Above the Fold: Communities, ACX predictions, and upcoming launch!

Welcome to the first edition of Above the Fold - a selection of what’s new with Manifold Markets.

Introducing: Manifold Communities

Manifold Markets lets anyone create a market on anything, from chess tournaments to lunar collisions to newsletter subscriber rates. But with all this variety, it can be hard to keep track of the subjects you’re most interested in...

That’s why we made Communities! These are groups centered around a single topic — like a subreddit, but for markets instead of posts. A single curator chooses which markets and tags are included. Communities also have their own leaderboards, so you can see who has most successfully put their money where their mouth is. Here’s an example:

Some good use cases for a community:

• Host a forecasting tournament for your friends

• Bookmark markets that you want to check back on

• Share a list of interesting related markets

Find the perfect Manifold community here — or curate your own!

ACX predictions for 2022

Scott Alexander just released his yearly predictions for 2022: a list of more than 100 events he thinks may happen this year, along with their probabilities. Like many of you, we’re huge fans of Scott — winning an ACX Grant sure didn’t hurt! — and we wanted to let you all join in on the predicting fun.

So we turned each of his predictions into its own market on Manifold! Now you can see what the market thinks about Scott’s predictions, and trade on any you think are mispriced. They span a wide range of topics, from politics to Covid to economics, and Manifold gets a shoutout as well:

Check out all the predictions here: https://manifold.markets/fold/acx-predictions-for-2022/markets

Launch: T-minus 6 days 🚀

One final piece of news: we’re officially launching next week, on Feb 8th!

But wait, you ask, isn’t Manifold already publicly available? What’s this “launch” about?

Actually, we’ve been in open beta this whole time! When James, Stephen, and I started building this platform in December, we had a long list of features we wanted for a good first experience. To our surprise, y’all jumped on and started trading on markets before many of our core pieces were in place! Over the course of January, we shipped comments, the activity feed, leaderboards, and a new trading algorithm — not to mention our rebranding away from “Mantic Markets”. Now, with the addition of Communities, we think that Manifold is in a good place for a public unveiling!

Things you can look forward to when we launch:

• A personalized, pretty, and public profile page

• Revamped metrics around your trading profits & losses

• An influx of new users to participate in your markets!

Lastly, we couldn’t have done this all without all of you early adopters. It’s been incredibly motivating to see your zany creative markets, hear your feedback and criticism, and read your notes of encouragement. With your help, we blew past our initial targets for prominent creators, community Discord activity and financial support. Thank you all so much — I can’t wait to see where we go from here!

Best,
Austin from Manifold