Recently there's been some complaints about all the "fun" markets, the Spindle memes, etc. (e.g. here.)
In my subjective opinion, will there have been a significant culture shift away from this aspect of Manifold by the end of 2023?
(If the culture shifts away and then back, this resolves YES once it first shifts away. But it has to be sustained; a few days with no silly markets is not enough.)
This is about absolute silliness, not relative silliness. If we start getting 100x more markets on serious things like election results, scientific advances, etc. but still have the same number of silly markets, and there's still a group of dedicated traders participating in them, this resolves NO.
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The thing is, all the 'silly' markets about betting on the bets of other participants, are just more fun and exciting than betting on actual real life things. When you bet on a real life thing, it happens or it doesn't, and then you win or lose. But when you bet on the self resolving markets, you get to enter a competitive team battle with people being emotionally invested in the outcome, and people switching sides.
@AlexRockwell Yep, those feel like strategy games, and you gotta think about how to enter, when to enter, when to exit, etc etc. It's fun.
@AlexRockwell Honestly I really disagree. Predicting real world events feels like it takes research and skill, while the 'fun' markets don't feel nearly as rewarding to me, and there is often some last minute change or ambiguity.
@jonsimon Note that this is about absolute silliness, not relative silliness. If we start getting 100x more markets on serious things like election results, scientific advances, etc. but still have the same number of silly markets that I can participate in, this resolves NO.
@IsaacKing You would assume manifold's number of users would increase, but if it becomes at least as silly in absolute terms just because of that it leads to a more trivial question. To control for it just means that you take the number of silly markets and divide by number of active users.
@IsaacKing You can still look at the ratio (serious/silly) after having corrected for number of active users.
@IsaacKing So (silly/population)/(serious/population) = (silly/serious) is the relative silliness and silly/population is the absolute silliness.
@levifinkelstein I don't see why I should care about number of traders any more than number of markets. They're both measures of the overall popularity of Manifold as a platform, which I'm ignoring. The point of the question is whether this community will still exist, not how big a fraction of Manifold's ecosystem it will be.
@IsaacKing I just found that to be the natural interpretation of the question, since we can assume Manifold will grow in size, it becomes trivially NO, since there will definitely be more silly markets as the number of users grow.
@jonsimon depends on which mainstream. some new users we tested find the fun markets more approachable than the factual markets. I think a lot of it comes down to whether we surface markets that interest them and which they have an opinion on.
ideally, multiple different kinds of communities with slightly different norms can coexist on manifold.
let a thousand tended gardens bloom.