If you signed up in the last week just to bet on the superconductor markets, I'm intrested in your feedback.
What are the biggest problems you've had using Manifold? What has been the most fun? Have you tried sharing it with your friends?
Any user who joined Manifold in the last week to bet on superconductors is eligible for this bounty. I'll pay up to M500 for your feedback, depending on how insightful I find it.
1,000
3.00The 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...
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.
Android app whitescreens whenever I resume from background. Restarting the app fixes
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 😄
I find it nice that this platform doesn't require staking real money. Payouts to charities is also nice. It feels like a fun way to have casual bets with friends without everything devolving into money issues.
There seems to be a bit of a zoom issue on mobile browsers on some pages where the bottom bar is partly cut off.
It is fun to have some stakes attached to the news watching that many of us are basically addicted to.
The biggest problem is the difficulty in precisely defining resolution conditions for a question. I feel many high-stakes questions will end up in litigation over what the outcome was. Like here: https://manifold.markets/StrayClimb/will-elon-musk-mention-lk99-or-supe?r=bHVrcmVz
One solution to this might be to make very strong guidelines about formulating questions. Interestingly, the problem is avoided when the question never resolves, like this one https://manifold.markets/EliezerYudkowsky/will-artificial-superintelligence-e
As a longtime user, I've been reading through this bounty and responding to some of the comments, and it's really interesting! (One random takeaway is that Manifold should rename loans, or at least explain them better.)
Anyway, one of the things that surprised me at first is users talking about how there wasn't enough variety of topics. As someone who bets in markets about elections, podcasts, sleep schedules, news events, school policies, romantic relationships, math, TV shows, personal goals, friends, Manifold itself, rationalussy, and much more, I felt like Manifold does a great job with this - since you can search for markets about almost anything, and create the markets that don't exist yet.
However, I realized that for newer users, the mana cost of making a market can actually be significant. Furthermore, without a long record on the site, your markets might receive less trust and attention. Since I've got some spare mana, I wanted to fix some of this! If your net worth is under M$2000, and you've got ideas for markets you want made, I'll help by either funding them or creating them myself - your choice:
Less of direct feedback and more a question that could help you when answered. I'm not sure of all the ways that users can get free mana but do you have ideas in place to account for when mana inflation start to occur due to older accounts accruing more and more free mana compared to younger accounts which could potentially sway specific betting scenarios?
I've noticed some lag in the past few days, it was especially laggy around the time I sent this comment: https://manifold.markets/ii/rock-paper-scissors-b3526b821208#KDZ0IinlYehlM9i4lcfo, not sure if that was just a one-time issue though. But a more common annoyance is that my comments don't ahow up immediately after I comment, so I have to reload. Though they always do go through.
Another thing is that the $1000 dollar balance and 1 week account age required to send manalinks seems a bit restrictive. I'm not sure if there are any other restrictions on other things that I don't know about, would like to know (like DMing, is that possible right now?)