Above the Fold: Mexico Edition!
Mexifold, Groups, Manalinks, Comment tipping, and API updates
Hello! Welcome back to this week’s edition of Above the Fold, where we update you with all our latest features and give you free Mana 👀!
New features added this week were Groups, Manalinks, and Comment Tipping. We also want to highlight updates to our API, our trip to Mexico, and a hackathon we hosted!
Groups
Ian has been hard at work on our new groups feature! Have a look at what he has to say about it:
“Have you been wanting to organize your markets into different groups with your friends, coworkers, organization, or events? Now you can do that all of that and more with groups! You can create a group easily by clicking into the ‘Groups’ tab on the sidebar. During creation you can add other users directly, or just hit create and start adding markets. You can discuss ideas for questions or anything else via the ‘Chat’ tab. Check out the ‘About’ tab to see how you compare to the other group members in the group’s custom leaderboard! Check out my groups group to add your feature requests and feedback!
“Pro-tip: you can even use groups as a direct message on the site if you want to talk to someone directly. Here’s me asking the motivations for our biggest free daily market (which are now gone 😱) abuser:”
Manalinks
Manalinks are finally here! Use them to send Mana to your friends, who are too poor to create markets now that we’ve removed free daily markets. 🙃 Jokes aside, we are working on a new mechanism that should encourage people to make markets and have access to some free Mana. We will have more details to share with you on this soon.
To celebrate, here is 100 Mana for the first 25 readers who see this.
Comment tipping
Sinclair has been powering through several iterations of tipping over the past week. This allows users to show recognition and give Mana to comments that provide value. This is similar to how other social sites function, but we are also hopeful that it encourages users who have “insider info” to share it.
In the first iteration, users essentially bought upvotes they would give to users following a quadratic pricing model (it got increasingly expensive to give more upvotes to a comment). When clicking to upvote a comment, you tipped an appropriate amount of Mana, which was then reflected in an upvote score that increases in increments of 1. Upon asking Sinclair about it she said, “looking back at it, this model doesn’t really make that much theoretical sense.”
She has since made several changes: now users can upvote a comment as many times as they like by tipping 5 Mana for each click. Instead of “buying” upvotes following a pricing model, the UI now just shows the total amount of Mana tipped. You have a couple seconds to click in the reverse direction to undo a tip if you misclick or change your mind.
Updates to our API
We have a fully functional write and read API! Our engineer Marshall, who has been working on the open source and API, has written the following about it:
“We did lots of new work lately improving the Manifold public API! You can now use the API to create markets and place bets on your behalf, so feel free to start brainstorming clever automated trading strategies. In addition to the Manifold core team, lots of community members have helped add new fields and functionality to the APIs for reading market data, so people have made some really interesting new tools powered by the API. Check out our Awesome Manifold page https://docs.manifold.markets/awesome-manifold to see some of the highlights.
If you have a cool idea for something you want to build that would be enabled by some new API features, please reach out on Discord or GitHub and we can make it happen together!”
Mexifold
Manifold hosted a trip to Mexico, where we had over 20 people come together to discuss Manifold and surrounding spaces. A huge thank you to everyone who came, including our investors, the EA community, and our awesome users! Together we dove into the most high-level conversation many of us have ever had, bounced cool ideas off each other, and got to know each other on a more personal level, all whilst enjoying the beauty of Mexico City.
Thank you Rachel Shu for the photos!
Our founder Stephen sacrificed to the Teotihuacan gods to bring good fortune to Manifold Markets.
Our 3 founders, from the left: James, Austin, Stephen
Jay Zhao from Leonis Capital, one of our investors, giving a talk.
Sinclair (one of our engineers) celebrating in the Mexico City Pride Parade with her partner Rachel.
Hackathon
We ran a Hackathon in Mexifold for all participants.
1st - Ida and Alex created a fun “guess the name of the MTG counterspell card” app.
Tied 2nd - Agrippa created AudioFriend using Dolby’s media enhancing software.
Tied 2nd - Stephen redesigned Numeric Markets (coming soonish!?).
Tied 4th - David designed a Manifold Twitch integration Twitch integration.
Tied 4th - Austin worked on creating Manifold Markets as an Android app using Capacitor.
Thanks for reading! Over the next few days we will be releasing an interview with our top leaderboard trader Joel, so keep an eye out for that!
See you on Manifold~
David Chee, Community Manager