manifold.markets/Sinclair
The "strongest" thing I have ever done with mod powers is to fix the misspelling of an answer in a free-response question at my friend's request. Someone at [unnamed big tech company] once asked me to delete their market about whether the company would [do a thing companies often do] because their boss told them, but I unlisted it for them and told them to resolve it N/A.
I think we have ever deleted markets, but only for breaking community guidelines. I've never done it myself.
It’s not zero net value because there’s information produced, and also it’s fun. A more rational alien species that does not find risk enjoyable would have less accurate prediction markets (although without such thing as “gambling” maybe their markets are actually legal and thus more accurate.)
At manifold we haven’t really found a good way to use the information value yet. Subsidization doesn’t lead to increased activity in practice unless it makes the market among the top best trading opportunities. Pay for views has been much more effective as a “pay for information” method than subsidy. Most users are bettors rather than viewers. It’s good that we’re good at converting people, but without a long tail of lurkers we aren’t generating a lot of value from the information itself.
At Manifold I find myself adding indexes for smaller collections. Like, in our postgres db we have a table for mana transactions called txns that has only 1 million rows, and I recently added an index so that a particular query would take 0.6 ms instead of 400ms. This is a query that has to run anytime a user loads their feed, and even if we never100x the size of txns we shouldn't delay the feed by almost half a second.
(I am generally for rapid, hacky prototyping)
Poor icon choices:
- triangle for changed mind
- scales looks like "fair and balanced" rather than "borderline nitpick"
- support pillar ... but mostly I don't know what support means
Eh / nitpicks
- elephant for "requesting additional info" is a bit obscure.
- cactus looks a bit like a person and does not actually look pointy.
- exclamation implies "wow" more than it does importance
- does graduation cap need the hands? maybe a book for scholarship would be easier to parse?
Particularly good icon choices:
- lightbulb, key, checked, x, hits the mark,
The subtitle copy on most of these is uninformative or duplicating the title. "I saw this", "this exhibits the scout mindset", "I feel empathy towards this". Maybe remove the subtitles for most of the reactions?
The icons are small (unavoidable), some have too many details, and the outlined ones are too thinly stroked. The lack of color makes them harder to distinguish.
This will be great for shortform! (Though maybe people don't use shortform so it doesn't matter)
Well, you can monetize info value in various ways - sell advertisements, subscriptions to get more data, access to superforecasters, directly sell “accuracy” (pay to increase trading volume) - if it is actually valuable. Alternatively, EA would probably continue to fund manifold if they find it valuable (like for pushing back AI timelines), but i still much prefer “valuable enough for people to pay for” as an objective target to hit.
I think fun mostly causes traders to accept higher losses than they would otherwise.
I don’t think it’s surprising that people don’t bet on profitable markets unless they actually know the market exists and they know there’s alpha in it. The whole purpose of marketing is to match users with deals they find valuable. And yet, do you think you have purchased every consumer good that would improve your life?