental bugs. (Given Manifold's poor track record of security and reliability, I'm pretty confident that I can keep the total impact of bugs in my tool to well below the impact of bugs on Manifold.)

In the event of disagreement over what counts as "misuse", it'll be decided by a community vote. Trustworthyish users get 5 votes, Manifold employees get 3, anyone whose API key was affected gets 3, everyone else gets 1. (Max, not combined.)

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Using the API involves being aware of the restrictions. An interested question is whether not abiding by using limits (which may change) is a bug or misuse.

My take: if I was entrusting my API key with a service, I would consider it misuse if my key was blocked because the service took the shortcut of not having processes in place to ensure request rates etc are within API limits.

@capybara Oh, interesting. I was thinking of the rate-limits as being per-application or per-person rather than per-API key. (If it's the latter, it would seem to be legal to send keyless reads at any frequency, which I'm pretty sure they don't want.) Would be nice if they clarified though.

predictedYES

@IsaacKing Per application doesn’t make much sense, as an application with 1 million users shouldn’t have the same rate limit as some application with 5 users. It can be quite tricky to provide a super-user feature that is within rate limits. Sometimes a feature isn’t in the main app as it’s expensive to run.

Edit: I think some services work with rate limits per API key, but still have an overall rate limit per user.

predictedNO

@capybara Makes sense. I'm not going to worry too much about it. Arguably any bets placed from my page would have been placed on Manifold if my page hadn't existed, meaning I'm not actually causing them more load.

predictedYES

Just be wary of any bulk operations, and any operations that cost mana (like commenting through API). Manifold is free to place greater restrictions on API use than whatever use they get natively.