So far, for the time I've been on Manifold, there have been five markets that felt like sitewide events:
Will there be another well-recognized letter/statement on AI risk by May 31, 2023?
/SimonGrayson/who-will-be-the-next-speaker-of-the-0b49bf53ad12
My perception of whether something feels like an event is mainly based on whether it receives a large number of traders and a high mana volume and is talked about by pretty much everyone active on the site for a while, to the point where it basically feels like that market is the main thing on the site for a short period of time. This is especially true if people say things like, "Oh, you weren't here for market X," to users who joined the site after the market resolved or stopped being as relevant.
I won't bet in this market, to avoid biasing my judgement.
1,000
3.00@chrisjbillington Yeah, I think at this point, the Sam Altman market counts as one. Aside from the high volume, it was talked about everywhere on the main site and Discord, especially around Thanksgiving week and did feel like the "main thing" on the site at that time. Plus, it spawned a bunch of spinoff markets.
@PlasmaBallin Plus, the >90% probability here seems to be evidence that everyone else sees it that way, too.
@chrisjbillington Manifold currently has more hourly active users than the peak during LK-99
@Odoacre it's popular because it fits a interest the site is overindexed (AI) while at the same time because there's so much uncertainty, the crowdsourcing wave of informations is fun
@MP you see a crowdsourcing wave of information, I see wild gossip and untethered rumors. 😜
@CarsonGale Hm, problem with that is that I haven't been paying attention to Manifold Dating at all. But maybe it will be too big of an event for me to ignore it.
@Joshua I think whatever effect that has is probably balanced out by the fact that it's harder for an event to be "sitewide" as the site grows. For example, I think "The Market" could only really have been what it was around the time it was made or earlier. Something like that probably wouldn't become a sitewide event today (even if the "unranked" topic wasn't a thing) because it would just be too hard for it to spread to the whole site.
Looking at the progression of the event markets, the first two are self-resolving, so they are about something on the smallest scale possible (themselves and nothing else). The next was about a real-world event, but nothing notable had happened in the real world yet to make that market into an event - it became an event due to the weirdness of the market itself. The first market event that was triggered pretty much purely by real-world factors was LK-99. And then the Speaker of the House market became one due to real-world factors as well, and in particular, real-world factors that were all over the news. It could just be a coincidence, but it seems like it takes more to make something a sitewide event now than it did in the past. Before, someone could make a self-resolving market for fun and have it blow up across the site - now, it takes something major happening in the real world.