In the early days of Manifold, people made these sorts of markets about their profit numbers. This was manipulated, people got upset, and a norm was instituted against doing that. (No actual rule though, though the general "don't exploit loopholes" might cover it.)
Now people are making markets on their league standings, which are effectivly the same thing. The rule against blatant profit manipulation (i.e. create a market, bet against a friend or alt account, resolve in your favor, and manalink them their losses) has kept that from happening, but less blatant manipulation still happens all the time.
One (partial) solution to this would be to ban markets that have someone's profit as part of their resolution criteria. This isn't a perfect solution, since some people would still want to manipulate markets in order to get a better league ranking, but it would significantly lessen the profit incentive to do so. (And since manipulating profits in this manner generally costs mana, it should heavily cut down on the amount of it that occurs.)
If something kinda like a ban occurs, I'll resolve to PROB.
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3.00@redcat I wouldn't say it's a virtue; ideally prediction markets would not influence the world. It's just an unavoidable side effect of prediction.
@june Oh never mind, my bad. It's only a rule to not use alt accounts; I guess it's technically allowed if you do it with a friend. (I feel like Manifold would frown on that though.)
Pretty sure @SirSalty has stated that it's not ok to do things like generate fake profits using two accounts, regardless of whether it's an alt or another person.
@jack This is true, I'm very sure I updated the guidelines to reflect this as I very clearly remember writing out a new bullet point that said it doesn't make a difference whether they are your own alts or your friends accounts etc. Although now when looking at the guidelines it doesn't seem to say this which I'm very confused by 🤔
Either way I definitely have said multiple times in the comments on Manifold that they are equally disallowed.
@SirSalty Thanks for the clarification. Would you mind confirming whether anyone doing so would be punished for it, as opposed to it just being "not allowed" with no real penalty? (I need to resolve this market.)