Right now, it seems to me that creating a market is always a net loss. The user base isn't large enough to have enough traders on a question to be able to break even on the bounty awarded for each unique trader on a 100 mana question, let alone anything higher. Mana is relatively scarce unless you are consistently seeing big wins or buying mana with real world money.
I don't have a wish to profit off questions, but I'd like to not take (relative to my "net worth") gigantic losses whenever I post a question. Whenever I have enough mana to post a question, the cost/benefit of doing so always results in me instead placing bets as there is a chance I can make myana back or more whereas posting a question seems to always without question result in a loss unless I post a question I know will resolve a certain way and bet in my own market.
This seems to result in most questions being posted by the same small group of people who have the mana banked where 100 or 1000 Mana is a small enough percentage of their total net worth where it doesn't "hurt" to lose that amount. It ends up with primarily whales being the individuals who direct the topics that appear on manifold and makes it so markets seem to only exist for topics that revolve around those individuals interests causing an issue of low diversity on market topics.
Am I incorrect?
The incentive to create a market is to #1 see the probability a crowd gives to a question you have, #2 to climb the leader-board
@TimothyBandors Really, if you a a new trader with low mana, I would avoid wasting it on making questions. Some users on here have millions of mana, though!
@TimothyBandors my chairs v tables market gave me 3500 mana in profit. It isn't a complete waste, but try to use the free question quota only.
I believe you get 100 free mana for making a question once a week, unless that is only for new users?
@NovemberKelly yes, and some of the creation cost is returned back to you at the end, depending on the probability difference between the resolution and market prob (e.g. YES at 99% gives you back 10 mana, and NO at 99% gives you back more than 500 mana)