Above the Fold - Create your private group!

SFF Grant, CE tournament, Leagues, private groups and more!

Hey all! Hope you enjoy this week’s (😬) month’s newsletter!

-David Chee

Survival and Flourishing Fund Grant

Manifold Markets wanted to extend a HUGE thank you to SFF for the grant they have given us of $1,241,000. This will extend our runway and allow us to continue to prioritise growing our site to make forecasting more accessible and hopefully actionable. We now anticipate having over 2 years of runway, although we are still hoping to grow and raise series A before the end of this year.

Some of it will likely also be used to continue the development of Manifund, our impact certificates site (you have 1 week left to submit AI essays).

Charity Entrepreneurship Tournament

Charity Entrepreneurship would like YOUR help: which Mass Media and Preventive Animal Welfare charity ideas should we choose?

https://manifold.markets/group/ce-2023-top-ideas

There’s $1,000 to be won by providing valuable comments that influence their regrant selection decisions and another $1,000 to be won by correctly predicting who they choose!

New feature: Leagues

• What is it?

Leagues put users into cohorts of 25 people based on interest, activity level and portfolio value. Over a one-month season users compete to rank highly in their cohort to earn prizes and promote to higher divisions. We’ve seen many with questions on how the specifics works - I’ve just created a doc to outline it here: https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Specifics-of-how-leagues-work-ebfb6ab678b4454a852d513733349c93

• Our Goals and design decisions

Our goal for leagues was the improve the core user experience. Making predictions and ensuring the core flow to find new markets to bet on will always be the most important part of our site. But we wanted to add another layer of substance on top of that. Something that doesn’t change the core user behaviour, but rewards them for staying diligent with updating their bets and appeals to the innate desire to win.

We had various debates on what the metric measured should be. Pure profit, pure portfolio value, something in-between, bets made before the season or only during. We decided that pure profit was too restrictive to only the top users, and it didn’t consistently reward users for frequently updating their predictions to the best of their ability. By using mana earned, anyone can consistently improve their rank by being active, yet profit is still the deciding factor at higher leagues. Streaks do seem to be a bit overpowered right now, so we might consider making tweaks for the following season.

The other criticism leagues have received is the 25 user cohorts that are generated as some have much higher thresholds to promote than others. These were seeded by user interest vector, frequency of recent bets, and profit. Some cohorts are significantly stronger than others, but we things will balance out as top users promote to Diamond, and this way you are competing with people trading in the same markets as you.

• Recent Additions

  • Breakdown of mana earned - Click a user to view.

  • Live feed for people in your cohort.

  • Arrows to show changes in rank.

Other New Features

Private Groups

Our longest, outstanding, highly demanded feature is now here!

You can now create a fully private group* with your friends and manipulate trade in secret! At some point in the future, creating a new private group will likely become a paid feature, so be sure to create groups while they are free!

*As groups are in development, we cannot guarantee complete privacy to hacks but wanted to launch them as we continue to work on security.

Edit comments + history

You can now edit comments.

Also, comments, market titles and descriptions now have a tab which shows their history of any edits!

Boost markets

Previously we launched an ads page where users low on mana could watch ads created by other Manifold users. The goal of this was to allow a direct way for users to spend mana in return for traders on their markets. We didn’t feel like we achieved this, as users would just claim the ad without engaging the content.

Our new feature integrates more seamlessly into the core experience, and boosted markets appear as users scroll their feed. These boosted markets are tailored to users based on their interest vector, and so far we heard great results on ad engagement received which creators can track on their market. You can also boost markets from other creators by clicking on the 3 dotted menu on the top right.

Hackathon projects

Manifold held another internal hackathon to work on games and other fun features.

These include: Stephen’s lootboxes, James’s Q&A, Austin’s oddball (guess a market’s probability and see how close you are).

Shoutouts

• I had the pleasure of meeting the owners of Optic at EAG London, a project just launched through Manifund!

https://opticforecasting.com

• Optic is an in-person, intercollegiate forecasting competition where undergraduates compete to make accurate predictions about the future. Think hackathon/olympiad/debate tournament, but for forecasting — teams compete for thousands of dollars in cash prizes on question topics ranging from geopolitics to celebrity Twitter patterns to financial asset prices.

• Check out Sage’s new Slack integration that allows you to create predictions with your peers (doesn’t use Manifold). https://fatebook.io/for-slack