Exited this market, but... I think the major issue with this market is less the ambiguity in the description, but your (@MP)'s lack of consistency and clarity in responses.

I think either (1) resolving on April ~7th or shortly after when links to Substack were -- by most definitions -- prohibited or (2) clarifying exactly what your resolution criteria would be after questions were raised or events happened -- would've been great. Instead market participants are in a limbo trying to guess your intent from vague statements...which is not really the point of prediction markets, I think! 😅

e.g.
- You said "I plan to resolve this market in a fair way, relying in mainstream media outlets." -- but then mainstream media outlets reported indicating a YES resolution, but you didn't resolve.
- In response to "What happens if Twitter prohibits Substack links, then un-prohibits them?" you said you'd resolve YES, but you didn't resolve YES when this happened, or clarify that you thought this wasn't a "prohibition".
- You liked the comment "If you can still post links but tweets with links can't be liked or retweeted. That's a NO, right?" -- which implies that this market should be resolved NO later if nothing happens, but also didn't actually comment on this. You also liked other comments indicating an immediate YES resolution.
- You did a poll on Twitter with the intent of helping decide how to resolve the market, got 85% to support YES, but didn't resolve.

I'd recommend N/A and being more precise and prescriptive in the future! ❤️

Links are no longer suppressed anymore: https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitter-disables-retweets-likes-on-posts-with-substack-links

NYT: https://archive.fo/yUa6N#selection-273.0-273.58

Twitter Takes Aim at Posts That Link to Its Rival Substack

Elon Musk’s company made the norm-shattering move two days after the publishing start-up Substack unveiled a Twitter-like service.

SAN FRANCISCO — On Wednesday, the newsletter service Substack announced that it had built a Twitter competitor. On Thursday, Twitter prevented Substack writers from sharing tweets in their newsletters. And on Friday, Twitter took steps to block Substack newsletters from circulating on the platform. (...)

Substack’s founders, Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement that they were “disappointed” by Twitter’s decision to stifle engagement with any tweets that featured a Substack link. (...)

The changes by Twitter on Friday meant that Twitter users could still share links to Substack newsletters, but blocked other users from liking or resharing those links.

@MP “The Substack kerfuffle is not the first time that Mr. Musk has blocked competing services from being shared on Twitter. In December, he suspended Twitter users, including several journalists, for linking to Mastodon after a Mastodon user shared public information about the location of Mr. Musk’s private jet.

He went on to bar users from sharing links to Facebook, Instagram and several other social media companies, but reversed course after a backlash.”

So NYT would likely say Yes to this market based on their writing… 😅

The following market of mine is also under significant doubt, but interestingly traders there are giving right now only a 16% probability of YES.

@Mira points out that the fact you need to pay to have reach is a form of paywall. But there isn't an actual paywall page and you still can tweet.

Both markets seem to be have fulfilled their spirits under similar redaction markets (Will Twitter take actions to damage Substack?/Will Twitter charge users for things that are currently free?), but not under their precise title.

@MP I usually go by the description, not the title. The title is for getting people interested in the market. In the description there, I see "If you're required to pay to use Twitter as it currently exists", and note that polls are a feature that currently exists that would be required to pay to use. I haven't bid it higher because there's a good chance Elon won't actually roll it out.

In this market, "prohibit" sounds like a strong word, but e.g. murder or other crimes are usually considered "prohibited by law" even though nothing stops you from doing it -there's just a penalty applied after. So I would consider this a prohibition, except they tried to be subtle about its enforcement.

If I was Elon, I would've quietly cut eligible tweets out of discovery(or lowered their weighting) but not given any explicit user-visible message to that effect, and preserved them in searches for phrases like "substack" so that Substack employees don't get suspicious and raise a ruckus. Then, if people still noticed and it blew up on social media, quietly fix the "bug" and blame my "incompetent engineers". That too seems like a prohibition on the links: It's a rule("don't post links to substack") whose enforcement is subtle rather than explicit.

Related market:

As requested by @jack

I created this market because Twitter had put a news on their blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20221219002045/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy

It listed a lot of companies, but not Substack.

Then I created this market with a short description: "If Twitter prohibits links to Substack like they just did with Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth and so on, this market solves to YES."

Twitter took actions against Substack, but not an outright ban. You couldn't like,rt or comment in links with Substack links and you clicked in one, Twitter would warn you that the link is unsafe. Nonetheless, you could still post it.

A recent poll I did in a Twitter account of mine, 85% of the people said that Twitter actually prohibited Substack links, so it seems that for the average observer, they did. On the other hand, I am unsure it hit my criteria of being like they did last December.

I am unsure on how to solve this market.

@MP it was apparent from your comments that you intended this to be about being prohibited from sharing the links, rather than being prohibited from accessing them, so I think it shouldn't resolve positively (yet) because it hasn't met your bar.

I think this market is quite an interesting one to learn from: having broader resolution criteria would have been more useful (in retrospect).

@finnhambly I don't know in advance which markets will have popularity, sometimes I craft careful resolutions for anyone to bet.

In the LLM Chess market, I ended up appending the resolution and offering a refund as a way to circumvent the poor initial resolution.

Yes, this market is very interesting to learn from

As usual, yet another case where a market chooses to use the word "by" when referring to a state of the world rather than an action, and ends up ambiguous as to whether it checks only at close or at any time before close. Really wish people would stop doing that.

@IsaacKing Hmm actually I read the question as will twitter take the action of prohibiting substack links by May.

@jack Yeah that's another reading. Would have been nice if it were specified!

@IsaacKing the issue here is not the deadline. The market date end helps to kill any doubt.

@MP It would be helpful if you summarized the context of what is ambiguous for people to understand it better.

@MP given that links where prohibited and then the decision was reversed. How are you going to resolve this market?

@Flo Honestly? I don't know.

I did a poll with my followers recently and 85% thought that Twitter prohibited Substack links. It wasn't exactly how they did to Truth, Instagram and so on.

@MP Didn't they also reverse those bans? Seems pretty similar to me.

@IsaacKing the reversal or not of the bans doesn't matter.

@IsaacKing Was anyone banned for posting Substack links? I don't think suppression is prohibition.

Seems like the link suppression has been reversed
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1644344779507916805

I hold a no position, but I’d say the level of link suppression rises to a YES resolution.

@LeahLibresco If there wasn't a direct comparison to the earlier cases I would agree.

In retrospect, the hurdle I put was too high. The spirit of the market seems to be fulfilled, but it isn't like how they did to Mastodon, Facebook and so on.

@MP IMO, if you wrote “just like they did” or “exactly like” instead of “like they just did” — that’d be a higher hurdle. But “like” is read inexactly (eg “similar to”) especially as you have “and so on”. I’d definitely say these situations are similar, but not 100% the same, because of the technical differences. I think any non-tech person would agree with the writing that substack links are now prohibited like these other platforms were. 😅

At this point, there’s dozens of articles on this (using the words “block”, “restriction”, “ban”, etc). And if you’re on a social media site and you can publish something but it gets no, or >97% less distribution, that’s essentially like not being able to publish it.

a similar spiritual discussion is.. “if I was shadow banned on (Reddit/discord/etc) such that basically nobody could see my posts regularly, was I actually banned?” and I think the vast majority of people would say yes.

Elon disagrees says this isn’t a “block” — but the comments generally agree — https://twitter.com/drkarlynb/status/1644716312558485504?s=46&t=PHWk_9Y9m0zCRVBP_uyzgw

@wustep "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"

Reminded me of the sequences lol