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Thanks for all your feedback, everyone! I was very tempted to try this out—if only to make this market resolve yes and become #1 in my league—but the vast backlash this idea generated was enough to hold me back this time. I'm still not totally convinced by your arguments, but I can't deny that instituting such a tax is not a top business priority right now, and the cost of gratifying my curiosity could be pretty high...

welp. time discount wise. my defection doesn't look good. just 2 hours left on Pacific time before May 13th.

Loans are a brilliant idea.

This... this is an abomination.

I defected from NO to YES, not because I would enjoy seeing negative rates on my cash balances but because I feel like Manifold is targeting engagement of a broader more casual market base than the math/finance eggheads, and that this broader market base might not evade the tax or be as offend by the tax as the math/finance people and may change their behavior in the way @SG is seeking to influence Manifold Traders, and because, you know, "SCIENCE." The fastest way to find out is to try it and see what happens.

I think this decision might be more aptly based upon the composition of the user base interest vectors than necessarily the very vocal discussion in this market. I am sure they have demographic sort of info on the DAU to see how diverse their user base interest is.

@ShitakiIntaki That's totally legit, but will they do it in 8 hours?

@MatthewRitter The only have to announce it, and it would be the most likely time to announce it. (i.e. a time decay model isn't entirely appropriate here)

@Mira Oh shoot, I might be out of the loop: Is there a big release announcement on the calendar?

@ShitakiIntaki I agree. I think this would be a very bad idea and why I merely hold a symbolic 1 share of NO.

playing with this idea more:

what if the tax was on uninvested mana > 20% of portfolio value or 500, whichever is higher, AND it went to paying off loans?

would that: be effective? and palatable?

seems to me it still allows whales to whale and users to keep discretionary liquidity for limit orders, adaptability, etc. it stops being quite as effective of a sink, but it does reduce the raw size of inflation and fills out some of the utility loans are missing

Focus all energy on 2X the DAU and all your problems will be solved. Problems about market resolutions, liquidity injections etc. Just get more users, that's all. Aggresively market, learn from whales vs minnows that aggressive marketing works -> go to reddit and post in comments different markets as part of a reply. Make posts. Keep active engagement. Pay users bounties to advertise manifold. Just grow the userbase and you'll be fine.

You need to focus on only 2 things rn (for survival and basic growth)

1. More good markets

   1. Already seeing improvement.

   2. Keep at it!

2. More users

   1. V bad performance. virtually no growth. The existing users stick, new have a good retention rate, so WHY ARE YOU NOT GETTING NEW USERS? >half of them will stick!!

   2. Get 3000 people to join manifold, 1500 will stick around!! Thats huge rn!

   3. devs dont have time then get 1 person for advertisement.

3. Manifold is amazing and i'd love if it sticks around. I don't wanna see it , and all the effort go down. User growth over anything (except quality of markets)

Just get more users, that's all

similarly: want to make money? just get lots of dollars and put them in your bank account. duh.

Aggresively market, learn from whales vs minnows that aggressive marketing works -> go to reddit and post in comments different markets as part of a reply

wvm marketing worked because wvm was interesting and dramatic and people found it such. posting random markets in reddit comments is ... you should try it to see it fail, but i don't expect it to work that well. it'what would work is just advertising the story of WvM more.

Pay users bounties to advertise manifold

my guess is if you do this, people will not advertise well (ie their posts will not get >100 upvotes)

@jacksonpolack not at all the same thing, even if it sounds like a "oooh nice one" moment. It's not the same thing because there's a LOT of low - hanging fruit when it comes to getting more users for manifold. There's not a lot of low-hanging leveraged fruit when it comes to making money.

Also, manifold is currently not making a lot of efforts into growing the userbase, they're making efforts into improving the platform and smoothing things out with their design, policies etc. So, devs are constrained, but there's all this userbase that'd love manifold if only they knew about it. So many gamer communities, so many science-related subreddits which would find it useful to track using manifold.

I'm not saying go out and blindly post as if inflamatory, it's strategic, which is why you need to hire someone to do this full time, it's not an easy job

@jacksonpolack "similarly: want to make money? just get lots of dollars and put them in your bank account"

Yeah, that's actually how it works. Except getting lots of dollars usually requires giving away lots of time and energy in exchange. When it comes to getting new users, 1 "portal to manifold" can keep giving users for a long time. Instead of thinking like money, think about appreciating investments

@Dreamingpast the new user retention isn't thaat good right now, closer to 15% I think. It used to be worse until we fixed a ton of onboarding stuff.

We did try a bunch of marketing and lead-gen stuff, including making content, outreach to subreddits and gamer communities. none of it has really panned out yet. Subreddit mods are strict and a lot of advertising platforms are allergic to things that sound like gambling. On the other hand, most of our wins are famous people with big audiences promoting us without us asking them to.

I think marketing is important, and we should be doing it more, but it trades off against work to make manifold more fun and informative.

@Sinclair oh i was very much mistaken about the new user retention in that case. I thought i saw much higher numbers on the stats page but apparently i misunderstood that

Users of Manifold are looking for opportunities to make Confident Bets. This is what to maximize.

I'm not sure mudflation matters. Having less cash makes it easier to get high percentage returns without moving the market so much.

It's funny learning finally the term ("mudflation") for what I was paid to manage 10 years ago.

If tax on uninvested cash is implemented, it can easily be avoided by someone creating a bunch of guarantee to resolve Yes market. Anyone with a bunch of cash and want to avoid the tax can just bet Yes on those markets. (To avoid counterparty risk, user can create their own market and invest cash in their own market too. That gives them the flexibility of taking out the cash whenever they wanted)

Why would we do something that our users hate, to solve a problem that none have complained about? Sounds like a big waste of time.

@ian I might just lose mana in this market because.... Science.

@ian fwiw, I've seen companies do stupider things. I think this would be bad and annoying. Not catastrophic. Id pay someone a bounty to aid me in figuring out how to dodge the tax, similar to how I pay an accountant to dodge tax

But I do think companies should follow Obama's supposed foreign policy doctrine of "don't do stupid shit"

/MartinRandall/will-manifold-add-a-penaltyfee-for

You would need this as well if you went in this direction, or we would sweep our balances into a nightly n/a market, so you might as well implement the n/a fee first.

@MartinRandall users can create a guarantee to resolve Yes market and invest in it themselves if there's a N/A fee. So N/A fee doesn't solve the problem