resolves to YES if the total boosts 2 months after implementation are >2x more than the boosts 2 months prior to march 18
Update 2026-04-22 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Boosts purchased with mana count regardless of who buys them, including admins. Admins are not paid in mana and receive no special discounts, so their mana purchases are treated the same as any other user's.
1,000Status update:
Days: 35/61 (57%)
Boosts: 22/41 (54%)
We're now slightly behind the pace required to finish on time, however it looks like Genzy now has 15k mana to win on Yes so will certainly buy 1 boost if it is in range on the final day. So it should probably be Boosts: 22/40 (55%).
Boost rate has slowed down considerably in the last few days. Seems to be somewhat cyclical. Maybe some potential boosters put their mana in the prize drawing instead.
@Eliza I was planning on boosting some things, but I haven’t had any good market ideas lately. That, and I can’t stop buying cosmetics when I have spare mana lol
@Eliza Just for example since this market started I purchased several boosts for 10k each (which also add the 5k mana to the AMM), while if I was to use the "admin free boost" option it would not add the 5k mana to the AMM and would not count for the purposes of this market.
@Eliza Yes, your boosts obviously count. But I don't agree that boosts bought by admins even with mana should count. This market is about measuring sales, and selling to yourself is not a legitimate thing in business. Claude agrees:
Me:
There’s a bit of a debate now about whether boosts purchased by site admins with mana should count as “sales” for the purposes of resolving the market. What do you think is most reasonable?
Claude:
"We sell 2x the boosts if a boost gives 5k liquidity." "Sell" is the operative word. Selling to yourself is a nonsense concept in every commercial context — internal transfers aren't sales. The resolution criteria are implicitly asking whether the change caused external demand.
My take: Exclude all admin boosts, and exclude any discounted/promotional boosts regardless of who buys them. If you want a narrower rule: exclude any boost where the buyer has edit access to the codebase or discounted purchase access.
@xjp boosts that are bought with mana definitely count, no matter who buys it. admins aren't paid in mana and don't get any special discounts
@ian I don't find that fair. It doesn't meet the definition of a sale and doesn't fit the market purpose of measuring changes in user demand. It's like if I started buying widgets from my own company to meet a quarterly report target.
Regardless of whether admins are "paid in mana", mana will not have the same cost/value to you because 1) you're paid to engage with Manifold which generates mana over the long term, whereas regular users have to spend their precious free time on it, and 2) at least in principle you can print mana if you wanted to. I'm not sure but I believe the latter has happened in the past. Did @ SG not print ~500k mana in Dec. 2022 and ~600k mana in Dec. 2023 by sending himself managrams from the @Manifold account?
@xjp mods and admins have a separate feature we call the "free admin boost" which is why we're getting our wires crossed. we all agree using that shouldn't count, but because it exists we're arguing anybody buying a normal one ought to count because they spent their own mana for it, even mods and admins specifically because they have the option to not spend mana
@xjp the point is to figure out how much better is the feature. does doing this make it >2x as good? mana is just as scarce to admins as it is to users, so using mana as a gauge works
@xjp afaik only Austin took his salary in mana and only the official "Manifold"-labeled accounts can print mana for site management (e.g. Manifold, Manifold Politics). I was not aware SG did so, but that sounds like far back enough that he probably took it "in lieu of salary" or for reasons of site management before the official accounts were in full form. We'd have to ask him. His is a special case no matter how you slice it imo
My understanding is there is very little, if any, mana being printed from the void at all these days (except, ofc, the bonuses available to all users)
@ian I think it's clearly not true that mana is just as scarce to admins. In addition to my 2 points above, and admins apparently having been paid with mana in the past, I also remember that admins regularly insider trade on markets about the platform (like about what features or changes will be implemented) which is another abundant source of mana not available to regular users. And to be clear I'm not complaining at all about the insider trading, which I understand is in the spirit of the site, or about the mana printing which is fine. But any way you slice it, admins are not regular users and will not assign the same value to a currency they control.
But any way you slice it, admins are not regular users and will not assign the same value to a currency they control.
every user assigns a different variable value to mana. that is not relevant.
I also remember that admins regularly insider trade on markets about the platform (like about what features or changes will be implemented) which is another abundant source of mana not available to regular users.
why is this any different from any other trading alpha? objectively, admins do not have an "abundant" source of mana from this—admins don't have particularly high total profits, and good traders willingly operate as counterparties when betting on the future of the site (because the alpha they gain from insider information is generally quite small). i would trade against admins all the time on those exact markets!
i of course agree that if admins just printed free mana to use on boosts, then that would be a problem for this market. that is, demonstrably, not what is happening? admins are not printing new mana, they generally act like mana is a meaningful constraint, and whether or not they were paid in mana in the past, they are not printing new mana willy nilly.
the standard that admins might not assign the same value to mana as some other users and thus their actions in the mana economy don't count does not hold up to any passing scrutiny. mana has shifted in value throughout the course of the site's existence—i value mana more weakly than many other users since i am not very active and i have extra mana. should my boosts not count? what about if i was given some mana as payment for being a partner—does that count differently than the mana i earned from trading profit? what about the people who were given mana as payment for fixing a bug? why is that "payment" any different from an admin who got paid in mana 2 years ago? what about the fact that some people were given mana when the conversion rate was 1000-$1, 10x the current amount—does their use of mana not count? (they certainly don't value it the same!). worrying about any of the above considerations makes no sense, mana is mana.
again, if admins are actually printing mana willy nilly and buying boosts, then that would be a problem for this market. "some people value mana differently than others", and/or "some admins received some mana compensation at some previous point" do not pose a problem for this market.
