A very, very weak NO, but I could be convinced of YES.

The main reason I think this is a NO is because there have been real dates facilitated by manifold.love (according to this blogpost, there have been "51 first dates, 16 second dates, and 9 third dates"). Also, just because the home page looks cool and makes everyone feel personally legible and seen as a human being.

The reasons I lean towards YES are: Dates are really rare! I personally got exactly zero. Also most of the love markets stayed at very low probabilities. (And for good reason: most of them resolved NO afterward!) There are not enough cishet women/girls for many of the thirsty, lonely cishet men/boys (eg me) on the website to get decent not-terrible matches. Also I'm a little surprised that y'all haven't experimented with making platonic in-person friendships, even though these are much easier and more common, and the mechanics to form them is very similar as well.

I see a clear path to success. Give it a few more months!

We're starting to master the marketing game. @Gen is figuring out how to do low cost, targeted ads, and @goblinodds is has just started a Manifold Love twitter account that is gaining traction.

We grew 10% in the last 12 days to 1,100 profiles.

Secondly, the product is getting better. We made the right call to implement compatibility questions, which users like. There's low-hanging fruit to make the product better after a lot of feedback (add likes, add friends). Unfortunately I've had my time split among a bunch of things so I haven't made as much progress here as I want.

Thirdly, I still think play money prediction markets will work. We just need the right combination of simplicity, liquidity, and a lack of insider knowledge — all of which is possible and all of which the markets lack today.

Lastly, the idea is fundamentally good. The dating market is missing an app with public profiles. It's soo fun to try to matchmake for your friends. Endorsements are pure joy. And the public nature makes it a fantastic companion app to Twitter.

Even if we don't literally hit 1000 daily active users by Feb 14th we can get pretty far.

A dating site like this is really only viable once we hit a critical mass of users. And we're, like, about to get there. So strap yourself in. I think 100x growth is possible this year.

@JamesGrugett I think it's a mistake because I expect it to make Manifold worse as a prediction market platform (by shifting the user distribution towards casual bettors who add very little information to markets). (Yeah yeah at large scale they're just suckers who add liquidity but Manifold isn't at large scale yet)

@JamesGrugett dumb question. How do you guys deal with the extreme sparcity of the predictions?

@MP there are at best 1/(n-1) couples. You see that you get the opposite of network effects here. And we know how bad prediction market deal with very unlikely events. See: /MP/this-market-has-a-1-probability-of

@JamesGrugett manifold.love has taken off more than I expected it to already; I feel like I've already heard a few heartwarming success stories of people finding matches on the platform! though it's funny how much of it is selection bias from the sorts of people who sign up for manifold.love

I've heard dating in San Francisco is terrible, and I'm thinking maybe that's why the dating app market felt more disruptable than it is for the Manifold team.

Niche of a niche. Expected results follow.

it probably won't go anywhere but it's worth a shot I suppose

It genuinely baffles me that they actually made it. Genuinely feels like a throwaway gag that you see in some flavor of dystopic satire

I told them it was a failure ex-ante. The arguments are plenty. No argument like "ohh, hindsight is 20/20" will convince me that the expected value was anything but very low

The opportunity cost of starting investing heavily in making manifold politics great is a strong YES contributor for me.

Strong YES.

Allow me to make the case for YES.

Let's start with the fact that right now, manifold.love is a failure. Only barely above 1,000 signed up users. Much less actually active. Not enough to have a reasonable dating pool. That's despite the developer's best efforts.

However, mistake is a harder thing to demonstrate than failure. It needs to have been possible to see without hindsight, and it needs to not be have been worth the opportunity cost. I'll start with the opportunity cost because that's easier. Manifold is in early development stages, and is high-growth. When you have such success, you don't just pivot off to try some other random stuff, you have to stick to what you're good at. There are many opportunities for improving Manifold Markets.

About hindsight, see how high the mistake market was there to begin with, even with "mistake" being a high bar. See how all the other markets about success were heavily bet down quickly. There were clear issues with the idea to begin with. It's not clear why would people be interested in and capable of predicting other's relationships. It's not clear why you would want to spend more time on that rather than on your own matches. Plus, the questions that you had to answer to create your profile initially were really bad. I think many of us knew that it is going to fail, even if we hoped it wouldn't.

The purpose of this poll is for the following market:
https://manifold.markets/SneakySly/will-manifoldlove-be-seen-as-a-mist?r=U25lYWt5U2x5