let's say you are running a market about some outcome in your personal life.
A domain expert might consider asking a question that would provide relevant information and help them make a more informed trade.
But the domain expert doesn't know if they will be the first to trade after reading OP's response. Someone else could use the information to snatch the extra mana that was put on the table when the information was revealed.
The domain expert would have a much greater incentive to put effort into asking those kinds of questions if they were guaranteed to receive the response in DMs before anyone else.

example

Alan makes a market about whether his flight will be late. Bob is a plane nerd and knows that planes of type XYZ model ABC23 are much less likely to be late, so he asks what aircraft type he will be taking. Alan reveals that it's type XYZ model ABC23, but Bob is offline. Charlie sees Alan's response and buys NO, eliminating any profit to be had from knowing the aircraft type.

Daniela is going to trade in Esther's market and thinks about the scenario above.

She considers that questions aren't free actions. It takes time and energy to think up clever questions and then formulate them nicely for Esther, who is not a domain expert. So Daniela decides it's not worth the time and effort to think of clever questions only to have Charlie snatch the reward anyway, so Daniela decides to look for easier trades.

This is bad for Esther, because she wants to receive questions she hadn't considered that would improve the market's accuracy. And it's bad for Daniela because she would like to get easy mana from asking clever questions.

solution

simple

• OP can incentivise questions by announcing that they will answer questions in DMs first and only post them to the market thread after some time has passed.

• the question asker can DM the question to OP and explain they would like OP to not post the answer in the thread until some time has passed.

in practice

But I dunno how much this whole dynamic is a problem in practice. Markets where OP has non-obvious private information also tend to have fewer traders. So, often the question-asker does get to be the first to trade after all.

And manifolders aren't always asking questions purely to profit in the market with the new information. Sometimes they just want to help OP get a better probability estimate, or they want to see how the market's price might shift with new information.

Setting up an informal systems like I proposed in solutions carries its own costs. Many people will misunderstand the purpose of this system. Explaining it takes up time and increases market description length. Explaining this dynamic every time is tiring.

conclusion

I don't have one. This is just something that was interesting to think about. Any thoughts?