Good morning and happy Friday! I’ve combed through my notes from the past few weeks and brought you a list of changes we shipped for the site.
Market Boosts
You can now boost a market directly from the creation page! If you know that everyone on the site is going to want to see your genius market, you can go ahead and grab a boost as an add-on instantly.
Boosts are awesome because they put your market in front of everybody for a day, and since March they now come with a cool bonus of M$5000 in liquidity! You can bet on boost sales here: /ian/we-sell-2x-the-boosts-if-a-boost-gi
Prizes & Charity
The Charity Champion Trophy is now showcased on the Charity page - be the #1 entry holder in the charity giveaway to claim this super-cool trophy from @Eliza. Holding the trophy at any point grants you the permanent ownership of the snazzy "Champion's Legacy" hovercard background.
Don't care about prize drawings or charity giveaways? Don't sweat it, turn off the notifications here in the notification settings tab. There was definitely a bug here before, but now we're 100% sure it works.
If you were one of the first people to buy prize drawing entries, you may have noticed that you paid a bit more than you expected. This was due to how the rates were calculated on the bonding curve, the mana price of each entry went up with each additional one you purchased. This was most noticeable for the first few users in each drawing when the curve was the steepest, but as of yesterday you will no longer be charged any more than the amount you put in the field! Your total spend will be capped at that amount, even if the bounding rate is steep or another user swipes those cheaper entries out from under you.
Thanks to @MarySmith for adding the Free State Project to the list of available charities! At the moment the FSP a 15% chance of winning the $1500 payout, contribute towards (or against) them on the Charity page.
Merch & Shop
In case you missed it: Card purchases with Stripe are back! We still prefer buyers to use crypto to avoid fees, but all verified or grandfathered accounts are now able to use their credit card to buy mana again.
When ordering merch, there's a new optional email field - if there are any issues with delivery, this allows the customs office or carrier to contact you to get it resolved. For Brazil and some regions of Spain the field is mandatory for duty resolution.
Also, for users shipping merch to Brazil or South Korea we now collect a personal tax ID which is required to pass through customs. If you live in one of those countries and had issues with your order, try again now with the updated form! As always, DM @Gen if you have any issues with an order.
In the shop, there’s a new “Owned” tab where you can find every profile and avatar cosmetic that you’ve purchased. Build the right fashion loadout for today’s trading all in one spot.
If there are no seasonal items available at the moment, the Seasonal tab will be hidden. But don’t fear, your seasonal items previously purchased are still visible in the "owned" tab. There’s also handy tooltip on those items to tell you why they’re hidden in the regular shop.
There’s now a link to the Manifest website on the Manifest ticket in the shop, in case you were wondering what exactly you were buying a ticket for.
There was a secret feature in the shop where you could make the item cards dance by hovering your cursor at just the right spot - the card would raise just above the cursor and then lower back down, jittering over and over again. This has been removed because dancing is illegal on Manifold.
API & Bots
Do you have a bot on Manifold? If you do, and they make over M$100 in profit in a month, they're now eligible to receive league rewards! The top 6 bots each month will receive rewards similar to other leagues, with the top bot earning M$800.
If you don't run a bot already, this is a great time to start. You can now mark your account as a bot easily from your Account Settings to automatically enroll in the Silicon League. Ask in the #api-and-bots channel of Discord if you need help or advice from other bot-makers!
For you API power users: All timestamps are now precise! There was an issue with how timestamps (such as a bet's createdTime) were handled as they made their way from the database through the API server, which led to them being truncated to the second. Now, all timestamps should have proper resolution all the way down to the millisecond.
If you're placing comments from the API, you should also be aware that we'll now reject any comment with a replyToCommentId that doesn't exist. Instead of that comment being lost in the void forever, we now let you know so you can reply to a comment that does exist.
Also, when you go to cycle your API key the site makes it clear that this will break all integrations using the key instead of referring to the old twitch integration that no one has used in years.
Miscellaneous
The daily $100 prize drawing is now automatic! No more waiting until an admin clicks the button. Long-time league members will remember a similar situation way back when.
Did you know that when you zoom in on a market's price history, the y-axis shrinks to show you the relevant area? Now that also applies to numeric and date charts! Here's a good example, click the 1D option: https://manifold.markets/NathanpmYoung/how-many-copies-of-yudkowsky-and-so
You can now filter the browse page by date markets, helping you find all those “when will X happen” markets to bet down since nothing ever happens.
When we introduced cosmetics in the shop we had hardcoded in the names of each item on the stats page, which led to some items in the table being referred to by their internal key. Now everything is nice and consistent and will update automagically.
Enlarging an image posted in a market description or comment section used to have a bug where a couple special UI elements would continue be drawn on top, especially user avatars from the right-hand sidebar on desktop. This is fixed, so now you can watch Supernatural gifs in fullscreen without any distraction.
Pro tip: when you hover over a bet in the feed, you can see a lot of detailed information such as the timestamps, share price, and limit order details. Now we also show a couple more decimals on the mana fields to help you understand exactly how much was spent on each trade.
On mobile, the leagues horizontal scrollbar now shows arrows indicating that you can scroll, or just press the arrows to move. On desktop, these only show when you hover over the ribbon.
Some buttons on the sidebar used to be comically narrow, especially the App button. This bothered me way more than it should have, and now all sidebar items are the same width.
