They're available from the 'create a question' page at the bottom. Let me know what you think of them in the comments of this one.
Are discussion posts discoverable? how? (besides for by going to a users 'questions' tab)
@FergusArgyll they are scored like markets based on user interactions, they notify followers, and are visible in the new sort. Ofc also at https://manifold.markets/posts but that’s not really discoverable
Strongly felt requests for next new question types:
Polls where you can vote with equal valence for multiple options i.e. tick all that apply
Polls where you can vote with descending valence for multiple options i.e. ranked choice voting
Polls where you can switch your vote an unlimited number of times, ideally with a graph showing the answer ratios over time like with market odds i.e. approval rating
Polls where users can add new options like with multi choice markets
@TheAllMemeingEye All of these sound great! Similar to your first point, I'd really like the option to simultaneously buy or sell the same amount of shares across multiple answers on an unlinked MC market.
@MarySmith Oh that's a pretty good question. Which market are you thinking of? As a platform, we lean Laissez-faire and let creators do whatever they want to with their markets. Some markets are worded such that manipulation doesn't go against the rules, so manipulation ensues.
@MarySmith i see, yeah that market’s rules allowed for manipulation, so traders followed the incentives. Sucks that that caught you off guard, though. Maybe worth having a banner on markets like that…
@ian after looking at the description I didnt see any mention of manipulation so the default is assumed "manipulation is okay" unless otherwise stated?
@4fa you put in the description “if there is manipulation I will N/A”.
Even better would be to specify what constitutes manipulation. But up to you.
@Ziddletwix I guess that mainly incentivizes people to hide the manipulation, not to stop doing it. 🤷 Sometimes it's hard to predict what kind of manipulation people come up with. But yeah, I guess laissez-faire goes both way and I get to decide what constitutes manipulation, even if I did not foresee it, as long as I put a disclaimer in the description.
guess that mainly incentivizes people to hide the manipulation, not to stop doing it.
By definition, if manipulation is totally hidden, there is nothing you can do to stop it, no matter what you or Manifold says. if manipulation is not totally hidden, then it is up to the creator to define the rules of their market.
there are all sorts of ways that manipulation could violate site rules. but manipulation, itself, is not a violation (and it would make no sense for it to be!). those self-referential markets are explicitly designed to be manipulated, that's like, the entire point of them, otherwise no one would make them (i do think it's unfortunate if new users see them and don't understand that premise, and they should probably be better hidden).
@Ziddletwix I feel like a warning banner on the market that it's unranked and liable to manipulation is better than being hidden.
@Ziddletwix Okay, I should have phrased that differently: People will just not brag about their manipulation and will TRY to hide it. By definition, I have not detected any undetectable manipulation so far. 😆
For you, do "self-referential markets" only include markets that refer to aspects of themselves or all markets that refer to anything on Manifold that can be manipulated?
Interestingly, for me, manipulation is not "like, the entire point". Personally, my goal is that my markets are "like, fun". That, even if a trader loses mana on one of my markets, the lesson should be "should have bet differently", not "should have anticipated people will manipulate the shit out of anything to maximize profits and destroy fun".
What is your advice in the following case?
I made a fun little RNG market. Because it was RNG, I did not add any disclaimer about the consequences of manipulation. Someone added answers to my market in order to manipulate ANOTHER market. The answers also made my market less fun: One of the new answers is strongly negatively correlated (-.96) with an existing answer, not really adding any novelty. Both new answers re-use the same old pun seen in previous answers, also not really adding anything on the meta/flavor level. They're not terrible, just very meh.
Is there anything I can still do or is it too late in this particular case, because I did not add the disclaimer?
@Ziddletwix why wouldn't the ASSumption be that the market is a put your money where your mouth is type of preference verification, minimum M1 signal that you like tits more than ass or vice versa
instead of
the ASSumption is this is an opportunity to bribe people to switch, and all the text about t & a is just flavor text for what could have been a much simpler yes/no self referential market?
What is your advice in the following case?
Can you link to the example? It's a bit hard to follow. At a high level, the issue there seems to be that people are submitting bad answers that mess up your market, and less that the reason for those bad answers are caused by an attempt to manipulate a market. But, generally you should outline the rules for what answers are allowed to be submitted, and N/A or edit ones that are bad submissions (as creator, you have full freedom to do this). You can also restrict submissions to just the creator, and ask people to comment and ping you to add their suggestions, but I understand that friction isn't great (it'd be lovely if the site had an option for creators to approve answers directly, but it doesn't).
