Will the rules of daily free markets change significantly before June 21st?
24
6
αΉ€211
resolved Jun 21
Resolved as
20%
This market resolves to YES if there are significant changes made to the rules of daily free markets before the close date. I will resolve it early if such changes are made, not waiting until the close date to resolve. "Significant changes" are somewhat defined by my judgment, but basically include anything I expect will (or is intended to) change the behavior of users, particularly the incentives to use daily free markets as sources of "income". Possible changes include: * Removing the free markets entirely * Imposing a waiting period or other restrictions on betting on one's own free markets * Limiting the profit one can pull out of the free liquidity of one's own free markets May 22, 5:22pm: one note - removing the free markets entirely should probably be paired with some sort of "daily login bonus" or similar, in order to keep injecting liquidity into the system. It'd be a fairer implementation than the current one (in which some clued-in and/or shameless users get "daily income" while most don't). It is possible this would disincentivize market creation, of course - I don't think it would for me but I've heard other users say it might for them. May 22, 5:37pm: just injected M$300 liquidity! I believe the appropriate exhortation here is.... pamp it? May 23, 9:15am: related (basically identical) question here, albiet currently with much lower liquidity - https://manifold.markets/MichaelWheatley/manifold-fixes-the-daily-free-mana
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predicted YES
This market should get a prize for "most transparent resolution". Thanks for the thoughtful way of doing that, Matt!
predicted NO
@Sjlver Aww, thanks! I appreciate that comment. Being known for honest and transparent resolution is definitely a goal of mine!
predicted NO
Status quo persists, as far as I can tell. I'll wait until my daily free market today to double check before resolving (also to give a last chance for any arguments one way or another).
predicted NO
Someone pointed out to me in another market that free response markets can still be cheaply farmed. Fair enough - but by the time the market closes I won't have started doing it myself (kept forgetting). Additionally, that's been the case for a while and I gave no indication before now that I was taking that into consideration, so in the interest of fairness to bettors who made decisions based on my previous comment below I'm still planning on resolving PROB 20%...... unless they change the free markets in the next few hours.
predicted NO
For transparency on my current thinking, if the status quo remains I plan to resolve to PROB 20%, because the slightly increased hassle to farm free markets (from no longer being able to set the initial probability low to make farming cheap) as pointed out by Scott has resulted in my only getting about M$80 each time (since I don't keep a ton of liquidity on hand) rather than M$100. This 20% reduction seems a good enough proxy for my propensity to farm the free markets being reduced by a similar proportion. While this is not what I had in mind as a "significant change", it is a change nonetheless. If a more significant change (all but eliminating the daily farming rather than slightly nerfing it) occurs before close date, I will of course resolve to full YES.
bought αΉ€25 of YES
It appears that it's no longer possible to set an initial probability on YES/NO questions. This at least seems to limit the extractable profit to M$50, while simultaneously normalizing the practice of the market creator using bets to set the initial probability (thus somewhat reliably extracting a profit even for legitimate markets). Obviously I'm voting in favor of this counting as "significant" :)
predicted YES
@ScottLawrence it doesn't quite work like that. You can still extract M$100 from an initial PROB 50% market, it just costs a little more to do so (cost which you do get back). In practice I've been getting M$70-$80, and other folks with more liquidity lying around have been taking the rest.
sold αΉ€34 of YES
@ScottLawrence for that reason I don't particularly find this to be a "significant" chance.... maybe enough to resolve to 25% PROB or so rather than full NO, but not more than that.
bought αΉ€25 of NO
*change, not chance
predicted YES
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to make it so that #personal #fun and #whalebait don't show on the default front/home page? Make them opt in.
predicted YES
Sorry, this is in response to @sjver
predicted YES
@Duncan yeah, I'm personally much less worried about the "spam" aspect (I don't personally see a whole lot of spam markets) and more just annoyed that I'm incentivized to create a spam market every day if I don't have a good question to ask.
predicted YES
@MattP I'm starting to consider the "do turtles dream" solution -- think of something you want to know, but don't want to start research on, and ask.
predicted YES
@Duncan oh sure, and when I have something like that, I do. When I don't, though - why not take the free M$100?
bought αΉ€20 of YES
To me, the issue of uninteresting markets would be the most important to fix, and part of that is related to the daily free market. Essentially, my Manifold homepage now shows markets that are mostly irrelevant to me, or spammy, or simply uninteresting. This makes the entire Manifold.markets site feel lower value. Back when markets weren't free, people thought more deeply about their questions, and browsing the homepage was more enjoyable.
bought αΉ€5 of YES
could some sort of separation (like separate tabs) for paid markets and free markets clean the uninteresting/spammy issue up a bit? [maybe with an option, like, if you or someone else has added M$X [20? 30?] liquidity to your free market, it graduates to the paid section]. paid and free are probably very unwelcoming names for tabs though. [interesting/hot] vs [all]?. I've been making silly markets because I don't want the free daily question to go to waste.
predicted NO
@Sjlver I wonder if this is due to the free markets or actually would be inevitable/indistinguishable from more people joining the site and making markets. Have you tried following creators you like? Or would more fine-grained tags be helpful that you could follow?
predicted YES
@ian So far I've tried various options for sorting the markets, but with limited success. I might try following people too. I reckon there could be some sort of "magic" sorting option, or recommended system that figures out which markets are most relevant... But I'm not sure whether I would truly like that. It might just enforce my bubble, like most other recommendation systems do.
predicted YES
In general I like the idea of creators not being able to bet in their own free markets. We want them to be incentivized to make cool questions and that's it.
@SneakySly yeah, I think that's the cleanest solution. Just remove that profit motive.
bought αΉ€5 of NO
@Austin what about a combo solution? Weekly M$100 login bonus, keep the daily free markets but prohibit creators from betting on their own? Seems like that would be the "best of both worlds" in terms of keeping it really easy for users to ask questions they're interested in, keeping a decent flow of liquidity into the system for people, but removing the incentive to "spam" markets for personal profit?
Re: bullet #3 of the description, I've validated (to my own satisfaction at least) one potential way to do this, which is to multiply the creator's net winnings from their own free daily markets by (L_tot-100)/L_tot. This essentially makes it impossible for market creators to win any of the free M$100 liquidity from their own free daily markets. Whether or not that's a price worth paying (as it would discourage betting on your own markets overall, not just when farming) is up to the Manifold devs, of course.
Another disadvantage of this solution is that it'll probably confuse people if free markets behave differently from other markets.
@MattP I still think this change would effectively make authors lose money most times they make otherwise-rational bets on their own markets, whether they realize it or not, and this is worse than the problem it's trying to solve.
For other people's context, here's my comment with the details: https://manifold.markets/MattP/will-gurkenglas-convince-me-that-mu#LRrwYhClVAQRe72KkR38
I think it would be better to outright ban authors from betting on their own free markets - to be clear I definitely don't think we should do that, but better than making them lose money unexpectedly because their bets work differently than usual.
predicted YES
@jack yeah, I don't necessarily disagree. I'm not convinced authors would *lose* money on otherwise-rational bets on their own markets, but it would certainly be almost impossible to *win* money on them. Disallowing betting on one's own free markets or removing the free markets in favor of a daily login bonus are probably both better options.