If manifold is looking for ways to add mana sinks / get more people to buy mana, I think this would be a good way to do it. I agree that subsidies in their current form aren't enough to draw new users.
Idea: I want to directly pay people to bet on my markets. But this is exploitable -- someone could bet and immediately sell, milking the subsidy without adding predictive value.
Revised idea: I want to pay people for holding a position on my markets. And we already have that mechanism, in the form of loans.
I think I'd be willing to pay to directly subsidize some or all of a market's daily loans, even if those loans are still repaid to the main manifold account. Bidders are attracted because their mana is tied up for less time than it would be in other markets. Alternatively, maybe they only need to repay 2%, and the extra Ṁ I'm subsidizing is just free.
(Still requires some UI way to search for highly subsidized markets, but I think that is true for any mechanism).
@DeanValentine What if they changed their algorithm so that it surfaced markets more often if they have larger subsidies?
@IsaacKing Maybe; would need to test it out a couple times. If the current mechanism is supposed to do that, it doesn't seem to.
@DeanValentine Better than that would honestly be some mechanism for people to sort or search for markets by subsidy, so people could actually capitalize on them.