If anyone were to make a serious attempt to build a manifold alternative, I would be willing to contribute a significant amount of time towards it for free.
If I contribute more than 40 hours towards a manifold alternative, this market will resolve YES.
With the pivot a lot of users are frustrated that play money betting is going away (myself included). While I understand why this decision was made, it’s unfortunate for myself and the people who enjoyed using play money.
I believe the pivot is necessary because play money prediction markets just aren’t profitable. But I believe a smaller organization not seeking a profit would be able to run a play money betting site more sustainably, and with much less overhead
Reasons to vote YES:
I have lots of software dev experience and have built web apps with 200k active users from scratch
I love doing side projects like this on top of my day job.
I think the pivot will add a lot of constraints to the ways mana is used, most of which are not known yet. A purely play money site would be free of those constraints, and I want to see that happen
Reasons to vote NO:
This would be a pretty big time commitment, and I’d only be interested if I had help from others in the community
I respect the Manifold team, and if for some reason they didn’t like us working a direct competitor, I’d likely step away from the project (although they didn’t have any issue with it in the past)
I do hop between projects a lot. I think this is a good idea now, but in a few weeks I might be less enthusiastic.
Also, here’s a related market, arb away!
1,000
3.00If you want to follow along we have a Discord! If you're interested in programming, beta testing, or just hanging out you can join here: https://discord.gg/r73Mmmy7JD
Update: I’ve been talking with a few others in the community about making a play money site we’ve temporarily dubbed “Manifork”. So far it’s been mostly discussing and figuring out if it’ll even be possible to make something decent within our time and budget constraints.
I’d say I’ve spent 5-10 hours already in the early discussions and research so far. This weekend we’re going to figure out some more details, and if all goes well we can start opening the project up to the community soon, so stay tuned!
@mckiev It’s actually not the play money going away that I’m upset about, it’s the knock-on effects of it.
If mana can be converted into real money, then Manifold has to be careful to not break any laws with it. This means a number of changes that make the site less fun. Specifically:
No more bounties
No transferring mana between users
Increased fees and other mana sinks
Increased competition with real money at stake
Market restrictions (this one hasn’t happened yet, but I’m expecting certain kinds of markets to be banned or restricted, such as death markets, political betting, or markets that resolve based on stocks)
Also, I like the community, and a lot of people are thinking of leaving, so I’d like to give them a place to go to.