@MikeElias Some users are requesting moderators to review this market. We have to take into consideration the Community Guidelines when looking at situations like this.

I don't find that I immediately know exactly how to handle this situation, but I do want to share some of the important details moderators will consider in a case like this.

• First, if the market was about a past event, then it is not about "predicting" anything. Markets that are non-predictive are marked 'unranked'. So @Gabrielle already took that action. There is also a section under "Markets which may be unlisted, N/A’d or deleted" that notes some non-predictive markets may be unlisted or N/A'd. So far that has not happened here, but it could.

• Next, we need to consider what the guidelines say about resolving your markets. I think the most important point from that page is here:

  If a market resolution has some ambiguity and there is dispute over the correct resolution, the creator will have the final say. However, we usually recommend an N/A resolution under these circumstances, especially if the ambiguity is at the fault of the creator.

  Keep that in mind. (Yes, in this case I would "recommend N/A" due to the lack of clarity about whether past events count.)

• There is a relatively strong 'norm' on the site that questions implicitly ignore past events by default. Some markets write that explicitly. Some do not. In my opinion, most traders would consider it a relatively strong norm. My reading of the original title+description says "this is all 100% asking about a future event" based on the tense of the words used:

  

  Everything about that seems forward-looking to me and I would discount past events.

• Finally, there is a section of mod guidelines that mentions "fraud" in many forms. This can be difficult to diagnose, but a very important consideration is whether the creator has profited from the way they ran the market. While you did not bet in this market, you did profit greatly:

  

  If you read the section on fraudulent markets, you will see there is some amount of grace given to creators, but also a strong nudge that resolving N/A would be a good move.

If you truly believe this is clearly and absolutely a Yes, then it may (may) stand that way, but I would personally strongly suggest resolving this N/A due to the base reading of question+description matching the site norm of only future events counting AND the apparent impropriety of a creator making a market with 2,000 mana of liquidity to extract 24,000 mana upon resolution.

@Eliza Thanks for your clarifications. Ironically, I added liquidity because I thought I would be guaranteed to lose it, which I wanted to do in solidarity with all the people who I figured would be upset. I had no idea adding liquidity would net me mana, and I'm perfectly fine with it being given back to users.

@MikeElias In that case, I will re-resolve the market to N/A, which will refund everyone.

Unfortunately for No holders, that means they have lost their potential gains. If you're still interested in this topic, perhaps you could consider hosting a forward-looking market about the same issue (with more clarity about what evidence will count).

@Eliza I did not bet on this market although personally I think this is rather unfair to NO holders. The market creator knew what he was doing and chose to do it anyways. I think a more appropriate resolution would be NO owing to the fact that literally everyone reasonably interpreted the market criteria that way, and possibly a ban on creating future markets applied to the market creator.

@Eliza I would also point out that the creator has like a dozen other markets that are basically just polls for things that are socially contentious that I am certain he will eventually resolve according to his preferred reality. The lenient actions here are just enabling further nonsense later on in those markets..

@Balasar I can definitely see where you are coming from.

The guidelines explicitly say that creators are given the 'benefit of the doubt' the first time. And the guidelines defer to creators in many places.

Rest assured, I'm not the only moderator who is aware of this situation and scrutiny does increase over time. Creators who consistently bend the rules can and do get that power taken away.

@Balasar I’d be happy to let mods resolve all my markets according to their interpretation of my criteria.

Did something happen with this market? It still shows as resolved YES, but the mana no longer shows up in my league score? (No opinion from me on his this mess should resolved 🙂)

@AlexanderTheGreater It is marked as Unranked because the market was not predicting anything.

@Eliza seems like a good compromise

@AlexanderTheGreater That doesn't necessarily mean it will stay Yes forever. Sorry if that is possibly going to be confusing.

Market and any reasonable person would have resolved this to NO, but the creator prefers the alternate reality that resolving to YES implies.

@mods This should resolve to No or at least N/A, obviously stuff from before market creation should not count, I googled this before it happened and bet on it assuming it meant any future reports. Also the price for yes was at one percent beforehand lol

@Mana I don't agree but I will submit to mod decisions on this. Also I didn't know I'd get a payout, was just trying to make a point. So if mods want to give people back their mana that's fine with me.

@MikeElias Based on the price the market definitely disagrees and having a market be resolvable to Yes before creation is crazy imo unless it's specifically mentioned in the rules as a bounty for hard-to-find info

@Mana yeah “will” is future tense. This was a misresolution.

@Mana Markets that are resolvable at the time of creation are VERY common — for example, many markets about UFOs:

- https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/are-any-ufos-actually-highlyadvance

There has been sufficient evidence to resolve this for decades, even by @IsaacKing 's own (very clear and reasonable) standards. (For example, the COMETA report in the 1990s came to the same conclusions about UFOs that the US government is "releasing" now.)

Yet that market hasn't been resolved. Therefore it seems "resolvable at time of creation" is in the eye of the beholder according to their personal standards of evidence, and therefore can't be grounds for disqualifying a market.

For this to resolve to yes, I would like the case to be made that the future tense in English applies to past events.

@TylerS I'm pretty sure this market and its resolution were a planned April Fool's joke.

@MikeElias Even if there were sufficient evidence to resolve that market, that market makes no mention of the word "will" in its title.

Should all markets that have "will" in their title resolve yes if that event happened in the past? The clear consensus seems to be no. I could find no (recent) markets that suppose your interpretation. Here are some examples of markets where the construction "will x before y" means "will x before y, but after the creation of this market":

https://manifold.markets/LilSamzy/will-btc-hit-95000-before-the-end-o

https://manifold.markets/OlegEterevsky/when-will-the-hostilities-in-gaza-e

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-tobiasvyseri-have-a-job-before

https://manifold.markets/strutheo/will-trump-visit-russia-during-his

https://manifold.markets/JonathanRay/will-bitcoin-fall-below-10k-for-1-h

would the market maker have decided this if they didn't place a 20000 bet on their own market when it stood at 1%?

imagine how stupid it would be for your third link to resolve to yes because the person has ever had a job in the past.

@TylerS To be clear, the creator did not place a large bet on the market. What happened is that markets have an automated market maker that you bet against, and when a market gets bet down to a low value (like 1%) the automated market maker has many YES shares in the pot. When the market resolves, the remaining shares go to whoever contributed the liquidity. So the creator got the result of those 20,000 YES shares, but they did not actually place any bets.

oh, ok sorry. thanks. I don't know why I got so worked up about this.

@robert Good clarifications here, thank you