Above the fold: Milestones and new features

News from Manifold Markets including progress since last week's launch and a new type of prediction market.

Hello from Manifold! This is our third newsletter, and we’ve got so many updates to share!

A milestone

Last week was our launch, and we’re incredibly excited by the response since then!

Our user count has more than doubled, our database bill has exploded, and there’s so many posts in our Discord that sometimes it’s hard to keep up!

Thank you all for using our site! And thanks to Scott (of the ACX blog) for all his posts about us.

New: Free response markets

Yesterday we shipped a new type of prediction market: You ask an open-ended question and users submit free-form answers.

For example, you could ask “If Russia invades Ukraine, what will that look like over the first month?”

Users could then submit descriptions of what territories would be taken over and how quickly, how many deaths there’d be, and so on. Traders would buy shares of answers they believe are more likely to happen. And finally, the market creator would use their judgment to choose the winning answer.

We are very excited about the potential for this mechanism! It finally allows for detailed forecasts of the future, as opposed to merely binary Yes/No forecasts. Manifold is already putting free response prediction markets to work for suggesting new features, selecting our betting system, and judging the reaction to free response markets!

Manifold API

Did you know we have an API to list all our markets?

In fact, this week we’ve expanded the API to include trades and comments! Check it out!

Prettier user pages

We’ve spruced up your profile so you can add a bio and social media links!

It’s the perfect way to share all the markets you’ve created.

Manifold plays Wordle

We tried a fun experiment last week where we used prediction markets to play a game of Wordle!

For each round, we created three prediction markets for three potential words we could guess. Each market asked, for the specified word, whether the game would be won in 4 or fewer rounds. After an hour or two of trading, we picked the word with the highest predicted chance of winning within four rounds, and repeated this process again for the next round. (Markets for words not picked were resolved N/A.)

Essentially, we took the idea of Robin Hanson’s futarchy and applied it to your regular old game of Wordle. It was fun, but I’m not sure I want to play every day.

It’ll be interesting to see what other cool applications of prediction markets our users come up with in the future.

Selected markets

Check out these popular new markets.

Thanks for reading! We can hardly predict where Manifold will take us in the coming weeks and months, but we’re happy to press on toward our goal of building the best prediction market platform.

Keep on predicting,

James