Consider this hypothetical scenario: Say there is a prediction market "Will Manifold have over 1000 daily active users (DAU) by the end of January?" Say someone sees Manifold currently has 990 DAU so they buy YES and create 10 alt accounts to push the number to 1000 to get the market to resolve YES, turning a profit.
This is based on couple of recent controversies, but I've abstracted and changed the scenario to focus more on the question in principle and less on the specific people and profits/losses involved. (There have been no actual controversies about manipulating Manfold's DAU to my knowledge, but it's inspired by a similar controversy about something else.)
Is this acceptable? Scroll the the bottom of the comments where I have posted a poll - you can vote either YES or NO by liking the appropriate comment. The poll closes at market close (Jan 14). Resolves to the percentage of votes (YES) / (YES + NO) when I check the vote tally shortly after the poll closes. By voting, you agree to vote honestly.
See fine print of the poll mechanism here.
You are also encouraged to discuss your thoughts in the comments.
Related:
1,000
3.00DAUs is a meta market and not really possible to game like you suggest. It would necessitate probably creating many more than just 10 alts to impact DAUs by +10 unless the site has a steady growth trend. Manifolds current DAUs rise and fall in ways that don’t appear easy to predict. Plus creating alts is a pain in the ass, so doubtful it’s worth the trouble. How could you possibly end up net positive mana, unless the goal is to manipulate the outcome for just one of the accounts specifically I guess. Idk, I feel like this probably definitely happens. I recall someone on Discord asking how to get a new phone number to verify all the gmail accounts they were creating for sock puppet trading or whatever. But does it actually help one account gain significant advantage when other non-singularly controlled alts are participating? Probably not. Maybe if you are Manifold employee and have a mana printing press at your disposal??
The main reason I think this is NO is I think the act of manipulating DAU is inherently problematic, regardless of the reasons for it. Creating and using 10 alt accounts is acceptable if the reasons for it are legitimate, but doing it to manipulate something is problematic (whether it's for profits or something else).
Seems like the market consensus is quite clear, so maybe I need to come up with better examples that aren't such a clear consensus. :)
Does anyone want to offer steelman arguments for YES? Here's mine (which I don't fully agree with, and I'll say more about why in another comment):
First, creating and using 10 alt accounts is acceptable. There are people who operate bots on separate accounts to do various different things (I'm assuming that the bots are all good and well-intentioned, of course) - see e.g. ArbBot or FairlyRandom etc.
Next, in general one could argue that if an action is ethical, and if it is ethical to perform an action for monetary reward, than it is most likely also ethical to perform the action for profit on a prediction market.
This has a long record of being considered fair game (obviously assuming that the action itself is ethical). Examples:
How much USD will be donated through Manifold for Good before June? - Joel earned a massive profit by donating 5k to charity to cause the market to resolve to 5k. This wasn't really the intent of the market, and I'd consider it a flavor of market manipulation, but I think most people would agree that this is acceptable.
Will anyone propose marriage via Manifold by 12/31/25? - Yev made a marriage proposal to earn profit on this market. I think this was in the spirit of good fun, so most people would agree that it is acceptable.
Will there be an easy way to generate secure, verifiable public randomness for Manifold by end of 2022? - I created the market to propose an idea for someone to implement and provide some incentive to do it, and A wrote the bot and collected profits for it - this was an example where it's just working as intended.
I'm honestly surprised by the results so far. I wouldn't do this myself, but I find it hard to say it's unacceptable. There's so many borderline cases that make it hard to draw a clear line.
E.g. If someone already had 3 alt accounts that they occasionally used, and they say the market was short by 3, so the logged into their alt accounts to push the number up, is that so bad? What about if they would have normally logged into the alt accounts, but today decided to "take a break" on the alt accounts, while buying NO?
@jack It's often unclear where to draw a line but also clear that a particular thing is on one side of it. Where do you draw the line between a cold place and not a cold place? I don't know, but the south pole is clearly a cold place.
Sure, but I guess what I'm saying is an argument that similar to free speech, it may be advisable to generally stick to principles that are more permissive than more restrictive. Although this poll isn't about what should be allowed exactly, it's about what the community thinks is acceptable, so it's a bit different.
@jack profit is never completely neutral. all trades change the world somewhat. nothing is truly decoupled. you can say whatever you want, but shouldn't say some stuff you can say. if you say shit I think you shouldn't, I might say some shit back, but I'll physically defend your right to say it. if you exploit a vulnerability in a market definition that is dishonorable to exploit, then I'll keep track of the fact that you did that, and I might diss you about it somehow, but hey, you're within your rights to do it. morality is more constraining than rights for a reason.