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What would be the point? Plenty of other polling sites already exist. Adding polls on Manifold would be wasted effort; effort that would be much better spent adding features for the actually-unique part of Manifold: the prediction markets.
Also, most of the things people seem to want to run polls about are Manifold features. As the site matures and stops changing as frequently, I expect those will become less common.
@MartinRandall I like this; it could even be tucked away under the "Bets" tab so that it doesn't take up any room in the main interface. I would like this both with YES/NO markets and also list markets.
@MartinRandall the issue with that is it ties the prediction to the poll result. Typically when I run these markets, I want the two to be completely independent. Sometimes I'll vote YES and bet NO (because I think the vote will go towards NO). Coupling them makes both less useful IMO.
@MartinRandall Love the idea of showing all current positions on a market, BTW. Just don't think that's the same thing as a built in independent poll.
@MattP I had a similar thought, but I think it mostly works if the market resolves proportionally to the votes. Initial bets are more predictions of the votes of others and later votes are more votes, because the predictions should have settled on to the right range. It is different from a pure poll, but that might be okay, or even good.
@MartinRandall It's a new thing that is neither a poll nor a prediction market. I would argue it's less useful than either due to the muddiness, though people are ofc welcome to disagree. I don't think there's a good argument it's the same thing, though. Manifold adding an "all current positions" table should not cause a "native support for polls" feature market to resolve YES, for example.
@MattP Probably we should have the discussion about how the other market should resolve at that market.
A related idea I had was doing quadratic voting where each bet is a quadratic vote for yes or no, so a m100 bet is with 10 votes. Probably an abomination. But I like the idea of the positions table because it lets us experiment with such things.
@MartinRandall Any poll that allows a whale to game the poll result is a poll whose results I'm utterly uninterested in, personally.
@MartinRandall sure, but that's a difference in kind from "I'm going to structure my poll such that people's votes literally count more if they spend more money".
NO -- it violates the Eggbasket Principle (https://blog.bmndr.co/eggbasket). I do see how it's tempting and maybe it's only a small violation. Just that typically startups should resist temptations like this unless they're being forced to pivot.
Although... could it be done in some more market-y way? We already have tipping which is very similar to voting, but with money, which is brilliant. Could we [wild hand-waving] partition the liquidity pool into named subpools, one for each option in the poll? Then voting in the poll is done by adding liquidity to your favorite subpools? (The market mechanism itself would use the whole liquidity pool like normal, not caring about subpools.)
I think that's too contrived but maybe there's something more elegant that could work? Tacking on a poll feature feels inelegant but if there were some nice general way to use mana to bet on what you think will happen as well as, orthogonally, use mana to vote on what you want to happen, that could be exciting.
I adore the idea of weighting votes by how much mana people were willing to sacrifice to cast them. It's kind of a generalization of the existing Manifold precedent of polls where core team members have their votes scaled by some multiplier.
@dreev I am a little confused how this violates the principle I think. This is just a type of prediction market after all, and the core product is social prediction markets.
@SneakySly You could view it as a type of market but also you could view it as a non-market thing bolted on to a market that the market can be about. But this actually has me more excited about decision markets again. Could most of the existing poll markets be recast as decision markets if those were a native, much less frictionful, feature?
@dreev I think this point is belied by the fact that these kinds of markets are already happening, this would just better support them. It's not a completely random feature they'd be trying to shoehorn in. There are many other far worse violations of the eggbasket principle floating around IMO cough Manifund cough.
@MattP I agree with him that it seems bad having so many markets dedicated to activities with only the flimsiest connection to prediction or markets.
Like if someone posted all their podcast episodes to Manifold under markets named "How many listens will this episode get?"
"Will Manifold ship X feature by the end of the month" does something similar to a poll, but in a way which at least makes use of prediction markets.
@SneakySly Consistency is good. Would allow market creators not have to manually go through and count all the comments. Resolves ambiguity for people that often don't read the description thoroughly.