I personally am happy and I agree with the statements that:

• the mana-only site seems to be much cheaper/easier to run

• there is already Kalshi and Polymarket, so Manifold seems to be needing its own niche, which I guess could be being playmoney-only

• real money betting still seems a bit predatory, I guess…

Basically in case Manifold wants to be sort of a “Wikipedia for future events”, then I personally am not sure if there is a place for a real-money betting, like at all. I mean, Wikipedia really doesn’t have real money involved in any way, yet it seems to work quite fine…

@McLovin I think the culture on this site is conducive to that. There seems to be a general air of trying to find the truth together with a bit of whimsy and meming mixed in to keep things lighthearted.

Generally speaking, it seems like people here are good sports. We can take an L with grace, and we can take a W with humility.

I am a person who wants all the benefits of calibrated news without the risk of a financially crippling gambling addiction. If Manifold leans into the "social media as news, but done right" aspect of the site, that would greatly appeal to me.

To further expand on this, if Manifold can appeal to the same people who chase likes on other social media platforms, except Manifold socially construes mana as the equivalent to those likes, it might strike gold in the social media landscape.

@Quroe I wanted to test the new Dislike UI, so I disliked this comment, but unfortunately I don't see a way to un-dislike it. I do disagree partly (you can have various measures (eg. cap on gambled money as a function of user's income) for making the risk of gambling addiction a non-issue, but I don't see how the site will survive without sweepstakes), but I would not dislike a comment just because I disagree even if I disagreed majorly as I believe that has a bad effect on discourse (people won't say authentic stuff if it is a bit weird/non-conformist), so I'm leaving this comment to manually "un-dislike".

@koadma I think they got rid of the dislike button for whatever reason, so I can't see it anymore anyways. Haha

I'm hoping for this thread to be a good discussion. Feel free to disagree with me. It makes the conversation more fun.

Sweepstakes brought in revenue. No one is going to spend real money on Mana. I liked how you get people in with Mana, and then eventually they buy sweepstakes money.

You have to consider that this poll is made up of CURRENT USERS. You will not survive if you don't bring in NEW users.

@HillaryClinton

You have to consider that this poll is made up of CURRENT USERS

This was a strong argument during the original backlash to the pivot—the goal was to appeal to an entirely new community, so anger from the current user base was inevitable & fine. But it's less persuasive today? The site (& staff attention) has been wholly devoted to running sweepstakes for 6+ months. If it's still not popular with the actual users of the site, that's a bad sign? (I am polling a bunch of people who currently directly benefit from sweepstakes subsidies!)

Sweepstakes brought in revenue.

I have no clue how viable it'll be to return to play money, but I am personally very confident that sweepstakes was doomed. The enormous growth of Polymarket & Kalshi meant that there just wasn't much purpose for the sweepstakes model. Why go through all these complicated hoops when you can just use Kalshi to bet on the Super Bowl? Sweepstakes was trying to break into a brutally competitive space. Sportsbooks will pay hundreds in advertising per new user acquisition, Kalshi/Polymarket have enormous amounts of VC resources to spend before ever trying to make a profit (Polymarket still has no fees!). Manifold has a staff of ~4, & could barely keep the daily sports markets running with modest liquidity. There was no realistic plan on the table to scale that up enough to compete.

(And in practice, it wasn't even bringing in much revenue? Here's the stats page. ~$10k mana sales in the past month—that's not even much more than you saw in some months when the site was entirely play money, pre April 2024.)

The TL;DR financial pitch as I understand it is that a play money version of the site can be run cheaply. Sweepstakes was already extremely expensive to run, & it would have taken orders of magnitude more funding to possibly compete (assuming you think there's any point trying to compete under this strange legal framework when Kalshi can do the ~same thing directly). A cheap site has more time to figure out monetization, and the target is a whole lot closer.

FWIW, where I do agree is that the #1 thing Manifold needs to is grow. DAUs are too low, and if they increase it'll make any path to monetization massively easier.

@Ziddletwix

FWIW, where I do agree is that the #1 thing Manifold needs to is grow. DAUs are too low, and if they increase it'll make any path to monetization massively easier.

I wonder how successful it would be as a "marketing" strategy to follow lots of famous people on social media and respond to claims they make with a link to a market about their claim. Create the market first, give it a little time to equilibrate, then make the reply.

Would definitely want to start with a bias towards claims which are true. That is, where the intial market betting supports what they're saying. The idea isn't to play "haha, you're wrong!" but to get a positive association between the influencer's fans and manifold. Just don't post the social media link if it goes against them. This is mostly about not getting blocked or viewed as spam, tbh.

Once manifold gets some traction, could start mixing in a few borderline cases.

Can leave it to others to link to markets where the betting is strongly against the claim.

@DanHomerick

I wonder how successful it would be as a "marketing" strategy to follow lots of famous people on social media and respond to claims they make with a link to a market about their claim.

FWIW the Manifold Twitter account already does ~this fairly often, although in many cases it's linking to a market showing their claim as improbable. They could aim to do the supportive version more often, although it's hard enough to get traction and I'm not sure "Yup, that plausible claim is plausible" is as good for engagement as "I bet that's unlikely", but who knows.

