Above the Fold - Community meetup and $13k tournament!
Changes to the site such as the new homepage, new tournaments, and community events
Well met!
Several important announcements in this week’s newsletter, notably our $13,000 Clearer thinking regrants tournament and our meetup in Washington D.C.
First, let’s take a quick look at site updates!
New Home Page
We have just introduced our brand new homepage!
Our aim with this page is to provide a more compelling experience for users who want to quickly check Manifold more casually.
Our previous home (now called search) is decent at surfacing a large quantity of markets to users who are committed to spending enough time scrolling through the majority of markets. We expect power users to still prefer that page over the new home, but it was important to have another option that is more friendly to casual and new users.
One of the upsides of the new home page is that it can be personalised to each individual. One new category of markets is ‘Daily movers’. This will show a list of up to 6 markets that you hold shares in that have moved a significant % within the last 24 hours.
By default, we show 6 markets from each category: Daily movers, Trending markets, New markets, Recently updated, and 4 markets from groups you are part of. But, users can fully customise this and choose what they want to be displayed on their homepage.
You may also notice in the top right that you can view your daily profit!
We are still intending to make a number of changes to our homepage. As always we have a market you can trade on to share with us your thoughts and feedback which is very much appreciated.
Fully customizable notifications
Thanks to Ian, users now have full control over the notifications on our site and what emails they receive. Edit your preferences here.
Other site updates
Daily streak greyed out if you still need to make your daily prediction.
New users are prompted to select interests (from popular groups) when they sign up.
Help & About Center navigation and content improvements.
Type % followed by a market name to add a market preview (similar to those in the feed unlike an embed).
Added and removed: Automatic subsidization of markets
This week we trialled Manifold automatically adding M$20 of liquidity after each time a new unique trader bet on a market. But, users quickly realised they could abuse this to make free profits by making another bet after the liquidity was injected. We’ve removed it for now but will hopefully add something similar back as we want market liquidity to scale as more people bet on them.
Removed: Subsidisation of markets that aren’t your own. This is to prevent people from providing liquidity before betting in tournaments to boost their profit stats. We will look to add this back in the future in a more robust way.
Groups navigation sidebar has been restructured.
Now when within a group the main sidebar will be replaced with the group-specific sidebar.
You can return back to the main site by clicking the Manifold logo.
This is still a bit of an experiment and part of ongoing changes to groups so let us know what you think.
As mentioned in the last newsletter, you can now make a post on the about page of a group. We recommend doing this as it is a great way to share your markets and introduce them to new users. Here’s an example of how that could look.
$13K Prediction Tournament with Clearer Thinking Regrants
Clearer Thinking is partnering with Manifold to host a prediction competition. The goal is to see which traders are good at evaluating grant proposals, and award the best ones!
Clearer Thinking has published 28 altruistic project proposals, each trying to have a “big positive impact on the future of the world.” About half of these will receive funding — you can look through all prediction markets on the proposals, and see what your fellow forecasters think here:
If you can predict which ones are good and profit in the market, you stand to win significant cash prizes.
$10,000 will be split among the top 20 traders who do the best at predicting which project applicants will receive funding.
$3,000 is dedicated to individuals who provide arguments on why a certain project should receive funding. If the comment is compelling enough to influence their decision they will give $250 to the writer of that comment.
Check out the full contest rules here!
Cause Exploration Prize: Tournament Results!
This week our Cause Exploration Prize Tournament concluded. Here is Austin to share some thoughts on the event.
“Manifold Markets ran a prediction tournament to see whether forecasting would be able to predict the winners! For each Cause Exploration Prize entry, we had a market on "Will this entry win first or second place?". Check out the tournament rules and view all predictions made here.
Congrats to KV (@KV12), for correctly predicting two of the prize winners and thereby winning first place, with $263 of the total $1000 prize pool!
I think overall, the markets did okay -- they managed to get the first place entry ("Organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants") as the highest % to win, and one of the other winners was ranked 4th ("Violence against women and girls"). However, they did miss out on the two dark horse winners ("Sickle cell disease" and "Shareholder activism"), which could have been one hypothetical way markets would outperform. Specifically, none of the Manifold forecasters placed a positive YES bet on either of these dark horse candidates.
I'm not sure that the markets were much better predictors than just EA Forum Karma -- and it's possible that most of the signal from the markets were just forecasters incorporating EA Forum Karma into their predictions. The top 10 predictions by Karma also had 2 of the 1st/2nd place winners:
And if you include honorable mentions in the analysis, EA Forum Karma actually did somewhat better. Manifold Markets had 7/10 "winners" (first/second/honorable), while EA Forum Karma had 9/10. Still, both systems did a fairly good job of surfacing good content; we’re looking forward to finding other neat uses of prediction markets to identify
A quick shoutout to:
The team at OpenPhil (especially Chris and Aaron) for hosting the Cause Exploration Prizes
The writers of these essays for creating such thought-provoking material
All of you forecasters, for evaluating and predicting along!”
— Austin Chen, Cofounder
Other Announcements
Washington, D.C. Manifold meetup & board games
The Manifold Markets team is going to be in Washington to attend EA global and host some meetups.
Let us know in Discord if you are interested in having a chat over a drink or joining one of our meetups!
EAG Washington D.C.
Manifold will be attending EAG this week!
We will be hosting a forecasting workshop on Friday at 8pm and office hours on Sunday at 2pm (if you are attending EAG and want to join details can be found in swapcard).
Congratulations to the winner of the f2p tournament… BTE! 🎉
Players created fresh accounts and competed to see who could earn the most mana within a week.
BTE’s main strategy was to create loads of trending markets to farm unique trader bonuses and referral links. His f2p account ended with 5 referrals and peaked at just under M$6500.
The runner-up was Stephen who debatedly cheated by sharing his f2p markets using the main Manifold Twitter account (I’m definitely not just salty he did better than me 😶).
Markets
One of the most popular types of markets since our last newsletter was those regarding the Queen’s passing. The Manifold team was doing our regular stand-up when we noticed from a demo a team member was presenting, which included an embedded market, that the probability of her death had gone up to 99.9%.
There are still a few markets open relating to her death that you can bet on.
A lot of controversy in chess recently with allegations of Hans Niemann cheating and Magnus Carlsen conceding against him after his first move.
People seem to gravitate towards markets relating to Putin’s death, although the consensus seems to be that he will be around for a while yet.
Thanks for reading!
We’ve had some small, but noticeable growth over the last few weeks and are more excited than ever about Manifold Markets. Thanks for sharing this journey with us!
-David Chee, Community Manager