More Free Mana, Limit Orders and Images!?

Above the Fold #16

Welcome to this week’s newsletter! Some changes to our site over the past couple weeks include unique trader bonus, limit orders, referral links, rich text and images in descriptions, and default groups with new filters to replace categories.

Read through for insight into how these new features work, our reasoning behind each change, and who put the effort into making each thing!

Unique trader bonus

Removing free markets helped removed spam, increased the quality of questions being asked, and increased the ratio of bets to markets.

We still feel it is important to minimise the cost to the user when making a market and reward users for asking good questions. This is where Austin’s ingenious unique trader bonus comes in! For each unique trader who makes a prediction, the market creator receives 5 Mana from Manifold!

This, in addition to Mana you receive from tips, is now tracked under the notifications tab.

Limit Orders

Thanks James for implementing what we suspect will be one of our most significant additions ever! When placing a limit order, users choose the type of shares they want to buy, the probability they are willing to buy up to, and the amount of Mana they are willing to bet. When other users come along and bet against the limit order, rather than buying shares from the AMM, they trade directly with the limit order.

One challenge we have been constantly grappling with is keeping market creation costs low, yet ensuring they have enough liquidity. Hopefully it becomes the norm for speculators who are looking to place large bets to use limit orders. Not only does this give the best price without waiting, they also provide liquidity for other users to bet against!

To everyone reading this, we would strongly encourage you to start using limit orders if you ever see a market you are interested in that doesn’t have much liquidity!

Referral links

Ian blitzed out this feature from scratch in a couple of days! You can now earn 500 Mana for each friend you invite to Manifold! Click the share link button on a market or group to receive credit for the signup. We have a competition for 20,000 Mana to see who will get the most referrals. Hopefully this helps our growth become faster than Ian’s ability to make new features.

Rich text and images in descriptions

When creating a market you can now add images and rich text to your description! Coming soon to comments and chat too! Thanks Sinclair for adding this feature and showing us how we can use it to admire Squidward.

New default groups and filters

Ian has become known for his innovative ideas that are met with skepticism within the team. This doesn’t stop him from going ahead and building them anyways and proving us all wrong! Transforming categories into default groups that everyone is automatically added to (which you can then leave) was certainly one of these controversial ideas. Although it is still in early stages, the response has been mostly positive thus far! So how does it work exactly? After a user tailors which default groups they are in they can filter by the newly added ‘for you’ option. This then shows markets from:

• All the default groups they are subscribed to.

• All other groups they are in.

• Markets created by users they follow.

• Markets bet on by users they follow.

• Markets they have previously bet on.

We have also added a ‘Most popular’ option that sorts based on the number of unique traders.

Report bugs and feature ideas to us in Groups!

We wanted to experiment with a new way to receive user feedback! Over the next few weeks we will be shifting a lot of our time from making new features, to following up and optimising existing ones. We have already identified a number of possible improvements, but would appreciate your help with determining what we should prioritise. Please voice your feedback regarding bugs here and features here (we encourage repeating others’ sentiment too). In return we will be tipping feedback with excessive amounts of Mana!

Other Updates

• Updates to fees from bettors to market creators (selling fees now match betting fees).

• Removal of categories.

• Return of numeric markets! Now uses the same back end as YES/NO markets.

• UI changes to betting.

Links

• Reminder: You can embed our markets on EA forum and LessWrong!

• Reminder: You have until the end of July 15th to donate to charity for it to be matched with quadratic funding! You can also bet on how much will be donated!

• Robin Hanson’s article on branding for prediction market platforms.

• Nuño Sempere’s forecasting newsletter.

• James Medlock’s market on “Will Democrats pass a substantial reconciliation bill before the midterm elections?”

• Alex’s market on “Who will be the next Prime Minister of the UK?”

Well… it’s the part of the newsletter where I express my appreciation for you taking the time to read it all (it really does mean a lot!!). And with that I awkwardly wish that all your bets ever be in your favour!

-David Chee, Community manager