Why did you resolve as NA?

@esusatyo the account got follow botted. see below for arguments

I think I removed most obviously fake accounts. There is no way to tell if any account isn’t fake for sure… Please post any accounts you find suspicious in this thread

@MrLuke255 maybe just NA it because i can see both YES and NO being right at this point

@strutheo wtf is happening here?!?! this has gotta be an N/A at this point.

@mattyb If the account gets 150 followers out of which there isn’t a significant number of obvious fakes I don’t see how it shouldn’t resolve YES.

@MrLuke255 I gave it a follow. Cool work!

@MrLuke255 because 'obvious fakes' was not part of the description the whole month people were betting on it , so half the people will think this should have always resolved yes anyway, even with the obvious fakes

@MrLuke255 Is there a foolproof method to confirm that every account you've removed is indeed fake, leaving no room for doubt? Can you guarantee with 100% certainty that all removed accounts are fake? I strongly agree to N/A the question at this point. Once the bot drama has begun, it becomes impossible to determine how this might have unfolded without it or without removing follower. The instagram algorithm is quite strange.

I do not think you are correctly identifying fakes if it is 150 after your count, given the huge spike within 12 hours below, and I'd suggest following David's very reasonable suggestion! (He's the community manager)

@MrLuke255 Specifically,
David Chee:

[If ignoring bots] would leave ur account safely below 150 then u should just resolve it to NO...

jackson polack:

it had been below 85...

David Chee

Yeah so unless there is some viral post that gets a bunch of followers in the next couple days then this should resolve no.

Was this going to be close? If the true estimate ignoring the fake accounts would leave ur account safely below 150 then u should just resolve it to NO as if the botting never happened.

If it was very close to 150 and unclear what it would have been without the botting then it should be N/A'd.

it had been below 85 as of 17 hours ago, according to commenters below. considering it's been up for a month, that's not really close.

note: i'm fine with n/a and no

@jacksonpolack Yeah so unless there is some viral post that gets a bunch of followers in the next couple days then this should resolve no.

@SirSalty I'm not sure of the reasoning here. Are bots not followers? They are usually included when people talk about the number of followers a social media account has. People bet YES with that in mind.

@Jacy that question is neither here nor there. Manifold doesn't want to incentivise its user violating the terms and conditions of other websites.

@SirSalty from the rule @EvanDaniel pointed out below from the notion:

Markets which may be unlisted, N/A’d or deleted

...

• Markets which incentivise breaking other website’s TOS.

  • There are exceptions to this if we believe it provides genuine value to learn more about. For example, “Will Twitter have a data breach?” would be allowed.

I see that there's a case for NA'ing this market due to this incentive, and I still see the case for YES based on the criteria itself. However, I still don't see tenable reasoning for a NO resolution.

@Jacy the argument for NO from Manifold's perspective is that N/A creates bad incentives too: people who are going to lose either way can bot an account to force an N/A and thus avoid losses from their bad bets.

The argument for NO from a creator's perspective is something like "obviously I didn't want people to violate the rules for my market, so I'll exclude bots even though I didn't say explicitly that I would." This is similar to any other spirit-preserving retcon of the criteria, but possibly more justified than usual because probably "and don't break the site rules" should be implicit in all resolution criteria.

@chrisjbillington Should these markets simply be closed early in the future? Like, N/A before ppl are even tempted to bot? I agree we don’t want to allow people to bot to cancel their bad bets. But also we don’t want to let people bot to spike the price and then buy NO, or any other funky stuff that happen when bots manipulate the ‘apparent human follower count’ or wtv.

@chrisjbillington mitigating bad incentives is not tenable justification for a market resolution. Market resolutions are based on market criteria, and they can be superseded by rules. Mitigating bad incentives can be a reason to make new rules, of course, but if market participants have to always wonder, "Will the mods and admins create some new rule that retroactively changes this market?" that seems like a huge mess. Of course, if Manifold policy is to create and apply ad hoc rules like that, so be it, but it's not to my knowledge.

And as below, I don't think "and don't break the site rules" is a policy that gets you to a NO resolution. Whether one should or should not break site rules doesn't have anything directly to do with how a market resolves. To my knowledge, there's no Manifold rule or norm that bases resolution on the rule-breaking of the creator or traders.

@TheBayesian I'm not sure. There's some discussion on discord between admins and mods at the moment (I am neither), so maybe they will come to some conclusion. Possibly there'll be some distinction between public figures vs personal accounts, or accounts owned by market creators.

A partial rollback feature where bets after a certain time could be N/Ad would broaden the options available.

@Jacy Market design is all about incentives and Manifold can do whatever they like, and have made no strong promises otherwise. It is up to them, and there is no cosmic law that says they have to even be consistent.

I think it's very good precedent for manifold to effectively say "and if you find a corner case we didn't cover, obviously we reserve the right to deal with it in line with the spirit of the current community guidelines".

Manifold can choose what level of consistency is best for their goals. Obviously gross inconsistency for no reason burns trust, but if people can generally see there's a good reason to impose ad-hoc responses, even at the cost of inconsistency, then not doing so can also burn trust.

Again, there's no cosmic rule that says anything about anything here. There's just manifold balancing impacts on trust and improving the platform best they can. Consistency or inconsistency are in service of other goals, they are not terminal goals.

Just like resolution criteria can be adjusted to preserve the spirit of what the creator was going for, so can the community guidelines or their enforcement. You can argue that it shouldn't be that way, but that's just your opinion - again, there are no cosmic laws to appeal to here. They're called "guidelines", and the top line is something vague about being excellent to each other that even if you're a literalist about it gives them very broad powers to make things more excellent as they see fit.

@chrisjbillington just to be clear, I'm not claiming any sort of cosmic law. I'm just talking about what resolutions could be justified based on the market title/description and Manifold rules. If we're just talking about what resolution Manifold as an entity could implement, then sure, they are only bound by the laws of physics and arguably some broader legal, moral, or social standards.

I’m going to remove all accounts which look obviously fake from followers. I didn’t want to gain fake followers and I don’t believe it is in the spirit of the market to count them. In best scenario, Manifold would have an option to pause the market or revert it to the previous state when something more or less probable happens which was controversial. Unfortunately it’s not the case. I will leave the resolution to the moderation team

In couple of hours all fake followers should be removed by me.

I suppose they might be a “gift” from the account on which I bought a shoutout, they wanted to show me that it’s “working”.

I’m really sorry it played out like this.

@MrLuke255 For what it's worth, I don't think anyone is blaming you for what happened here, as long as you didn't buy the bots. You just created an interesting market that led to an odd situation.

Also, in my personal opinion, whether the bots are removed doesn't have any implications for the market resolution. It's about whether the account pxl_hckr reached 150 followers in 2023, not whether it has 150 followers at the end of 2023.