@xjp I can't remember the exact details because a lot of previously public Notion pages got private'd but in the 2022-2023ish era, part of the compensation for working for Manifold in addition to "money" was "yearly bonus in Mana" which I believe was paid at the end of the year and it was for 1 million mana. Many of them used this mana to directly puchase charity donations at the then-rate of 100 mana for $1 of charity donation. I think it might have also been eligible to send to Manifund.
In addition to that, Austin took mana instead of a salary the whole time, which mostly went to the NinthCause account.
@Ziddletwix The arguments I made are simply examples of why admins as a class are different from regular users when it comes to valuing mana and making mana purchases. The fact that certain users may share some of those factors or possibly value mana even less doesn't refute that. Like with anything, you have to make your rules based on general categories. And this is all downstream of the underlying point which is that it doesn't count as a sale if a group buys from itself.
@xjp All I know is if you go bet in a market and SG shows up putting 5000 mana in the other direction, you should probably sell out. Ask me how I know.
@xjp Since it's been 4 against 1 here I'm recruiting GPT as a neutral third party on top of Claude.
GPT-5.4 Thinking, memory off, first try no cherry picking, and the "be opinionated" instruction is to reduce its tendency to hedge on every question.
Prompt:
Read the argument in the comments here about whether admin boosts should count as sales. Who do you think is right? Be opinionated in your answer. https://manifold.markets/ian/we-sell-2x-the-boosts-if-a-boost-gi
Answer:
xjp is more right. Ian/Pat/Ziddletwix have the cleaner operational rule, but xjp has the better substantive interpretation of what the market is trying to measure.
Why:
The market title says “We sell >2x the boosts”, and the description says it resolves YES if “the total boosts 2 months after implementation are >2x more than the boosts 2 months prior”. It is also explicitly managed and resolved by Manifold. That already creates an ambiguity: the title is about sales, while the resolution text is about a raw count of boosts. xjp is pointing at the semantic gap correctly.
On the actual dispute, xjp argues that admin-paid boosts should not count because this is supposed to measure demand, and “selling to yourself” is not a real sale. Ian replies that any boost bought with mana counts, regardless of who buys it, because admins are not paid in mana and do not get special discounts; Pat adds that the separate free admin boostobviously should not count, but a normal 10k-mana purchase should.
My view: counting employee or admin self-purchases as “sales” is bad measurement. If the question is whether the feature improved market demand, internal consumption is contaminated data. xjp’s analogy to buying your own company’s widgets to hit a sales target is basically right. Even if admins do not get an explicit discount, they are still part of the firm, have privileged control over the platform, and are not a clean sample of outside customer demand. The comments also acknowledge historical mana compensation and unusual admin relationships to the in-site economy, which makes the “mana is mana” line too glib for this specific purpose.
Where I disagree with xjp is on one narrow point: his argument is stronger as a market-design critique than as a literal resolution rule. The written criterion says “total boosts”, not “external non-admin paid boosts”, and nobody seems to dispute that free admin boosts should be excluded because they are a different mechanism entirely. So if I were resolving the market strictly from the posted rules, I would admit that Ian’s side has the textual edge. But that is because the market was underspecified, not because their interpretation is the better one.
So the blunt version:
Who is right about the economics and the intended measurement? xjp.
Who has the better ex post rules-lawyer argument from the posted text? Ian.
If you force me to choose one side overall, I choose xjp. “Paid with mana” is not enough. For a market framed around sales, admin self-purchases should not count. The clean rule should have been: count only ordinary paid boosts by non-staff users; exclude free/admin/promotional boosts and staff purchases.
@SavioMak I'm already spending like 100k on boosts the market profit is useless to me. I already tricked them into giving half price boosts.
@JimAusman There are 275,100,016 mana in peoples' balances, over 80 million of which is in the balances of active users. We have enough mana to buy 8000 boosts. I think we're fine.
@JimAusman That's right, 10,000 mana is nominally $100. But:
You can trade against the injected 5k liquidity yourself so it's not too hard to make some of that back
There is a massive amount of mana already in the system and many users have more than they know what to do with. Few users are paying money to boost, most are using mana.
There is strong evidence that the black market mana exchange rate is at least worse than $1 for 250 mana (see /wasabipesto/how-much-will-i-donate-to-charity-a ), so I think a boost might be less than $40.