Manifold is mulling a new product, perhaps hosted at manifold.love, which takes aim at the dating market.

The site would feature one prediction market per dating profile that asks: "Who will I date for 6 months?"

In a first, we would leverage crowdsourced betting to surface the top matches for each person, based on real predictions of how long their relationship would last.

Read my full writeup here! Excerpts are below.

Super interested in what the Manifold community thinks about this proposal. Let's iterate on the design to make it as strong as possible.

At Manifest, Robin Hanson urged us to find a high-value use case for prediction markets. He suggested markets on which candidate to hire. But markets on who should date might be even higher value (and more fun)!

Thesis

Matching people into relationships is a killer use case for prediction markets because:

1. It is fun for traders, which means people will be motivated to bet and thus create accurate forecasts

2. Accurate forecasts of relationships are super valuable

Betting on love is fun

• Aella’s and Shelvacu’s markets got a giant amount of traction (the biggest two at Manifest!)

• Proof School’s original popular markets were betting on relationships continuing

• Austin’s OG markets on getting a girlfriend and marrying Rachel were some of the site’s most popular

People can’t look away. They even will bet on people’s relationships when they don’t know them personally. It’s too fun.

Prediction markets are an ideal solution to matchmaking

Prediction markets allow crowdsourced betting on who should date who with feedback from actual outcomes. Those bets will produce accurate forecasts, going on Manifold’s strong track record.

Matchmaking is a forecasting problem, so let’s use the most powerful forecasting tool!

How it might work

• Users opt-in to create dating profiles

• One main prediction market per person:

  “Who will I date for 6 months?”

  • Free response market constrained to dating profiles on Manifold.

  • Resolves to next such person you date for 6 months

  • Subsidized liquidity (M2000?)

  • Created when you first fill out your profile.

• Custom UI for browsing and betting on dating profiles

  • A table view with one row per person, standard info in columns, link to full profile (or opens in sidebar on desktop)

  • Select two people and bet on their relationship success

  • For each person, show the market’s top three matches (and let you bet on them directly from the table view)

  • Filtering, sorting, pinning potential matches via checkbox, leaving notes

Principles

• Matchmaking is betting, and everyone can play matchmaker

• Empower matchmakers

  • Give them the UI and tools to be effective

  • Public dating profiles with high information drive better crowdsourced decisions

• Kickstart a flourishing ecosystem of fun secondary dating markets

  • The hope is that by doing the main matchmaking through markets, people will be more willing to create lots and lots of secondary markets on aspects of their dating lives. And they will be hilarious and super engaging

  • E.g. Will we kiss tonight? Where will we go for our date? Will our relationship last two weeks? Will he propose this year? How many children will we have by 2030?

• Privacy where possible (Not 100% on this yet)

  • Dating profiles won’t by default be linkable and shareable. You can only find them in the table with everyone else

    • Allows people to feel freer to include more about themselves

  • Dating profiles will not by default be linked to your Manifold account. Can use a pseudonym

Encourage evolving community sophistication at matchmaking

• Matchmakers will learn what questions to ask daters (comment section on dating profile)

• Daters will fill in more information over time based on what is helpful

• With DM’s (private 1:1 chat), traders can ask about character flaws too sensitive to broadcast publicly
  

Resolution criteria

To resolve YES, manifold.love needs 1000 daily active users on average over 7 days.

An active user must perform at least one of the following:
- Profile create and edits
- Bets (from people without profiles too, but has to be on manfold.love domain)
- Comments / endorsements
- Messages

I reserve the right to modify this / add more actions that I feel are primary.