Resolves according to https://manifold.markets/stats
An engaged user is a user who has traded in, commented on, or created a question on at least 2 out of 7 days in each of the past 3 weeks.
Addendum Sep 13th:
Market resolution will not respect manipulation attempts that violate Manifold's
community guidelines - this means use of bugs, an army of alts, botting, etc. Regular
collusion and other kinds of manipulation that don't violate the community guidelines are
fine.
In the event that community-guidelines-violating manipulation occurs, I will attempt to
correct for it and be transparent about how I have done so.
🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ92,189 | |
| 2 | Ṁ46,705 | |
| 3 | Ṁ7,606 | |
| 4 | Ṁ1,256 | |
| 5 | Ṁ897 |
@Soaffine Their engagement ended as soon as Chris announced who they were, and PC has offered people mana to drop. Why wouldn’t he pay them too?
If I didn’t say anything, I’m sure we’d be seeing a donation to Myria soon, and all those alts returning on the 2nd of sept
@Gen 🤷
It had not occurred to me that an army of alts might be used to manipulate the price of the market, by misleading people into betting more, before dropping their activity. I only anticipated alts being used to manipulate the outcome.
I wouldn't assume PC was was behind the alts, since he created an unlisted bounty market trying to pay them to stop, and that wouldn't have been necessary if he controlled them. Staging the attempt to ask them to stop (which appeared unsuccessful, you can see PC using an alt to reclaim his own bounty when nobody else claimed it) would be implausibly many dimensions of chess IMHO (but...I have been wrong to assume people wouldn't add dimensions to their chess games before).
He claims to have been responsible for them stopping, but I'm not sure that's true - might just be cover for the fact that other users he paid to be inactive for some reason are being paid in the form of Myira donations (the same form in which he was going to pay the alts to stop) - so when he pays them at the end of the month, he'd like us to think that was him paying the alts to stop, which would be less dodgy than paying other users to be inactive (which he claims he had no success with - but who knows).
To be clear, I started interacting with almost-engaged users and their markets all over the site trying to increase engagement as soon as I found out PC had decided to push his big red button. Prior to that I thought there had been no shenanigans (but I can't know!).
I agree with @Gen's sentiment all up and realise there are additional reasons to make sub-Kelly-sized bets (a big part of my betting strategy recently has been predicated on the idea that people don't make large enough bets here when they are confident), so I'd like to keep things smaller in the future.
Big markets end up with people trying to cut deals and it isn't worth the drama, it's not about betting or forecasting anymore. Or even really who can rig the best, it just becomes politics.
I don't think anyone really wronged anyone here, it's just that it wasn't what I expected so if I don't want more of it, I'll have to avoid it myself. I don't want to have to pick sides and forge alliances, and participate in a race to the bottom of who can dedicate the most resources to rigging a market. Even if markets are getting rigged and others are in a rigging arms race, I don't want to get a message from them asking me to pick sides or whatever. If I'm about to lose a big market I don't want someone messaging me offering to sell insurance. If I'm about to win I don't want someone else messaging me asking to buy insurance. I would prefer we just let the market play out (rigged or not), have our balances and profit be grossly different than they were a month ago, get demoted/promoted in leagues or whatever, and be happy.
@chrisjbillington Yeah to clarify, I’m annoyed, but I don’t see it as cheating. It’s totally within the expectations when playing these markets. If there wasn’t an amendment made halfway I wouldn’t have mentioned anything at all, but it seemed like there was active effort to shame/prevent manipulation to increase numbers while the other side were comfortable going nuclear
I compare it to Levi’s markets because it felt like a hustle. There was more at play than tracking user status, and with my sole reason for playing to be incentivising my efforts to increase users, it is extremely disheartening to find people incentivised to actively work to decrease those figures.
Public announcement 📣
As someone very invested in this market, mostly for meme reasons, the behind the scenes activity to manipulate this figure has really killed the vibe
People are being paid not to make actions, people are being specifically targeted to take actions (where possible), but ultimately, the figure has been meaningless from the beginning as someone can easily run 20accounts (or contact someone who is doing that) and have them stop being active right before the finish line.
The whole market has been filled with this, it’s very cringe, and the cherry on top was the correction/change to the formula.
Stay away from these markets; it’s not as it appears on face value, it’s a trap. I’d put it on a similar tier to Levi’s shenanigans, honestly, but it’s all hidden rather than being on display as an obvious troll. Nobody can tell what they’re getting into when they play these markets
That’s not to say it can’t still be fun, but don’t assume you can predict it for a second.
@Gen FYI I’m posting this now so that it doesn’t come across as sore-losery; regardless of how it ticks over today, it has been a total shit show behind the scenes
@Gen I agree with a lot of what's said here, and I think a useful constructive criticism is that a much more robust metric for engagement would be of benefit both for tracking engagement as tbe term might more colloquially mean and for providing a target for a market to consist in. Hopefully something of that sort arrives!
@BenjaminShindel I was busy and just checked the numbers, and we're at 1148 with 1h45m to go. Average is maybe 1 per hour, so it's going down to the wire.
@BenjaminShindel For real that's what I do. "An engaged user is a user who has traded in, commented on, or created a question on at least 2 out of 7 days in each of the past 3 weeks." I download that data using the supabase API, and calculate how many users satisfy that definition so far today. Today is 1148 so far, tomorrow 1125.
(only 1147 shown in this plot - as it's only up to the end of the last hour and there has been one more since)
@BenjaminShindel One fun fact is that if we get exactly two more engaged users today, then @Soaffine's bets earlier today that we wouldn't will have been self-defeating, as they caused her to become engaged.