Will "Manifold Dating" reach 1000 daily active users (7d average) by Feb 14, 2024?
16% chance. Manifold is mulling a new product, perhaps hosted at manifold.love, which takes aim at the dating market.
The site would feature one prediction market per dating profile that asks: "Who will I date for 6 months?"
In a first, we would leverage crowdsourced betting to surface the top matches for each person, based on real predictions of how long their relationship would last.
Read my full writeup here! Excerpts are below.
Super interested in what the Manifold community thinks about this proposal. Let's iterate on the design to make it as strong as possible.
At Manifest, Robin Hanson urged us to find a high-value use case for prediction markets. He suggested markets on which candidate to hire. But markets on who should date might be even higher value (and more fun)!
Thesis
Matching people into relationships is a killer use case for prediction markets because:
It is fun for traders, which means people will be motivated to bet and thus create accurate forecasts
Accurate forecasts of relationships are super valuable
Betting on love is fun
Aella’s and Shelvacu’s markets got a giant amount of traction (the biggest two at Manifest!)
Proof School’s original popular markets were betting on relationships continuing
Austin’s OG markets on getting a girlfriend and marrying Rachel were some of the site’s most popular
People can’t look away. They even will bet on people’s relationships when they don’t know them personally. It’s too fun.
Prediction markets are an ideal solution to matchmaking
Prediction markets allow crowdsourced betting on who should date who with feedback from actual outcomes. Those bets will produce accurate forecasts, going on Manifold’s strong track record.
Matchmaking is a forecasting problem, so let’s use the most powerful forecasting tool!
How it might work
Users opt-in to create dating profiles
One main prediction market per person:
“Who will I date for 6 months?”
Free response market constrained to dating profiles on Manifold.
Resolves to next such person you date for 6 months
Subsidized liquidity (M2000?)
Created when you first fill out your profile.
Custom UI for browsing and betting on dating profiles
A table view with one row per person, standard info in columns, link to full profile (or opens in sidebar on desktop)
Select two people and bet on their relationship success
For each person, show the market’s top three matches (and let you bet on them directly from the table view)
Filtering, sorting, pinning potential matches via checkbox, leaving notes
Principles
Matchmaking is betting, and everyone can play matchmaker
Empower matchmakers
Give them the UI and tools to be effective
Public dating profiles with high information drive better crowdsourced decisions
Kickstart a flourishing ecosystem of fun secondary dating markets
The hope is that by doing the main matchmaking through markets, people will be more willing to create lots and lots of secondary markets on aspects of their dating lives. And they will be hilarious and super engaging
E.g. Will we kiss tonight? Where will we go for our date? Will our relationship last two weeks? Will he propose this year? How many children will we have by 2030?
Privacy where possible (Not 100% on this yet)
Dating profiles won’t by default be linkable and shareable. You can only find them in the table with everyone else
Allows people to feel freer to include more about themselves
Dating profiles will not by default be linked to your Manifold account. Can use a pseudonym
Encourage evolving community sophistication at matchmaking
Matchmakers will learn what questions to ask daters (comment section on dating profile)
Daters will fill in more information over time based on what is helpful
With DM’s (private 1:1 chat), traders can ask about character flaws too sensitive to broadcast publicly
Resolution criteria
To resolve YES, manifold.love needs 1000 daily active users on average over 7 days.
An active user must perform at least one of the following:
- Profile create and edits
- Bets (from people without profiles too, but has to be on manfold.love domain)
- Comments / endorsements
- Messages
I reserve the right to modify this / add more actions that I feel are primary.