Feedback
Any comments or questions about the changes above, feel free to post them below! I’ll do my best to answer anything, and I hope to do these changelog roundups in the future at least once a month. If you see any bugs similar to the ones above, feel free to post in the #bugs channel of Discord or DM me here on the site.
And be on the lookout for some cool new things coming soon...
Quality of life requests: I'm on Android. When I type an @ tag, and I want to backspace it, there is some weird interaction with the cursor where it exits typing mode and requires that I tap the text field again to continue backspacing or typing.
If I backspace the space after an @ tag, then I type the space again, it types the whole user's tag again in a way that doesn't feel right at all. It looks like this when I do that: @QuroeQuroe
@wasabipesto The notification thing is maybe solved... Will talk to you more about this separately. I should be able to fix the typing thing too if I can replicate it
@Primer Thanks! I have both of those on my backlog as things I want to address but long-term solutions aren't necessarily obvious. I think diamond-level leagues probably need to be reworked but we could reduce the number of them as a short-term fix. For betting on your own markets I'm personally in favor of a toggle you can't undo that prevents you from being able to bet, but UI details still need to be worked out. Let me know if you have any specific thoughts!
@prismatic Yes, we are working on an updated set of community guidelines that will make this clearer. If an account is 100% making automated trades it is required to be marked as a bot, if it's not set at account creation we will detect and apply it automatically. (If we get it wrong, DM us and admins can remove the tag.) For accounts that have some manual and some automatic trades we're still hashing out exactly how they will be handled.
wasabipesto's non-admin-hat opinion: I've historically been in favor of a 50/50 threshold, if over 50% of your executed trade volume or profit comes from fully-automated strategies then you should probably be in Silicon league. But I want to allow human users to stay in human leagues if they're using the API for something like arbitrage or custom trading dashboards. I know others have strong opinions, and those people generally enjoy Leagues more than I do, so I'm open to other approaches.
@wasabipesto should accounts like mine that do more than half of their trades in an automated manner but not all of them be marked bots?
@JasonMendoza2008 Right now it isn't required for you to mark yourself as a bot since you still perform many manual trades and comments. That may change at some point in the future, but we'll communicate that clearly when it does.
@wasabipesto Thanks for your work!
I want to iterate that I think the cleanest solution is to not have an arbitrary threshold of say 50 / 50 api vs manual bets which can change from season to season (applied after the season or before?).
Instead I beg for just giving each account the default entry to human leagues only counting manual bets and if that account places api bets, they automatically get an entry into bot leagues which only counts api bets. Api and manual bets on the same market can negate itself for the purpose of leagues.
@Yuna Thanks for the input! I think this is a neat idea, I've seen you bring it up before. My biggest hesitation here is that I still want to allow people to use e.g. custom dashboards or scripts to execute trades and use that profit towards their regular human leagues. I would feel bad if someone's options are "I can do this on the site with 50 clicks, which is annoying but I get league profit, or I can do this with one click of a script but then that profit goes to a Silicon league I don't care about." I guess the options here would be to make it so you would never need to use a script to manage positions (hard) or make Silicon leagues competitive, rewarding, and prestigious (also hard). Or maybe no one actually does this and I'm worrying over nothing.
@wasabipesto That makes sense, but it sounds more like 10-20% API bets maybe? Idk. I agree that it would be a downside that would hurt some power users. The opposite downside is that regular users who can't or don't want to bother building bots feel disadvantaged by being overtaken by people using api bets in human leagues. To me the latter has more weight.
Also, I think you'd very quickly see the Silicon league get more competitive if api curious power users get an entry in Silicon leagues, which in turn could have several tiers if the current one overflows.
@Yuna Those are good points, and I think you're probably right about Silicon getting more competitive over time.
A rambling digression: When leagues were first introduced, I didn't like that unique trader bonuses were included in the profit calculation (and those bonuses were a bit larger than they are now). I didn't create markets and I wasn't interested in it, but that was how the top users made a lot of their profit. Over time I came around to it, my philosophy being that ranking in leagues is roughly correlated with how much you're engaged with the types of activities the community favors. Even profit isn't just a metric of predictive skill, it also encompasses news trading and market making (limit orders, not whole markets).
So I could (very hypothetically) see a world where bot trades are fully integrated into human leagues, with the idea being that making a good bot strategy is just another activity that's rewarded within the league framework. If you don't do all of the things that can net you league position, it makes sense that you won't be at the top of the leagues. I think the biggest problem with that is bot profits can grow much larger than human profits, and we don't have a good way to dial those back so one doesn't dwarf the other (like we did with unique trader bonuses). I think this leads pretty naturally to your solution, breaking those out automatically and letting each stand on its own merit. Or maybe Silicon profits will fall as more bots start to compete over the same size pie, and bot profits will become comparable to human ones again.
@wasabipesto Agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I think good market creation is much more contributive to the community than bot activity, however. I can tell you from first hand experience that I got a lot hate and blocks when I dominated sports even though it was an explicit stunt to have bots banned in sports 😅
Lots of people are really put off by bots and maybe have stopped complaining because they've fallen on deaf ears for too long.
My solution is:
- toggle off api bets from the Trade display (maybe off by default)
- put all api bets in Silicone league(s) 🤖
So that we may live in peace side-by-side 👩 🤝 🤖 🕊