Will Manifold reintroduce categories this week?
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Manifold previously allowed market creators to categorize their questions by category (e.g. business, science, etc.). We removed categories to focus on groups, but it seems like we might want to support both, as they solve different problems for users (i.e. discovering new markets versus participating in a community).
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I like a lot the idea of groups, especially to be able to have groups with your friends or for a very particular topic (cycling or World Cup vs sports), but I would like to be able to restrict the questions that I see to topics/groups too without having to subscribe to the groups. So maybe it would be enough to only have groups, but be able to hashtag a question to multiple groups (even doing it automatically by creating subgroups) and to have the ability of filtering the homepage by groups (not only by the ones that you are subscribed to) just like one could do for topics before.
I think the plan was to convert the previous categories to groups? Doesn't quite work for excluding personal markets, unless we laboriously have users add every personal market to a Personal group, and allow excluding groups.
The path forward seems to be following groups you are interested in, and seeing mostly just those markets.
@JamesGrugett Removing categories has definitely worsened the discoverability of relevant markets IMO. In order to filter by your interests you now need to: follow the groups you're interested in, check each one of your groups individually, and click past the "chat" tab an each. The homescreen is now generic for everyone, following a group doesn't surface its questions in the homescreen either.
The analogy of groups is confusing as well.
If they are sort of like "subreddits", why are we still allowing questions to be added without a group attached to them? As long as we do that AND remove categories, there will be a ton of "floating" questions with no way to filter between them. I don't like the idea of floating questions as they are very hard to discover.
The homescreen should be the main place for people to check whether there's new interesting questions, they shouldn't need to click through their individual groups. Short term, I'd bring back categories for now if it were up to me, and make it mandatory to either add a question to a group OR pick a category.
Medium term, you could:
Option 1 - Do it like old-school reddit. Manifold is based around groups, all questions belong to some group, and the "homepage" (by default) shows you only questions of groups you're following. Add all new users to a set of 10-15 default groups (probably the old categories, and migrate old questions to these groups). Let users filter markets by group in the homepage.
Option 2 - Keep both groups and categories. The homepage surfaces markets based on a ranking algorithm, with questions belonging to a group/user you're following getting ranked higher. Let users filter questions by group/tag/category in the homepage.
Option 3 - While groups still exist, don't base Manifold around them. The homepage is generic and centered around questions and can be filtered by category. Bring back the "following tab", and get that one to show questions from groups and users you're following.-
tl;dr:
- the homepage is the page that users check and drives discoverability of markets .removing categories means it's now fully generic.
- checking groups takes a bunch of clicks
- most new questions are now floating questions with neither a group or a category, which are very hard to discover once they leave the "new/24volume" filters.
- floating questions are bad: either force every question to belong to a group, or bring back categories