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Manifold shadow-bans markets they don't like. This market has been excluded from leagues. @DavidChee In the absence of communication, I am assuming malice. Positions tab also does not show.

Anything I can do to change your mind? I'm now very incentivized to do so 😅

@Joshua Considering a 20M purchase causes 443M in losses, no. This is not how a market should work.

@TravisLuckenbaugh Honest question, not a concern troll: what's wrong with markets working that way? That's normal for low-liquidity markets. Not every market is the market for AAPL shares or Treasury Bills.

I think this is sensible for a prediction market. If you buy 101 shares of YES claims at 40%, when you sell one share at 37%, that implies that you think 37% is a fair estimate of the probability. (If you didn't, you would be a buyer at 37% instead.) That means your new fair estimate of your remaining 100 shares is marked to market at 37%. You can't sell your 101st share at 37% and then expect the other 100 shares to be worth 40% still.

If you had US$101 and you sold US$1 to get S$0.75, your remaining US$100 will still trade at US$1 to S$0.75 because that Forex market is huge. (Of course, any spread from the market price will be the market-maker's fee for doing the transaction.)

Can you suggest a different way for these markets to work? Manifold could program its market-maker algorithms so prices are much more sticky, but at a certain point, market-maker-induced price stickiness can mess with the information getting factored into the price.

Regarding the liquidity to increase trading: I'm not sure that's bad either. The loans are there to make the effective discount rate close to zero. That means that long-term questions will be fairly priced. (If the discount rate is 5% per year, then a question that resolves as YES in 2100 should be properly priced at 0.7%. If Manifold gets the discount rate down to 0.5%, the price will be 60% -- which isn't great, but it's a lot better than 0.7%.)

One side effect of a low discount rate is that people will have less incentive to sell YES or NO tickets just to raise cash that can be invested in a more promising question. Selling YES or NO tickets for liquidity reasons rather than because you have new information will make the markets excessively noisy and unreliable.

Regarding the UI issues: I used to play on Foresight Exchange. The liquidity problems there were awful. the UI was bad. Security was terrible. I think the UI changes are slow enough and subtle enough that I just get used to them and enjoy them.

IMO, Manifold is doing very well, not just in comparison to the Foresight Exchange, but objectively.

Can you suggest a different way for these markets to work?

@FubbiQuantz Thank you for your question. Manifold's decisions frustrate me in a way that I feel a need to communicate rather that doing the smarter thing of just leaving.

Every item I'm complaining about has an answer that Manifold does not implement. I'm answering the points in reverse order because I realize the later grievances are actually the bigger ones.

Intelligent bets are overrun by people dumping mana on positions in between when information is announced and market is resolved.

The standard for a prediction bet is a window where betting is allowed to increase fairness between early betters and late betters. Manifold ignores this standard because having more markets "open" makes the site look bigger than it is.

Money is granted for betting to maintain the appearance of traffic.

Driving participation by giving money is a dark pattern designed to drive traffic. Flooring is the easiest to implement, easiest to understand alternative.

UI is re-arranged randomly for no reason.

Financial UIs stay consistent, even at the cost of staleness for a reason.

Buying causes you to show "profit".

Selling causes your balance to go down not up.

Loaning assets to maintain liquidity is a decision with trade-offs. Actual trading platforms do not default YES here for a reason. They still do the actual loaning when you say NO, eat the cost when it's a bad idea (because you sold something) and pocket the difference.

Finally:

IMO, Manifold is doing very well, not just in comparison to the Foresight Exchange, but objectively.

There is a betting market right now over whether Manifold will exceed 2023 daily users during 2023. You and I have very different definitions of "success". Random individual twitch channels have better (and bigger) prediction markets.

@TravisLuckenbaugh Thanks for providing such a long and thoughtful reply! It's pretty rare to get a response like this on the Internet!