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I was looking for this fee in the "fees" section of incoming bets on the API, but didn't see anything there. Is it just being subtracted more sneakily?

@MichaelWheatley It's a "transactional" fee not a "bet" fee. The latter is returned to traders if the market is N/A-ed (or would be, if we had fees); the former is not.

@SG I'd recommend changing this so that all fees are reversed for N/As, for two reasons:

• Emotionally N/As are already an anticlimax, and now you're making that worse by saying that everyone loses

• Irreversible fees break the conceptual cleanness of N/As: the closer N/As are to reversing everything, the closer you get to this cool feature where you can safely condition your reasoning on an assumption that an N/A will not happen. Especially in e.g. "if Russia uses a nuke will NATO retaliate" where we expect an N/A, I want to be able to just mentally inhabit the world where a nuke was definitely used, rather than also multiplying irreversible fees by the very large chance that a nuke is not used.

@BenjaminCosman That makes sense in the general case but not in the specific case of a M$0.1 transaction fee designed to deter bots from spamming our site.

The transaction fee actually reflects a real cost to our infrastructure, user attention, and site speed that exists even if the market is N/A'd. Reversing it for N/A'd markets sets the wrong incentives (on the margin, it means bots can spam more on conditional markets whose preconditions are unlikely to be met).

@SG But consider https://manifold.markets/LivInTheLookingGlass/amplified-odds-100x-will-a-nuclear-4acd2868830b (ignore the wiggles)
You would not want to bet on this market unless you expect to make at least $10 per bet conditional on not N/A.

(although one could argue that M$0.1 is negligible compared to the opportunity cost of locking up your mana for 2 weeks, and this fee doesn't break amplified odds markets because they were already broken)

Was this announced anywhere? It's a small enough fee for normal human participants that it doesn't really make a difference, but it still feels bad to me on principle that a 'hidden' fee was added without alerting me (I might easily have never seen this market).

@BenjaminCosman It is posted in the Updates channel on our Discord and will be announced in our next newsletter.

@SG Ok! I am satisfied, thank you :) For a similar but bigger change, I'd want to see advance warning, but I also understand that this is a new and rapidly evolving platform, so this is more "here's a consideration I want to make sure is on your radar" rather than "you are a shady company if you don't do this" :)

Does the fee currently go somewhere? If not, can it go to the subsidy?

I second this

To be clear, does this also apply to the API? If not, shouldn't it?

@LivInTheLookingGlass Yes, it applies to all trades.

Makes a ton of sense to me to have at least a tiny fee like this. Presumably the fee applies to all trades, bot or not, lest the bots be tempted to pose as humans using the website.

@dreev It does.

What if you reduce the fee? Is it still a YES?

@Yev Yes, reducing the fee but not removing it will count as YES.