• The mixture and balance of "News" and "Questions" in the default "For You" feed is occasionally annoying. I feel as though too much of the available screen is filled with a giant image of the news story, and the related Questions themselves are deemphasized too much. Makes me wonder if there's a better way of displaying these blocks of content, to avoid displacing the on-site content (the Question markets themselves). At a minimum, maybe a system like many reddit 3PAs had, that allow you to choose your preference for "content density", on the text <-> image continuum.

  • There are also often duplicates news blocks in the For You feed, usually directly adjacent to one another. I've sometimes seen the same story and associated Questions duplicated up to 3 times in a row.

• I'm unsure if new users should be directly incentivized to make markets. "Good markets", that are well-moderated (resolve promptly, have clear resolution criteria), seem like the important content of the site. "Low-quality markets", with poorly defined resolution criteria, seem bad for the site, and more likely to be created by users with less experience in using the site and making markets.

  • As a separate issue, the "free questions" expiry date on the banner never seems to update (always seems to be 5d away).

• Organization of the Questions is hard to understand. There are "tags" on each question that I think are related to Groups? Groups sort Questions into topics... but they can have Members? (Why do people join Groups?) Apparently these tags/groups are unrelated to the.. "Categories"(?) I selected when I joined the site, that are permanently at the top of my Questions page under the search bar (with no way to modify those, post sign-up?). This is all confusing.

  • These elements should be labeled wherever they appear (ex. on each Question page, whatever those tags at the bottom actually are, they should be labeled), and I'm actually unsure why Groups even exist, or are so prominently featured on the site.

• It feels as though there should be a separate section on the Question page that encourages Question authors to formally state resolution criteria in point-form, so it can be more quickly evaluated by prospective participants when the page loads. Sometimes people write novels, with the pertinent resolution criteria scattered everywhere within the Question.

• It feels as thought there are too many "Meta questions", that seem to be jokes about particular users, the market itself, etc. These are intrinsically boring to new users that are engaged on news topics. If you come here to bet on RTSCs, and then the next suggested question is, "Will my United flight get delayed?", it makes you less interested in engaging with the site.

I signed up last week in the wake of the superconductor news. It has been quite fun so far! Here are what I thought:

Most fun:

- Betting with fun money provides a moderate and fun impetus that is not too stressful, compared to say PredictIt. I also tried Metaculus but find it to be less intuitive and much more cognitively demanding to navigate, so I stick with Manifold.

- For markets with a lot of activities, the markets and the comments below serve as a rapid barometer to updates to the situation, big or small. It is a really handy way to gauge the newest development without monitoring Twitter or other emerging, localised media like a hawk.

- Site is slick and easy to use. Most of the time it runs well except for moments of usage spikes.

Issues:

- Markets other than the hottest and most popular topics receive little traction and activities, which throttle the growth of niche expert communities and affect retention. Throwing Mana into boosting doesn't help much. I agree with @MoritzBrodel on the lack of varied topics and the focus on rationalist niche. I do understand that Manifold is still growing and it's probably part of the growing pain, and it's a chicken-and-egg problem. But as it stands, one is highly incentivised to make questions that would fit the existing popular areas of Manifold instead of trying to broaden the areas of expertise available on site.

- There are quite a lot of non-predictive and self-referential markets. They could be fun in moderation and drive engagement, but they seem to crowd out other questions at times. And some markets are arguably fairly subjective as well. It would be nice if we can separate the different use cases (personal, current events, news, etc) in a more customised manner on the UI and the home feed.

- There are quite a lot of cliquish in-jokes and meta markets. They are fun, but they could be rather confusing to newcomers without explanation, and especially to those not privy to the culture of the site or those not active on the Discord server.

- The multitude of very similar markets, iterations of the same markets and even direct replicates could be confusing to navigate. It would be nice if they can be tagged and automatically grouped somehow. It would also help if an auto-search is done on the market creation page to let the market maker view whether or not there are already existing duplicates of their to-be markets. Very similar markets can even be rolled and organised into funds of a basket of markets to offer an option for those who desire less clutter or sifting through.

- The profit spikes on the user page are quite confusing, and parts of the league system could be confusing (e.g. ending at random time). Might be good to show some explanations of how leagues work to people who are enrolled into the leagues for the first time, when they open the league page.

