Above the Fold: Anyone want a loan?

Loans, Substack supporting embeds*, daily betting streaks, new emails, new hires and more!

We are pumped to share the awesome new additions to both our site and our team over the past week!

In this newsletter: Loans, Substack supporting embeds*, daily betting streaks, new emails, new hires, and a user’s experience of running a 20 person prediction market game night!

Enjoy!

Loans are back!

Thanks to James loans are back with a twist! See the image below on how they work.

Without loans, there was very little incentive for users to bet on long-term markets. This prevented an array of interesting questions from receiving engagement and accurate forecasting. We hope as activity in long-term markets increases there will be more room for profit and more accurate probabilities generated.

If you’re a regular reader (<3) then you will know the drill by now. Our new features always go through plenty of iterations so bet on any changes you think will happen to this loan system!

Embedding markets into Substack

Wait… what’s this!? One of our markets embedded into Substack?

That’s right, Substack has worked with us to enable Manifold Markets embeds on their site (won’t work if you are viewing in an email)! For now, it is not available to the public as we wanted to test that they function well in this newsletter first. But you can bet, directly from this page, on whether they’ll be available to the public soon!

Daily betting streaks

We heard you young folk love your streaks!

Earn mana in increasing increments of M$5 for each consecutive day you bet, capped at M$100 per day. Be warned, these numbers will likely be adjusted before any of you actually bet 20 days in a row. 😛

Other updates to the site

• Unlisted markets

  • When creating a market you now have the option to toggle its visibility.

  • Unlisted markets will not be listed on the home feed, but can still be found through search, profile pages, or groups.

  • Notably, these aren’t fully private markets, but we will add those eventually.

• Weekly trending markets email

  • Each week on Monday, 6 random markets from the top 20 trending markets will be sent out in an email. You can opt to unsubscribe from receiving these recommendations at the bottom of said email.

• Onboarding drip email campaign

  • Most of you reading this probably won’t be affected, but as part of improving our new user retention we are implementing a drip email campaign.

  • One of these emails is a link to M$500 redeemable once per account. You might have retroactively received this email, but if you missed it here you go!

New hires

Please join us in welcoming Federico R. Cassarino and Inga Wei to the Manifold Markets team!

Originally from Uruguay, Fede is a full-stack developer who was previously working at Meta in London on use cases of Virtual Reality. He has been using Manifold and other prediction sites as one of his main source of news for a while now! Today marks his first day on the team and we can’t wait to see what he brings to the table!

Inga Wei is based in San Francisco and was previously a UI/UX developer working at Cruise. You may have seen her around as she has already contributed to Manifold during her work trial. During this time she did a superb job of reworking the Manalinks UI and creating a short onboarding popup tutorial which won our last hackathon. She will be joining us full-time starting in September!

How to run a prediction market game night

We wanted to highlight this awesome post Shakeddown wrote about running a betting market game night contest using Manifold Markets. They had ~20 people come over and sign up to bet on 15-20 questions over the course of 3 hours.

The post outlines the method by which they ran the event and a list of helpful conclusions they learnt from the experience. Even if you don’t intend to run one yourself, it’s an engaging read showcasing one of the many use-cases of Manifold Markets!

We are planning to run our own similar community night on our very first Twitch Stream next week. We plan to use it to test our new Twitch integration, so keep on eye on Twitter or Discord for more information about that.

Some spiffy links to check out!

Click at least one of the following that piques your interest! I bet you it’ll be worth it ;)

• Scott Alexander’s Mantic Monday discussing all things prediction markets including the CSPI/Salem Center tournament and the fall of PredictIt.

• User John Roxton’s glorious writeup about his experiments with bots on Manifold.

  • Particularly relevant if you are interested in competing in our ongoing trading bot competition.

• For those of you interested in the EA space - Will MacAskill, author of recently published book “What We Owe The Future”, did an AMA on reddit.

  There wasn’t much about prediction markets, but there was some interesting discussion about promising EA projects, tying together morality and EA values, and why the distinction between EA and longtermism is important.

• Should we add polls to Manifold?

Thanks for reading!!

If anyone knows who Qualy is let me know 👀 I’ll pay well.

David Chee - Community Manager