At a high level, manipulation is usually "bad" when (1) the act of manipulation itself is bad, or (2) there is some real thing you are trying to measure, not the thing that is being manipulated. (1) is a big problem, but the manipulation itself isn't the issue. (still, there are rules against this, e.g. you cannot violate another site's ToS to influence a market, or etc, but this has to be handled case-by-case). (2) again is up to the creator to define.
For you, do "self-referential markets" only include markets that refer to aspects of themselves or all markets that refer to anything on Manifold that can be manipulated?
so people can define "self-referntial" as they'd like but i'm just using it in the sense of the site guidelines, i.e. one of many different reasons a market might be unranked. typically, this just means markets that refer to themselves, not aspects of manifold at large, but that can be a little fuzzy, and again has to be handled case-by-case (if you create one market and a 2nd that is referential to the first, it's probably still "self-referential" in some sense).
but i say the "will X have more traders than Y" or etc markets are built to be manipulated because they aren't measuring anything real, beyond the definition of the market. by placing a bet, you are manipulating that market. by making your case in the comments, you are manipulating the market. if the goal was a poll, make a poll, that's a site feature. if the resolution is defined by the actions people take on a market, and the actions don't mean anything beyond that, then there's no true thing you're measuring, it only exists to be manipulated. test
@Ziddletwix my argument here is that Joshua and others took advantage of what was supposed to be a measure and competition of preference between tits and ass by creating external incentives to switch that had no relation to whether the users preferred tits or ass.
The market already created an incentive for people to chose ass or tits based off the M one could earn over their actual preference, sure, but that is inherent to the market and not an external, user generated incentive to bribe others to bet and/or switch.
Also, there is no poll where users have to pay to state their preference, and potentially be compensated for it 🤔
@MarySmith what would be the conditions for the compensation, that would not involve market incentives to bet dishonestly like a Keynesian beauty contest
@MarySmith I guess (bribing and other trickery) that's just what people get up to sometimes in order to earn profit. Saying that out loud though doesn't really sit well haha
The market already created an incentive for people to chose ass or tits based off the M one could earn over their actual preference
Yup, by its construction, the market was a silly game with a reward that is irrelevant to one's own preference. That's what I mean by manipulation being built in—it's how the market was defined! If the goal is to poll people, make a poll!
what was supposed to be a measure and competition of preference between tits and ass by creating external incentives to switch that had no relation to whether the users preferred tits or ass.
"supposed to"—based on what? Before deleting their account, the market creator gave no indication that the purest measure of the true preference of the users of this site was their goal. Instead of making a poll (a site feature) they structured the market as a silly game instead (well, after being asked in the comments how it would resolve, first saying one thing, and then changing their mind after hearing a different suggestion—if anything I'm being too charitable about the coherence here). You are welcome to interpret this market however you'd like, including as a pure undiluted measure of preference, but (1) that does not reflect its construction, (2) that does not reflect anything the creator said, & (3) that does not reflect how the traders in the market behaved, even before Joshua offered any bounty.
If there are actual cases where the creator is trying to measure something real and they are frustrated by manipulation, LMK and it would be good to take a look and see if there's anything to be done to better refine the market/rules/etc to avoid that case. This is not one of those cases. test test
I would like markdown support: I am not too interested in going through this 2000 word blog post I want to put here and manually reinserting all the links.
@BoltonBailey I know that we can convert markdown to the editor style, would you use that if I added it? I think adding markdown style editing would be a much larger lift.
Sure, if there's a paste markdown option I'd use it (though it actually seems that google docs has this, and I can just paste to google docs and then copy the google docs rich text, so it's actually not a big deal after all)
@warty in browse, filter by status is available in one click, but filter by type is hidden in options. most suboptimal for discussions, and polls I guess (just found out about explore view, which maybe I should be using. as it happens the discussion section there doesn't work at this time. I miss that view where you could click current big events and see related markets)
@warty Yeah I believe those sections were called dashboards, which were pretty good. I think they were hard to keep up to date but I don't totally remember why we removed them