In any case, David @SirSalty is already experimenting with different Twitter strategies and IIUC giving users chances to try stuff with the Twitter account. So if you have suggestions, I'm sure he'd hear them out, although reply-guying famous people already seems to be a staple FWIW.

(In practice, the main constraint is just having the market up for a claim—running & operationalizing markets is a lot of work! If people made markets about viral tweets I'm sure the account would happily post them).

@Ziddletwix Good response, thank you for taking the time to do so.

My idea would be to somehow partner with Kalshi or similar to run a "paper money" version of their bets. Either that or you need grants from places like Open Philanthropy like Metaculus, which I imagine are very hard to get.

You've probably already thought of these though. I'm sorry I don't have a more creative idea.

@HillaryClinton

You've probably already thought of these though

oh to clarify I have no special insight into their plans, only what they've said on the Discord + my own opinions from using the site too much for a while!

My idea would be to somehow partner with Kalshi or similar to run a "paper money" version of their bets.

FWIW I do think partnering with Kalshi is a great idea, if possible. They sponsored Manifest last year, so it's not totally out of the question—the advertising benefits were much more direct for "prediction market conference", but still it's at least proof of concept that manifold has a small but concentrated user base of prime Kalshi potential customers so totally a good area to explore if ppl can brainstorm anything that Kalshi would actually want (as now that they're big, they can get attention pretty easily)

When they announced the pivot, Kalshi couldn't create new markets, no one had heard of Polymarket, and even PredictIt looked like it was about to permanently close down. It seems like the political and legal environment for prediction markets in the US has improved considerably.

@HillaryClinton I found that the hook was the opposite, where the sweeps draws you in and then you get engaged with the mana. I (and others) got drawn in by the proposition of “check out this site, you could win money and you get a bit for free!” only to stick around and see that mana leaderboards are kinda fun. I don’t know anyone who was drawn in by the appeal of forecasting with play money, but then decided to spend a little on gambling. But maybe that’s just me.

@GleamingRhino Why Manifold and not Metaculus?

@HillaryClinton a couple of reasons:

1: I’m just not very aware of Metaculus as a platform. I had never heard of it when I signed up.

2: It seems like they take themselves too seriously. I’m not actually big on the whole rationalist/forecasting/effective altruism part of things, and a quick look at their website didn’t seem to be something that interested me.

3: Manifold was offering a pretty generous sign up bonus at the time.

Voted NO, mostly because I'm worried about the future of the site. I'd hate to see this place die for lack of a successful business model, and I don't think they have one right now.

The current model of "you only pay when buying mana" isn't going to work. If I'm winning, I'm happy and I get to play more for free. If I'm losing, then I'm annoyed and feeling down. Why would I want to pull out my wallet to resupply my mana when I'm feeling like that?

Real gambling has the hook that winning big could solve all the person's financial problems (and since they're a degen gambler, of course they have financial problems...). Also, gets you a wild night of hookers and blow.

Can't buy hookers and blow with mana.

I honestly can't decide. On the one hand it was fun to be able to win actual money and I'll miss that. On the other hand the statement about "ignoring the core audience in favor of moonshots" hit hard haha. It's nice to see them make a pivot away from novelty towards core experience.

Mixed so didn't vote. I was never able to use them as a non-USian, and they definitely drew the air and mana away from topics I was interested in. So I'm happy that play money is king again and hopeful that stuff I'm interested in will see more views.

But this doesn't feel like a move from a position of strength from the Manifold team. I'm not saying Manifold is in a death spiral, but it's also not twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. My concern is that Manifold will just bimble along from new idea to new idea, never gaining any additional traction but managing to drive away a few long-term users at a time.

My concern is that Manifold will just bimble along from new idea to new idea, never gaining any additional traction but managing to drive away a few long-term users at a time.

I have this concern as well, but doesn't this particular move represent exactly the opposite? Dropping a new idea in favor of spending energy improving the core experience?

@MattP the core experience, imo, is really driven by "lots of users to engage with". Sweeps didn't bring in the users, so that's a shame. But polishing the core product alone probably doesn't do that either. I don't doubt their desire to attract more users and make Manifold even better, but I frequently doubt the outcome will come about.

I couldn't use them, but wouldn't have even if I could. Play money has lots of advantages, and real money gambling already exists.

My only concern is: how are they going to make money now? Seems like they'll have to make the mana system worse somehow.

I feel like if they had enabled sweeps on more markets, they would have seen more usage, but maybe they swept all they could? At any rate, I would have loved to see more "real" money markets than what's available at Kalshi.

@WilliamGunn Yeah, it seemed like a lot of work for Manifold employees to keep up with clarifications and resolutions across all the sweeps markets.

@WilliamGunn I think the reverse would have been better. A limited ammount of sweeps markets at a time, at least while it hadn't caught on + the simplified app didn't come out. Would burn less cash in the pocket + more attention can be spent developing the product further.