Manifold Gold is a premium subscription plan for Manifold which will give you
A gold badge next to your name
Access to Loans, which give you 2% of your invested cash back each day (assuming we remove free access to this feature)
Algorithmic boosting to all your markets and comments (something like 20-50% more visibility)
Exclusive access to new or experimental features
More stuff we haven't thought of yet
It will cost something like $100 / year. (We'll probably let people pay in mana, but please answer the poll as if a credit card payment of $100 were the only option.)
Resolves YES if 25% or more respondents vote Yes. Poll closes on April 2 at 11:59 PT. I won't trade in this market (outside an initial ante bet).
I would pay more than $100/year, but I am a power user. I would particularly appreciate more visibility on my markets. I am a mediocre predictor, but am a contender for the top creator chart (top 10 at least, if I keep it up). I make markets because I want information. Getting more information is valuable to me and helps me refine my world view and is fun.
@LarsDoucet Don’t paywall Liam’s entirely tho. Also consider that creators and predictors are two different markets
It was already said, but I believe paywalling loans would harm quality of forecasts on long term market. I am new to the platform (cca 1 month) and my experience is that betting on longer term than cca 1 month locks too much mana to do it. I am betting on longer term questions only because of the loans.
@IsaacKing i think at some point there ought to be 2 tiers. One that is very cheap & paywall loans and has other capabilities discussed. Then another that is pricier & is meant for those with lower price sensitivity that has "bot creator", quick loans, no non-Manifold ads (if those were implemented). Need to take advantage of the high-paid software engineers in the Bay Area.
@chrisjbillington Another option instead of paygating Loans entirely, would be increasing the cash back rate for subscribers, i.e. increasing their effective leverage. "Double leverage for subscribers" sounds reasonable to me and potentially compelling as a selling point.
@SG This is a much better solution. Even with loans, long-term markets are having a hard time getting interest, and getting rid of loans entirely for 95%+ of users would make them even less accurate.
Worth noting that the super long term markets (>50 years) are having the opposite problem where people think they'll be dead by the time the market resolves, therefore spend their mana on bets they know won't win since they'll just get the mana back within a few months and won't care about losing it in 50 years. Increasing the loan rate might make this problem worse.
If you're looking for revenue streams: I'd happily spend mana (and thus have a reason to buy it with $) to boost visibility/trading on my markets. Ads are cool, I'm using them, I'd like if there were more. I also made a suggestion at https://manifold.markets/DeanValentine/will-manifold-markets-have-any-mech#pGeGPtwwxhBy62m3NxU7 re subsidized loans + algorithmic boost.
@DavidChee I'd probably support that as long as there were a full exemption to the extent of past net real-money mana purchases and at least a partial one for future real-money purchases. Maybe the exchange rate would be worse in the latter scenario as well, but a full loss of convertability would probably end most mana purchases among non-gold members.
@DavidChee It's not ideal, but there has to be a monetization plan at some point and I don't see any in the short/medium run that are both realistic and won't degrade the experience for non-paying users in some fashion.