We are already planning to add market tiers for 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M markets. Will we add 100 mana as a tier? (Or any amount less than 1k?)
I think this could unlock a huge amount of activity, similar to Manifold before the cash prizes pivot. Users could create lots of fun and niche markets. We'd get more trades, comments, and markets shared. I've heard from several creators that the high market creation cost is meaningfully dampening how many questions they create.
One downside is traders would have to adapt to markets with low liquidity. We'd probably change the bet buttons to default to 1/10th their current amounts for these markets.
Another downside could be lower-quality markets. Is it good to host these on our site?
Lastly, from a business perspective, it could be that people would create more 100 mana markets instead of 1k mana markets, and thus buy less mana, decreasing our revenue.
Personally, I think the greater content and activity that results from this change would increase revenue in the long run, but I'm not sure.
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@JamesGrugett I like this idea! Might be tricky to get the execution right, you don’t want to spam the feed with markets without enough liquidity, but there are low stakes/fun things with many options that don’t really make sense at the higher tiers (even if for most of my markets atm, I want meaningful liquidity). Cool idea to try, now it’s just a question of the algorithm
@Ziddletwix Any chance there could/would be a Play option for numeric? Even if it's 1k instead of 100k.
Obviously can only speak for me but 10k is half my liquid mana which feels prohibitive.
Really appreciate the lower cost play option for the other formats. Granted it's the offseason but the NFL category went almost completely barren once it was 1k per question.
@JamesGrugett Any thoughts on the new Play tier triggering the weekly M500 create question quest essentially incentivizing us to make Play tier over Basic tier?
@JamesGrugett Interesting. Allthough that means I just lost my incetive to make Basic 1K markets; they're too risky compared to Play tier.
@JamesGrugett I forgot to factor in the bonuses, but as long as you don't make it lower than that, so we thus get 1 play market free per week, rather than being a loss without vast trader numbers like before this, then I'm very happy :)
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Why only do it in factors of 10 rather than a more flexible system?
Relevant market: https://manifold.markets/Fion/will-manifold-let-market-creators-s?r=Rmlvbg
@JamesGrugett The most important part for me is that the questions people actually want the answers to (more expensive ones) get:
- user feed priority
- search result priority
- mod attention/guidance
- active comment sections
That means some combination of nerfing cheap ones and giving lots and lots of bonuses to expensive ones.
The 'crisis of too many stupid markets' over the last few months before the pivot was never an issue of too many markets, but just an issue of surfacing markets people were not actually interested in, too highly.
@JamesGrugett As an occasional question creator, there's really no difference between M100 questions before the pivot and M1000 questions now. It costs the same amount as before, measured in daily bonuses or weekly quests.
In other words, this is the least consequential thing downstream of the massive inflation event we went through. Lots fewer rich users around when you tax away 90% of wealth. I'm surprised that you're surprised this decision had obvious consequences. Did you actually think that nothing would change other than you guys getting to eliminate a huge amount of outstanding debt for free?
Anyways, trying to be productive, it does make sense to me that short fuse questions should be cheaper, with the corresponding expectation of less liquidity, less detailed resolution criteria, etc. I would like to be able to browse long-term, serious questions as a separate category from short-term reactions to current events. Both these modalities have value, but right now they're sort of jumbled together in the feed. ETA: and the latter category is under threat if their creation is mana-negative for their creators.
@JamesGrugett I think the M1000 fee is good. My feeling is that the new economy has improved general market quality; there is now an incentive to create more interesting markets. If anything, I'd rather you up the price even more, than lowering it.
@JamesGrugett I would really like this. My markets currently have too much liquidity and end up mispriced.
I think this is especially needed for lower stakes multi choice markets during the transition to post-pivot Manifold. 250 is a lot per option for something silly, and it's good to have silly markets.
@Joshua Could have just left Old Mana as the play-money-only ecosystem and bolted on the Prize Points ecosystem with Spice and Rice (New Mana) or whatever.
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The social media feed is an attention-grabbing game. Like it or not, Manifold has the same dynamic. More silly markets mean less attention for more serious markets. This is how products like Facebook and LinkedIn became worse; the content of their feeds deteriorated. While silly might be fun for the super-active people on Manifold, I'd wager it's not attractive for less active users who are less involved in the Manifold social scene, and it deteriorates Manifold's market proposition to the general public
are you suggesting that the presence of any silly markets has made this site worse? the comment was never for "more" than the status quo, but rather, making it economically accessible to have "silly" markets (which don't mean useless or entirely unserious ones - I'd personally say prop bets on Manifest or other events would count as silly, so would having a market about Good/Bad Tweets, and countless other fun but not entirely predictive markets) at all. not to increase the proportion of these markets, just pointing out that having fun markets makes the site fun - and it's been that way for some time. now, it's much more expensive to add options to fun MC markets, let alone create them.
personally I've had a lot of fun with Bingo markets when I travel, and a silly market I made about whether someone would send me a recipe for Soup spurred lots of fun soup related markets for a momen in time and showed the value of the community here. I'd like to still be able to do these sorts of things. I respect you don't feel the same way and I get what you're saying about new/established users (I don't entirely disagree overall), but I've found things like travel bingo to be a much better way to explain the site to a lot of people who wouldn't join for "AGI when?" but would for my travel market, then stick around to see what else is here, including AI predictions.
tbf there are also plenty of low value markets I'd be fine without having here so even that is subjective lol
@shankypanky Seconding that. The markets are just the landscape, the comment section is what can differentiate Manifold from competitors. If [Reddit? Whatever other site?] kept showing you things you were not interested in, you might also leave, but many of these other sites figured out how to foster sub-communities. Manifold might still be too small to have a lot of sub-communities, but it can at least start setting down that path instead of the current direction which seems destined to kill the comment section activity.
as a noted overactive commenter, the community is the spirit of the place for me - it's absolutely the differentiator. I've spent some time on Polymarket recently (and in their Discord) and I see people betting on practical markets with good questions, but the interaction is just people dumping low value, feral comments for the sake of it.
I like that the silly or interpretable markets around here mean there's a reason to comment and connect with other people.
I originally joined when I friend made a market based on some side comments at a book club chat. I was interested but not particularly drawn to predicting outcomes of general things until I got here and had some context (I'm a practical learner, I guess). but to have silly/personal goals market as my entry meant I had a fun thing I was somehow invested in and then I started to look around. and I've participated in practical markets but I've also gotten to see what people think of books or movies, I've given and received nice travel recommendations, I've cheered people on with their personal goals - hell, I got to bet recently that a guy's girlfriend would say yes when he proposed.
I respect that lots of people come and stay for purely practical reasons. but I'm sad that some of my favourite ongoing markets have gotten so quiet or that people aren't feeling as drawn to create more of them (not to mention that market creation in general feels so slow).
@shankypanky To be honest, I probably made the assumption that silly = bad. I was picturing the "personal goals of random person" and straight up percentage gambling like you find in an online casino. Admittedly there are better ones. What words will Trump use to describe Biden. Personally I'd want a pricing regime that makes the captivating ones stay, and the self-indulgant humble braggy or casino ones to decrease. Fun helps, community building helps, and soup recipe related is good as long as they are captivating enough that it warrants the creatuon fee. Making markets cheap, sounds like unpivoting backtracking to me. Both serious and "silly" markets can be engaging.
To sum it up, I'm for incentives that require creators to make more engaging markets, but I think making a silly market price will bring with it a lot of spam and ugh.
Doing something about answers in MC markets seems like a no-brainer, though.