Testing shenanigans with @Stralor
Context: https://manifold.markets/jatloe/is-my-number-squarefree#9fyx4ojmec8
1,000People are also trading
@Stralor looks like 1 tag (links to unranked) is publicly accessible and the other (links to nonpredictive) can't be added manually by nonmods and is what is used when the toggle is added?
@Quroe I did my own test marking it, which you can see on my questions page, and it's clear that only when the AI adds the unranked tag will it actually unrank.
@Stralor wait wtf did the tag disappear??? I didn't remove it and it usually is oddly sticky after the toggle is flipped back to ranked
@Quroe fascinating! okay it really is completely tied to the tag
removing the tag flips the toggle back, flipping the toggle adds AND removes the tag (I never noticed because I never hit refresh before)
@Stralor I see, and the non-predictive tag is the real unranked tag. When I add non-predictive, the AI also makes it unrank.
@Stralor Okay! Interesting!
@100Anonymous Wait, so you mean to tell me you have a way to force a market to unrank as a non-mod?
@Stralor this is the "real" tag: https://manifold.markets/topic/nonpredictive
as you can see it's a "curated topic" which means no one can manually add it unless they're the owner of it. I can remove it fine, but I can't add it by hand even as a mod! let's test if you can remove it, one sec
@Stralor yes, but if you remove it, nothing happens unless you remove the other unranked tag, apparently. Also, if you add tags before you add "Non Predictive," it glitches out and doesn't make it unranked.
@Stralor So! Here's the philosophical question now:
Do you want normal users to be able to do this? Do you want to let them keep the power to re-rank? Do you want to give them the power to unrank?
he did it
@Quroe anything else we want to test? if not I think we should keep this dark magic secret. I'm going to unlist this shortly
@Quroe I think yes, it makes it much easier to make whale bait markets if somebody forgets about unranked. But about re-ranking, I would argue no.
@Stralor he toggled it from ranked to unranked by removing the real unranked tag that is added after non-predictive profits is added.
@Quroe okay I just hit the switches a bazillion times. it remembers the last state of ranked/unranked
@Quroe I think we'll test the re-rank part if it's unlisted, because this would make for very bad shenanigans.
@Quroe if the market is unlisted while ranked it doesn't get the tag, so I don't expect shenanigans to work. but let's unrank and then unlist and see what happens
@Stralor Oh, yes, I manually removed it. I thought that's what you meant by trying to re-rank because I have no other method of control over that. Non-mods cannot toggle ranked with a switch like you can.
@Stralor I'm so amused that unlisted is a proper toggle in the backend but unranked is just a fucking tag lolll
@100Anonymous Nononono, that's not how science works. You reject null hypotheses. Not accept hypotheses.
@Quroe confirming to expectations does not mean they are true. Confirming to expectations means the product is working properly.
@Stralor Up to you. I mostly wanted to see if normies could preemptively unlist to avoid a mod-unlist. It seems like we can't, which is probably the correct behavior.
@Quroe they can and odds are we wouldn't notice. also we can't fucking see unlisted markets just like normal users. who knows what the blackmarket of manifold looks like
@Stralor I've been advocating that at least we should be able to see unlisted markets (marked as unlisted) in users' questions list. sometimes we have to take moderator actions in them and then misplace the links
@Stralor I expect this [mods can't see them] to be true too. I have some markets that are unlisted for the lost episode of Nash Pit episode 2, and nobody but me has seen them.
If you guys do come across them, please don't look at them. They're about how many people will view those markets, so looking at them ruins the fun.
@Stralor maybe, with admin permission, if people think that mods may abuse that, admins can give permission in special cases.
@Quroe I guess viewer counts for unlisted markets due to moderator/admin action need not be counted.
@100Anonymous Only because you have some method of getting the link. Unlisted doesn't mean unreachable.
@Stralor oh, okay then. I did not notice this because on the few markets that were unlisted after I saw them, I also traded on them.
@100Anonymous I once got a series of user reports about bad behavior in a random school election market (in a foreign language). it was unlisted, would have had no idea it existed except someone in the market didn't like what someone said and so I got a direct link which disappeared after I resolved the ticket
@Stralor God knows how much black market trading is happening. Thankfully, we can see balance logs at least.
@Stralor https://manifold.markets/post/i-need-v-bux-please
Math PsychoFancy is another case I have seen, although I don't know where these markets actually are. (Also, is V-Bucks another type of currency?)
@100Anonymous v-bucks is fortnite money I think? pretty sure that post is just gibberish, I saw no unlisted trades in that user's history from a quick skim of their last year's log
@100Anonymous As for what Math PhyschoFancy is, I suspect it's a user-made casino in either Roblox or Discord.
@Quroe big bets and comments. that's why I thought it important to unlist before the dark magic was shared with bad actors
@Stralor I guess I could have used the new manual feed score settings mods have to kill it from the front page but I didn't even think about it
@Stralor Wait, so we confirmed that a bad actor can always re-rank a market with this testing, right?
yep! they're quite new and quite nifty but I haven't had a reason to use them yet so I rarely remember they exist
@Quroe yeah. it's the kind of power that needs to be wielded very carefully imo. shadowbanning is dangerous! when possible I still prefer admin boosts for visibility + normal unlisting for un-visibility since it's clear to creators that moderator action has occurred. I'm sure there will come a day when I'll need to both uprank and downrank markets with these powers but it hasn't happened yet
@Stralor what's nice about it though is the subtlety of change you can do. boosting and unlisting are very black and white, and being able to juuuust tweak something is very cool
@Stralor May a day never come again when I see a "How many times will I poop" market on the front page.
@Quroe oh I'm familiar. I reached out to fedor personally to find a resolution and get confirmation of life lol
@Quroe oh, those cursed markets. I really think these should just be unlisted entirely if a mod spots them. If any new user sees it, they are probably going to be put off by the site entirely.
@100Anonymous while I agree they're a bit icky I'm sorry to say I'm the (often dissenting) voice on the mod team that argues in favor of dumb shit like that being given full permission to do their thing
@Quroe I just realized I never updated the folks in the october market. fedor did get back to me later! they're alive and well
@100Anonymous I personally think this is one of the cases where down-dooting the market with mod downweight power is the right solution. I think the market is still in the realm of acceptable, just not palatable.