Will we raise the unique bettor bonus to M$10?
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resolved Jul 21
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Right now it's M$5. Should it be higher, though? @JoyVoid mentioned that getting 20 bettors is pretty hard in order to recoup your losses, even for pretty interesting markets.
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@Austin I'd bet most active users are quite low on mana both to bet and to create questions with. M$1000 isn't that much to start with. Someone could probably gather some stats, I'd be curious what the distribution of M$ balances is.
Also, the number of markets created is still down substantially from when free daily markets existed (even ignoring the spam markets which we didn't want), probably ~30% fewer, as discussed on https://manifold.markets/jack/how-many-markets-will-be-created-ne-edb2b9156d4e - I think it's pretty clear that market creation incentives are lower now than before and this caused a noticeable reduction in markets created.
@akhil Not sure how you'd want to define "active user" but the mana distribution balance (along with a bunch of other neat info) is available under the "Market Stats" tab at http://manifold.markets/stats
Excerpted here: https://i.imgur.com/jjQyppx.png.
I'm not sure to what degree wasabipesto excludes outliers in the average, but if not I'm personally holding on to M$680k and thus increasing the for M$200 per person in the 1 year average.
@Austin Seems reasonable to me. I think running out of mana is just one part of it, there's also the general incentives - more M$ loss = less markets created.
To me losing M$ feels bad regardless of how much M$ I have. I can also think of it as spending/subsidizing my question, sure, but regardless I'm much less likely to make a market if I know it's going to reduce my M$ by more than I expect to profit in several bets.
Of course, there's some debate about whether you want more or less markets, but I tend to believe you'd want more.
@LivInTheLookingGlass yup, that is also my experience, and I have subscribed to like M$1000 a month
@jack Does it also feel bad because it isn't tracked properly in the status recap (and is shown as pure loss)?
@JoyVoid Hmm, I thought the cost of market creation wasn't shown in the profit recaps and was basically hidden. Are you talking about the email showing investment amount and payout when the market resolves or something else?
@Austin it's more that creating a question is almost always a net loss, so there's little financial incentive to create them
I don't think you want to do it. Besides the inflation problem, MM problem today is too many unimportant markets, not a lack of them. I don't think people aren't playing because they don't have enough Mana because it's tied to other bets elsewhere that they need more Mana from this structure to play.
What you need to do is to create an incentive to better and more relevant markets. If you increase the unique bettor reward, what you're going to achieve is that people will create even more questions like "Will I brush my teeth tomorrow?" that's flooding the platform.
@MP I haven't actually noticed any markets like "Will I brush my teeth tomorrow?" after daily free markets were removed, can you link some examples of the bad markets you're talking about? I don't think a market like that is noticeably profitable to create - maybe if you set them up right you net like M$10, but I doubt people would bother for that little.
@MP I think these sorts of markets are interesting for a specific subset of users, while the majority of users really don't care about them. Which is true of many types of personal markets or markets on niche topics. I don't think this has anything to do with the rewards - I haven't noticed any more of these after the rewards were added than before, and they almost certainly aren't making a profit for the author. It's more of a problem of how to better surface relevant markets and hide irrelevant markets based on what you are and are not interested in.
@jack if incentives don't matter, why not increasing the incentive to $20?
And a market in a niche topic is quite different than a fun/irrelevant market.
You are likely aware of the arguments of why prediction markets are good to society and a niche market that nonetheless help someone somewhere to make a better decision are still good.
The world isn't in any sense better if strangers on the internet give their best guess of how many people are joining some taco night.
How many people show up to my event is a perfectly legit and socially valuable prediction market imo. I need to plan my event differently based on the forecast number of participants. Now, I doubt Austin is actually getting that much of a better forecast than he could have made himself, but maybe a few other people chime in with their info, e.g. someone invites a group of friends and predicts that 4 of them will come, etc etc. Isn't that also socially valuable?
And I'm not saying the incentives don't matter, but that markets like these are mostly being made for reasons other than profit, and that increased incentive likely only makes a small impact on how many of these are made, while it has a much bigger impact on broad-appeal markets that are more likely to get a lot of bets. In other words, I bet that increasing the reward will increase the ratio of broad vs niche markets.
To add to that, I think it's socially valuable in a very niche context (people who are potentially interested in going to the event). To everyone else, it's either just for fun or entirely pointless. And I think that's ok, as long as users see a reasonable proportion of markets they find interesting in their feeds. Some of the features Manifold has been working on lately are working on this from various angles, e.g. making groups to help form different subcommunities that are interested in different markets.
@MP I think the core of your gripes will be solved once some (closed?) groups don't display their questions on the frontpage