Liquidity is key for prediction markets, absent a distinct set of people (say a company or group of 'experts') multiple competing markets will perform less well than one centralised one.

@PaulBenjaminPhotographer That's a very definitive statement about a very generalized topic...? What about the idea of a platform with a small number of subject matter expert users and a defined topic, with a constrained number of possible questions? For example (since you mention Photographer in your name), a prediction market platform specific to photography and cameras, and invite only photographers and industry specialists. So think of a photography or camera forum, but rather than just being braggadocious and talking about what's coming out, placing bets on various technology predictions for the next year. Presumably this topical based prediction market would not require as much liquidity as an, "anything goes about any topic," prediction market platform, no?

Other: I know what open source is, but I don’t know any of the other words you just said.

@the_puzzlax Basically, Docker is a way of creating a sort of very thin, layer based virtual machine...so think of a pretend computer running on your laptop/Mac/PC. This allows you to set up a machine however you want and write code to it in a way that is very replicable, so you can build something on your machine and then easily transfer it over to a machine in the, "cloud," making software highly portable, hence, "docker," like...docking ships from one port to another. "Deploy," means, you are taking the software you built on your local machine on docker or whatever, and then deploying it on a cloud machine that you pay for, allowing you to host a website, again, much more easily than guessing and hoping that the software you wrote on your local machine and then having to fix a bunch of stuff on the remote machine because it comes with a bunch of totally different packages and software. Rather, you have docker on your local and on the remote machine, and so the software you wrote works the same in both environments.

Manifold takes a different approach, their code is open source, but it's basically designed to use one particular service, called Vercel, which is super awesome, but kind of expensive. So you can use Vercel but it might be $100 or $10,000 per months or something, but if you have some Dockerized software, then it might be just $5 per month, something like that. However, Vercel would allow you to be much more flexible and add features super quickly (as Manifold does) whereas the docker approach would be limited to your ability to change the code and update it, and however you architected that code. There are some other features in Vercel that I won't go into which makes Vercel amazing and justifies the price.

Other: I would love to have a platform for my company and I would be capable of running it. But it would be a lot of effort to educate coworkers about it and find out the right incentive to drive participation. So I'd only do it if I feel I have enough spare time.

@bence Are you talking about the company you work for or a company you own?

@PatrickDelaney a 100-200 employee count company I work for

@bence I mean what if there was an about page with a bunch of educational materials somehow attached? E.g. maybe GIF's that show how to use the markets, how they resolve, etc...a, "built in manual/documentation?"

Other questions...would there need to be something inherent in the code that allows it to be, "secret unless logged in," or is this something you could serve on an internal server? Or...could it be on the open internet? Would you need to be able to approve users via invite codes or something? Would it need to be branded to your company (or better specifically to not be brand-able?)

@PatrickDelaney I guess I'm actually most worried about convincing and incentivizing people to care (although I am in sort of a leadership position), and how much effort that would take. By default, the vast majority would not care to even read an about page. OTOH with the right incentives I'm sure my coworkers would self-learn how the market works.

We could place the app behind an Okta authentication proxy so that the app doesn't need to be "secret" aware. But it's still appreciated if that's an option for peace of mind in case the auth proxy breaks somehow. With this setup, I'd trust people to create accounts for themselves, without admin approval.

Branding does not matter at all.

@bence OK, well, do you guys do any kind of gaming brown bags or weekly meetings? What about introducing it as a game? From the polling I have done on Manifold, it appears the greatest primary motivator people on here is gaming. https://patdel.substack.com/i/138643786/what-motivates-peoples-usage-of-prediction-markets Of course there are others who selected, "learning," and there is of course a mix of motivations. But at least at the company I work for, we do weekly brown bag presentations and often do games as a part of that, maybe once a month or so.

@bence Another question would be...what would be the objective for hosting an instance? Predicting trends? Having fun with the team? Just curiosity to see what would happen? Or something else?