Poll: Do you want all betting to be publicly visible?

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resolved May 31

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Write "YES" or "NO" in the comments to cast your vote on whether you want all your bets across all markets you've participated in on Manifold to be publicly visible from your user page going forward in the future. ** This market will resolve YES if a majority of the votes are YES; NO if a majority are NO within a week of the creation of this question. (In the case of a tie, I will resolve PROB at 50%.) ** I will use your last stated option if you vote more than once. You can also assume for the purposes of this poll that if you made a bet in the past that you don't want to be publicly visible that it can be hidden without wiping your history, even if we aren't necessarily planning to support that. The purpose of this poll is to figure out which behavior is desirable going forward, not to figure out how we should deal with bets that were made in the past with the understanding that they were private.

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25 Comments

21 Holders

37 Trades

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predictedNO 2y

The final tally was pretty close, but NO edged out a victory! Thanks to everyone for their great feedback. It's now looking like the most probable path forward for us is to have public betting by default + true anonymous betting on all markets. In my view, this is basically the best of both worlds.

@SG I'd personally be okay with bets being pseudo-anonymous and be public after resolution. I wonder what others think about this

I would love to be able to see at a glance how many transactions are people updating earlier bets vs making new bets.

predictedYES 2y

YES @Austin, the question phrasing makes this seem more controversial than the actual proposal? That the *default* willl be public rather than ALL betting being public - and that market creators (not bettors) can toggle the market to anonymous?

predictedYES 2y

@AkhilWable Yeah, you're right that "Do you want betting to be public by default" would have been a better operationalization. At the time I posed this, we didn't have plans to support the technical side of anonymous betting, but Stephen came up with what looks like a workable plan! I'm going to leave this phrasing as is, but for people following along: there's currently a proposal to make true anonymous betting, opt-in. (Not sure if it'll be on the market level or the bettor level, though)

predictedYES 2y

@Austin Ok, makes sense. I personally think there are good reasons to only allow the creator to make this choice (simplicity, market purpose etc.), but don't feel that strongly.

predictedYES 2y

FWIW, one more reason not to support anonymous betting: it makes leaderboards & tournaments less good. Imagine I'm super interested in "who's the best AI Timelines predictor" to get their take on AI policy; then I put up a big cash prize on who does the best on 10 AI timeline markets. If anonymous betting is allowed, then the leaderboards can't reflect who actually did a good job of making that prediction. What if you could reveal your position afterwards, to claim the prize? Then that runs into the selective enforcement problem; I could bet YES and NO to be net-neutral, but then reveal the position that the market actually resolved to, giving the appearance of "being a good trader". I guess a fix is that for leaderboard/tournament markets, you just say "no anonymous betting allowed". This argues even more towards a sharp division between "public" and "private" markets IMO, where only the former is eligible for leaderboards/tournaments, and only the latter for anonymity

predictedNO 2y

@Austin Couldn't we just have a toggle of "buy publicly" versus "buy anonymously"?

@JoyVoid I'd like this toggle; maybe it's an option that the market creator can set per market, and you decide whether to use that market or create another one with the opposite property? (You can always reveal your own bet in an anonymous market.) Or perhaps Manifold sets it per topic category, it seems like people want personal markets to be more anonymous than markets on other topics.

YES

Some people will quit if bets become visible in the UI, but if Manifold keeps growing that will happen at some point with a third party site using the API, so I think that just delays the pain.

predictedNO 2y

@MartinRandall Two things about this: 1. I don't know that I would necessarilly quit if there's a third party API. It's the pseudonymous argument again: I'm just less of a jerk for betting "Yes, you will breakup"/"No, you are not going to finish your project" if the person having the market has to go through a non-cannonical process to find out. Even if it's simple to use, it's just that by doing extra steps, they are taking their own responsabilities in finding out, it's no longer me publicly saying "I don't believe you" for everyone to hear. The social dynamics involved feel different. 2. Less certain on that one, but if it becomes that popular, it'll have probably partially transfered to crypto/shared multi-accounts/private options that will make this less of an issue. Not as central as the first one.

NO I'm considering quitting if it does. Starting a new account from scratch is such a hassle, especially since the new one only has 10 M$ for some reason, it's impossible to build trust with a pseudoanonymous account, and I have to use a pseudoanonymous account otherwise I'd give away a pattern. Honnestly, just having a toggle of "publisize this bet" (or just keeping the current system) is enough. I do agree we need to know what the author of the market bet on, however. For engagement, I think others would also quit if it became public, maybe this is another market to open?

predictedNO 2y

Thinking back on this, I'm starting to change my mind. The bets are already public in some cases (smart money, etc), and a similar argument to what I'm using can be said about "You shouldn't have looked into the betting history" Not yet changing my vote, but thinking on it. I'm still unconvinced, as I'm aware of trivial inconvenience, but less so than I was prior.

YES Changing my vote to YES in light of recent points I had not considered

predictedYES 2y

Actually, retracting my vote in order to ask for some clarification: - If there is a toggle, and it's set as "public" on default, does that count as bets being public? - If the bets are hidden while the market is open, but public after resolution, does that count as the bets being public? I am in favor of both, and very much the latter, so my vote will go to whichever it counts as.

YES With the site as it is now, YES. For things like "MM for Teams" and other incarnations, maybe not.

NO In many cases I'd be happy to have my bets public, but it adds friction to have to consider every time if there's any reputational risk to making a given bet.

YES Most people are lurkers and won't bet betting. So, we'll have to feed off the scraps of the bettor-creators. Let the people see the bets! Also: you can just bet pseudonymously.

NO I've heard two main categories of arguments for this change: 1. Anyone sufficiently motivated can look up the information in the API even if the UI doesn't display it, so better to just show it in the UI. 2. Visibility of bets will increase social engagement. Counterpoint to 1: trivial inconveniences have substantial effects. Most instances of privacy/security in the real world are about making it difficult to find information, not guaranteeing that it is impossible to find. I think it is perfectly reasonable to explain that bets are not guaranteed private but also not displayed on the site, and there is nothing dishonest about that. Counterpoint to 2: although this might be true for some users, there is also a population of users who will be less interested in engaging with bets publicly displayed. Some potential compromise ideas: - Market creators could opt when creating a market whether to display all bets for that market publicly or not - Individual users could opt to display all their bets publicly. - Bets could be publicly displayed after the market is resolved (as the leaderboard features already do this to some extent). Basically, the framing of this proposal is a false dichotomy. Hold off on arguing for solutions until you have thoroughly discussed the problems!

@blaisewh I agree, mentioned this in another comment but I think it's basically the Linkedin problem. Linkedin publicly alerts people if you've viewed their profile. As a result, most people I know do much less random clicking around than they otherwise would. The decision is no longer, "do I want to view this person's profile", but "do i want to view this person's profile" AND "do i want them to see that i did". Similarly, I think if the default manifold bet decision becomes "do i want to bet on this + let everyone see that i did" you'll see less betting.

YES That way we can sus out the insider trading. See also SneakySly's comment.

NO Private market or private bet support is a preferable endstate. While passing through all bets being public on the way isn't terrible for any use I personally make in particular, I don't think it's the desirable end state.

predictedYES 2y

Yeah there's some room for interpretation on what YES means here. I agree that a desirable end state includes something like private markets, and perhaps the something like anonymous wallets. But I'm not sure how much work it'd take to get to that end state

YES Public bets make the entire game more interesting. Accumulating Mana is reputational, except everything is private so I don't know the neat plays other players are making. With private betting I don't know the moves of anyone. If it's public I can look back and see the flow of mana and how people approached markets. This isn't particularly close in my opinion.

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