Aug 27, 9:39am: Will there be drama caused by Manifold employee's ability to create free M$ by the end of 2025? → Will there be drama caused by Manifold employees' ability to create free M$ by the end of 2025?
This could be an employee directly abusing the function by giving themselves or a friend large quantities of M$, or it could be something less nefarious like a bunch of less active users feeling that it's unfair others are getting handouts.
Resolves based only on drama I find out about; I have no way to know about internal drama in the Manifold team or some other subcommunity if no one tells me about it.
Bugs don't count.
Related questions
Here's another link to discussion of what people were upset about: https://manifold.markets/JamesGrugett/which-of-these-would-you-want-back
@IsaacKing It's converted into free mana when user A goes very negative and user B goes very positive after the market resolves and the loans are paid back. Which is why the loan system was turned off during the real-money pivot. And also why Ian made an emergency fine of Catnee - https://discordapp.com/channels/915138780216823849/1158528733444055071/1188163136646299750 - which was in itself a cause of drama.
@IsaacKing My summary of that situation's wider context, from the time:
I'm just now following the chain reaction back further. So Ian pissed off traders on daily stock markets, which causes Teddy to rage quit, which misresolves AI doom markets, which causes Catnee to be active, to which causes Ian to piss off AI doom traders, which causes Mira to rage quit.
Which is basically all drama caused by handing out lots of free mana with a "hope we don't get too much inflation" mindset and then trying to course correct on an ad-hoc basis.
@MartinRandall Just want to point out that Mira did not rage quit. She was preparing her exit for a long time. (But the Catnee shenanigans did provide motivation to pull the trigger, so I don't disagree with the essence of your post)
@MartinRandall Hmm, but was that caused by the free mana? Or was it caused by their ham-fisted attempt to minimize the free mana?
@IsaacKing Everything has multiple causes and multiple effects. There's a clear casual chain from poorly controlled mana printing to drama, which several people predicted in advance. The specifics of how it played out could have gone differently.
BTE's banning was caused by this, they gave BTE the ability to create free mana (there was special code that allowed him to create markets for free, this was done by manifold employees). He would create markets for free, then he would NA those markets and get mana back from thin air.
Not sure if you want to all it drama, but IMHO it was at least somewhat dramatic.
@Odoacre The info is in this public discord thread (add yourself to the power user role to view)
IIUC, they gave BTE a special case ability to go negative to create markets (so like a loan). Then, they had a bug that meant that instead of going negative his balance instead stayed the same. BTE abused this to print himself a bunch of mana, and was banned for that.
If an employee had done what BTE did, I would totally agree it counts. I also think granting the special case to BTE seems not ideal and I think there could have been better options, but it's a little ways removed from the employees creating free mana themselves. It could potentially fall into the category similar to "a bunch of less active users feeling that it's unfair others are getting handouts." except that the drama wasn't over BTE getting the free loans to create markets with negative balance, the drama was that BTE exploited the bug that came later to print himself a bunch of mana, which is just obviously wrong but is something BTE did taking advantage of a combination of something the employees did and a bug.
@jack
seems like these things happened
1) BTE was allowed to create markets on credit (presumably letting him go to negative balance)
2) A bug was later introduced that made the market creatiion free in the specific case the creator was BTE and he did not have enough mana to pay for the creation, but still would print mana for the initial market subsidy. The subsidy would be returned to the market creator on resolution or NA, effectively creating an infinite money glitch.
3) BTE abused this to create, duplicat, cancel and delete a bunch of expensive MC markets and made ~50K mana out of it.
4) Manifold banned BTE
I agree that steps 2 and 3 were unintentional on manifold's part. Still I think you can argue that they are at least partially responsible, both for introducing the bug, and for fostering a climate where everything goes and it's ok to exploit, double cross, insider trade etc especially if you happen to be one of their buddies.
The drama that resulted was not much about BTE exploiting the bug (everyone agreed this was unfortunate) it was about BTE being banned for it and in general the change of established norms around mana being tightened retroactively in preparation for the pivot. Previously exploits like this had been subject to fines or just forgiven with a slap on the wrist.
It was also about BTE being granted special privileges directly in the code in the first place, that was pretty lame.
The whole thing was just bizzarre.
To put this in context at the time this was happening it was all overshadowed by the banning of FUH, which created more drama and was related to alt manipulation not free mana. So maybe BTE's banning was a sideshow or a minor drama, but I think it should count.
I don't think BTE was a case of tightening norms. I'm pretty sure exploiting manifold to print yourself a bunch of mana, with the intent of getting away with that mana (as opposed to with the intent of reporting a bug to manifold and returning the mana), has always been viewed as obviously wrong and ban-worthy. BTE did something obviously ban-worthy, and was banned right away for it. That's why it wasn't really dramatic imo.
@jack That Discord thread doesn't explain the reason for the ban, just the bug. In fact at the time of that thread it looks like Manifold had no hard feelings towards BTE, with Sinclair saying "I don't really blame him, this was on us".
Some potential drama arose in discord. The consensus seemed to be that it should not count for this market as the mana was not "free".
https://discord.com/channels/915138780216823849/943628693958459462/1022930308762439840