Will manifold.love be seen as a mistake by the Manifold community at the end of 2023?
140
2.2K
2.2K
resolved Jan 11
Resolved
YES

At the end of the year I will make a community poll asking the following question:

"Was manifold.love a mistake?"

This market will resolve after the poll has been up for a week based on poll results. If the poll is somehow compromised due to botting or some other untrustworthy methods, I will work to count non-bots only.

I will NOT bet in this market, and will NOT bet in the poll.

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*lightbulb what if this whole Manifold place were someone's passion project lightbulb occam's razor

I like this thought. It would mean Zuck didn't totally enshittify the WHOLE internet and it's not just Old Internet People who can still create spaces that promote intelligent online conversations.

predicted YES

Okay now that we established this. Why is Manifold still pouring valuable dev time and advertising money into this failed product? I get that Manifold is a startup and sometimes they throw shit at the wall to see if it sticks (although I don't understand why they do this if they already have a successful product). But then why do they keep throwing the same

shit and just hope it will work.

predicted NO

@Shump It’s James’ passion project. The app has the potential to both find him a relationship and introduce a broader group of people to the pragmatic power of prediction markets. I agree that it was a mistake but I don’t think that it has yet failed per se.

A lot of results merchanting in these comments. A decision is a mistake if it's poorly made: wrong framing, or incompletely thought through, impulsive/emotional, flies in face of evidence, etc. But even if you make only rational, evidence-based decisions with 95% chance of success you'll get bad result one time out of 20. Manifold.love not meeting its goals -- I don't see agreement on what those goals should be either -- isn't the same as baving been a mistake

Not sure if term "results merchanting" is widely used outside competitive duplicate bridge but if it's not it should be.

predicted YES

@ClubmasterTransparent everyone told them it was a bad idea and that it would fail. It went ahead anyway. Then it failed.

predicted NO

@ClubmasterTransparent “One who evaluates bids and plays according to their outcome, rather than to their intrinsic merit” (Wiktionary)

predicted NO

@ClubmasterTransparent I was pessimistic about Manifold Love since inception, as were several users. All of the major flaws were predictable, and there are critical markets and Discord messages dating (ha) back months to prove it. You don’t even have to leave this page; just scroll down to the early comments on this market.

@oh Thanks -- I didn't mean there was ONLY results merchanting.

Poll results are in!

Resolving YES.

Poll is up:

bought Ṁ100 of YES

I hope people will vote honestly and not try to game the poll since that hurts the predictive value of these questions

Starting manifold.love was a mistake for "Manifold the hypergrowth startup", not a mistake for "Manifold, the rationalist community infrastructure team". From the second perspective there were plenty of execution mistakes, maybe even fatal ones, but the idea has merits.

bought Ṁ50 YES from 38% to 40%
predicted YES

Less DAUs than NO betters right now

predicted NO

The current featureset is a dead end, but from what I've heard in the community call they're going to add normal features (open questions, match percentages) too.

bought Ṁ1 of NO

@ManifoldLove has a profit of Ṁ71,000 at the moment, so maybe it's NOT a mistake! Wait a second... @ManifoldLove bets NO on all of the relationship questions, so its profitability should be inversely correlated to likelihood that manifold.love might actually produce lasting relationships. So, yeah.

(I might be a little salty because that dumb bot is in my League and it's basically impossible for me to compete against it)

predicted NO

@DanielParker @SirSalty We need to remove ManifoldLove from the League.

@DanielParker I would give it a 99% chance to be removed by the end of the month. You should make a market about it!

@DanielParker A bot is in a league? Why is this bot privileged above all the Silicon League bots? It's almost like the humanity-ending AI is trojan-horsing everyone and sneaking in as a bot betting on dating relationships, while some fools were hoping for hot virtual sex bot girl.

predicted NO

Does this resolve to the majority result, or to PROB?

@IsaacKing Majority.

I think given the projected 10%+ chance of 1,000 DAUs in a few months it's hard to say it's a mistake ex ante.

2 traders bought Ṁ100 NO
bought Ṁ100 of NO

@MartinRandall If I had already merged my ‘react to a comment with a bet’ PR I would’ve bet in support of this comment

predicted YES

@MartinRandall luckily hindsight is 20/20

bought Ṁ0 of YES

It will have been worth it for the Applebees market if nothing else

predicted NO

@Odoacre I think our users are more cognizant of hindsight bias than average 🤞

bought Ṁ10 NO at 39%
predicted YES

@ian first of all, the reply with a bet feature looks really cool. And second, I think it's really cool that the team tried out a direction that seemed promising and as such will not and should not see this attempt as a mistake. I also think that the manifold community at large doesn't really care and would be pretty neutral to it and won't call it a mistake.

4 traders bought Ṁ80 NO
bought Ṁ10 YES at 38%
predicted YES

@MartinRandall DAUs is not a good metric for whether something failed or not in this case. I think it will be considered a failure if the amount of relationships it develops is very low.