- Comment threads should be have more than one layer, and pinning of comments by market makers would be nice.

I did share some of the questions with my friends. They didn't join though, haha. One of them was quite confused about the point of the website, but was amused when I showed her the low chances of a certain mangaka tweeting in July. There is potential for increased adoption, and I think a more precise or clearer messaging and positioning of the website can help.

I signed up because I saw this tweet by Nate Silver: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1686246843980689408

I think it's very fun to discover interesting topics, find out what people think, and especially to get some good odds and make a profit. I've recruited three of my friends (only one used my link unfortunately). We talk about our deals and odds and it's definitely sparked some good conversations. Unrelated, my friends all think lab leak is super unlikely and a conspiracy theory, the 80% odds here did not convince them otherwise. Biggest problems I've had are technical, site not loading, some annoying bugs. It's also not super intuitive how the returns are calculated but I guess you figure it out. Also we don't understand all the Bot (cancelled) transactions. Oh and all the duplicates are annoying, especially regarding the supercundoctur stuff. I also wish the topics were more varied, currently most of them do fall into kind of specific rationalist online niche, which reflects the current userbase I guess. Overall our experience has been pretty good, looking forward to this site maturing and becoming more mainstream (hopefully).

I'm a new user who was previously aware of prediction markets, but have never participated. I have only used manifold via desktop, and have never created a market:

- I have been aware of manifold for awhile now, but never felt drawn to signing up. It was only after seeing what I consider to be the irrational exuberance surrounding LK-99 (I bought no at around $0.5) that I pulled the trigger. Unsurprisingly, "people are wrong on the internet" seems to be great for engagement.

- Despite some of the inherent shortcomings, I like the fact that Manifold uses fake money. I'm guessing this means the predictive power is lower, but I probably wouldn't have participated otherwise. Presumably this allows for a much broader range of markets, which is why you don't see the superconductor question on Kalshi.

- The comment section seems to be fairly well moderated and productive. That might be a function of the type of people this site attracts, but I think it adds a lot of value and nuance beyond the prediction itself.

- I like how open this platform seems to be. The UI is very well done.

- Maybe it's because I don't play video games, but I found the whole league/season thing confusing, at least at first.

- I've found it difficult to go through other users trading history. Looking at the profiles of some high "net-worth" individuals I naturally wanted to know what their big trades were. Unfortunately the time series view doesn't seem to be interactive.

- I don't like how notifications are done. Every time I open the site I see I have been notified of every comment made in a market I have a position in. This means I'll regularly have 100+ notifications.

The mobile app glitches out like crazy when trying to make limit orders. Esp the sliders. Also a lot of the numbers are different on different screens / don’t update as often. Kinda confusing. Not sure how easy to fix though. Also UX for seeing limit orders is a bit confusing to get to.

i signed up because i saw memes about people betting on the superconductor fiasco, i thought that was hilarious. the cherry on the cake was the fact you can donate your mana. my advice is that you make donating more straightforward and simple as currently you need to go through several (at times hard to use) menus to donate

I joined three days ago and I'm having a lot of fun. I'm finding it really hard to perform well which I think is a good sign!

Biggest problem I've had is definitely the android app performance. Sometimes it takes more than 15sec to load a page or to react to le clicking something. It happens sporadically throughout the day so I'm guessing it's due to the recent popularity.

Most fun is getting those free rewards throughout the app, but I'm hoping it doesn't turn my activity into too much of a slot machine and too little of actual market predictions. I've gamed the system today by placing a bet to get a streak reward, then immediately selling my position for immediate net profit with no risk.

My top 1 recommendation would be to improve rule explanations embed in the UI, like tooltips and such. The UX is already fantastic, but more guidance for people like me which are already very comfortable with maths, but never participated in any market (predictive or otherwise) would be helpful. After reading the FAQ, it's still unclear to me what loans are for example.

