Above the Fold: $10,000 for charity and new features!

$10k raised for charity, notifications, following users, and more!

Welcome to our 14th newsletter! This week we added notifications, following users, and concluded our first month of raising money through Manifold for Charity. Let’s dive straight in!

Notifications

In an effort to increase the addictiveness usability of our site, we have added notifications! This will allow users to stay up to date on markets they interact with.

If you hadn’t realised yet, our philosophy is to push new features, even if they aren’t yet fully optimised. The initial iteration of notifications was an example of this philosophy. Although I like to think myself as popular, I shouldn’t be receiving 321 notifications in 2 days after commenting on only a few markets. >.<

Fortunately, new settings have been implemented to help with managing notifications! You can now adjust email and in app notification preferences under the notification settings tab.

Follow your favourite market creators!

You can now follow market creators!

As part of this update, the home feed can be filtered either by ‘categories’ or ‘following’. Additionally, you can now filter by multiple categories at once!

We’d like to use this opportunity to highlight some of our best market creators you should consider following!

• Manifold employees: SirSalty, Austin, SG, James, Sinclair, Ian, Marshall, Alice

• Community figures: Aella (for racy #Fun), Scott Alexander, SneakySly (for #Fun), Zvi Mowshowitz

• Other notable creators: Duncan, Tetraspace (for #Politics), NcyRocks (for #Politics), Jack (for #Manifold and #Economics), Joel (for EA and #Personal), David Glidden,

We probably missed some, so share your favourites and check out the leaderboard to see all the top market creators.

Manifold for Charity: $5k donated, $5k matched!

Manifold’s first month of redeeming Mana to donate raised just over $5,000 for charities - thank you so much for your generosity! The biggest contributor, Joel Becker, donated over $4,000 at the last moment whilst also betting on the above market. This last-minute play bumped total donations just over $5000, allowing him to profit for M$28,892 and catapulting Joel to 2nd place on our leaderboards. We will be publishing an interview with him in the future, so keep an eye out for that!

We’re also pleased to announce that all donations made through July 15 are eligible for our very first matching pool! We’ve set up a quadratic funding matching pool that grows by $1 every time someone donates $1. Quadratic funding is a neat mechanism because it puts more weight on smaller-sized donations, meaning that whales (like Joel) will have less influence over which charities receive the donation match~

This matching pool is made available thanks to the FTX Future Fund, which has approved a $500k charitable grant to build out prediction markets for charity. It’s truly an honor to be working with them to figure out how prediction markets can save the world!

Bounties Round 3

We would like to acknowledge the following users for their contributions to Manifold!

Wasabipesto: M$20,000

• For creating an awesome stats page which features and analyses various data sets! This can be found on the second tab of our analytics page.

Jack: M$10,000

• For adding a bunch of charities to Manifold for Good, working out market math with Austin, and excellent comment activity.

Forrest: M$10,000

• For a variety of open source code contributions, making our code base easier to use and maintain.

IsaacKing: M$10,000

• For responsible disclosure of an exploit involving liquidity withdrawal, which has now been fixed! Removing one infinite money glitch at a time.

Sjlver: M$5,000

• For responsible disclosure of a potential exploit. We would say what it is, but it isn’t quite fixed yet! 🤫

Other updates

• You can now withdraw liquidity from markets you’re subsidizing to get back your proportional share of the liquidity pool. See the full technical explanation here: Maniswap

• Numeric markets have temporarily been removed as we look to make significant improvements.

• Using opposite quick bet arrows to ‘undo’ a bet now sells all shares (you still lose a fraction of Mana to slippage, so it isn’t a perfect undo yet).

• Pressing the back button after clicking on a market now takes you back to where you were on the feed.

Also check out…!

Links

• Check out Scott Alexander’s latest Mantic Mondays post featuring us and other forecasting news.

• https://civicdash.org/dashboard - Click the tracked solutions tab to see Manifold’s markets embedded and re-skinned for predicting what the SF government should do.

• Nuno’s newsletter on forecasting.

• There have been a few “ask Manifold for advice” markets going around lately. We think it is great that on Manifold, users are incentivised to give high quality suggestions as they will profit if proven helpful. Maybe we’ll accidentally put Quora out of business 🤪

  • What does interventions does Manifold users think will improve quality of life?

  • If David Pennock buys a Pacaso house, would he regret it?

• Check out the most recent drama which had users staying up all night (myself included) to bet on this purely for fun market!

• Trust SneakySly to use our markets to create a cool math game for us to play!

• This market has been heating up! Will Trump be charged by the grand jury in Georgia for his attempts to overturn election in Georgia?

Once again thank you for taking the time to be part of this journey with us!

Catch you next time, where I will be writing from Mexifold!

-David Chee, community manager