The site is mostly great. However, when creating a question having the custom date underneath, and having that custom date automatically set to 3009 isn't great. Some easier visible new-user info would be nice too. I had to google and go to other sites to get info, I understand you guys have your own guide, but it's not really visible. I haven't shared it with any of my friends, but I think soon, if I keep using the site. I found it by some random twitter link from some crypto guy. Someone else mentioned this, and I completely agree. It's super cliquey with a bunch of weird, inside jokes. Good for yall but as a new user it's just really weird, kinda discord-shitposter type of vibe. Good for you guys but that's not for me, and other new users. Site also seems to buy into a lot of conspiracy theories. Like one I saw about COVID being made in a lab having some 80% yes or something stupid. This isn't a easy issue to fix, nor am I saying it should/can be, it's just indicative of the user base

It would be great if there was a mechanism for enticing convergence of questions onto a similar topic rather than fracturing the with multiple very similar questions (similar to customer service bots, or say something like Quora). I'd always prefer to participate in the question with highest liquidity of opinions but filtering for those is not obvious or easy for me at the moment.

On the mobile app it's too easy to click the sign out button. Also on android, this is probably just a personal problem but I use "Open Link With" as my default browser but I couldn't sign in with that, I had to temporarily change my default browser for that.

More generally, it would be nice to have an alternative sign-in or signup method other than Google (tho i know that does have a risk of mass account creation). It's not that big of a deal but I prefer to not have too many things relying on a single account.

I really like the concept. Always have been into prediction markets, but never thought they could work with play money. Most tricks that have been found to enhance engagement are smart.

For me the main problem currently is the excessive number of almost identical markets with zero liquidity. You never know where to bet. Think a nuclear warhead will be detonated in 2023? There are 10 markets on this exact question...

I would also like to be able to place limit sell orders. I.e. I bought YES at 20% and would like to sell at 40%. Not sure if there's a way to do that.

1. Some questions have a very small market and don't move, ever. As is, I won't bet in small markets if I don't think others will participate. Vicious cycle. Maybe there should be a small incentive for people to bet in new markets.

2. Android app whitescreens whenever I resume from background. Restarting the app fixes

3. Not enough variety of questions (but not much we can do here)

Cons: too many duplicate or variation questions, conversation should be a separate more chat-like feature as opposed to a nested comment section, not being able to delete comments, lack of templates/formats for questions, IMO play money makes gambling on the market more appealing than predicting outcomes

Pros: good user pool with decent engagement, decent UI with dark theme, site seems stable thus far even with a large upswing in users

I came here after multiple articles cited a ~30% chance of this bet: https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-temp-ambient-pre

I instantly became addicted and shared it with some friends, some of which I know like this kind of betting.
The only annoyances I see are that
1. The profit on your open positions is calculated at the current marginal price. Not the price I would get if I sold all of it. This way I instantly had +50% "profit" on some trades. Of course this is only important for low-liquidity markets.
2. We need more people, or more people with liquidity. E.g. https://manifold.markets/firstuserhere/will-manifold-drop-below-850-dau-7d at 25% can be sold and hedged with this one https://manifold.markets/firstuserhere/will-manifold-drop-below-900-dau-7d at 13% for literally free money.

3. People should not be allowed to participate in a question which they can still edit. There are some questions where only the creator participated and I do not want to bet against him since I know he could change the question or fake the outcome any time.

The memes made me sign up. I knew about prediction markets but they are all so dry and un-fun. Literally signed up because of rationalussy.

One actual piece of feedback I have is that new users don't know about loans, so they don't want to bet on things that have 3+ month resolutions, and they also don't realize that they can exit their position once the % reaches what they think is correct. I think having more markets with faster resolutions would be more encouraging for new users.

Joined today with all the superconductor news and haven't used a prediction market before, but traded real markets before so not a massive shock. I've found it difficult to find questions ending soonest, as some I've seen are expiring in >5 years and that's not the kind of timeframe I'm looking for. I'm generally going for a few hours to at most a few months, especially while my balance is low. Having some kind of global filter for these would be great.

The other issue I've had is for questions with ranges of answers (e.g. when will LK-99 be shown to be a superconductor with >95% confidence; Aug, Sept, Oct...) When I've checked my answer, all I can see is "yes" and as yet I haven't found a way to see what I answered. In the comments I see people suggesting I put both yes and no bets for different time ranges, but I'm pretty sure this could be optimised? Happy to be wrong though!

Having fun otherwise, just wish there were more short-term (<24hrs) questions to play against, keep my hyperactive brain awake 😄