Presenting Manifold Love - Our new dating site!

How Manifold.love works, why we made it, what to expect next

After 2 weeks of intense coding, Manifold just launched a new website. A dating app known as Manifold.love!

How does it work?

Users can take on one of two roles (or both) — someone seeking love or a matchmaker!

Love seekers create a dating profile by uploading photos and answering questions from a long list provided by Manifold. These questions provide insight into an individual’s nuanced personality, taking inspiration from date-me-docs and OKCupid.

By making this collection of highly detailed profiles public, anyone can act matchmaker between profiles they find compatible! This is further incentivised by incorporating prediction markets, which allow matchmakers to profit mana (our play-money), if they can correctly bet on whether two individuals will last in a 6-month relationship or not.

Aella, whose profile is featured above, already has 44 potential matches, yet she hasn’t needed to spend any time searching for matches since creating her profile! Everyone else just does it for her! After a match has been made, Manifold will create a market and notify the two profiles that a match has been presented inviting them to message each other and place their own bets on the market!

At any point, either individual in the match can choose to resolve the market “NO” and reject the other person. Or perhaps they’ll start talking, go on a date, and you’ll see the cutest YES bets from either side as they fall for one another. Maybe their friends will take advantage of their insider info and make trades the lover was too shy to make (or bet on the inevitable downfall they see within the pairing).

I’ve already found the next richest account on Manifold:

What’s next for Manifold.love?

• Experimenting with markets.

  • The primary resolution criteria for a market being 6 months has its pros and cons. It provides the most directly useful information for people interested in longer-term relationships but is a worse experience for matchmakers who have to wait a long time and are making bets at <5% which has bad liquidity.

  • We are planning to introduce a set of markets for each match, with a greater focus on the first and second dates. Possibly something along the lines of proposal B.

• Getting more people to sign up!

  • Remember, if you invite your friends not only will you profit when they get rejected, but you will also get a 250 mana referral bonus!

• We are hosting a party in SF to celebrate Manifold Love’s launch!

  • You are invited - RSVP here!

  • Saturday, Nov 11th, at 8pm, near Market St & Guerrero St

• These are still just ideas, but if we can create a dating app in 2-3 weeks from scratch, we could potentially try the same thing with other applications! Which do you think we should try next, if at all?

  • Sourcing employees

  • Finding friends

  • Finding cofounders

Why did Manifold decide to build a dating site?

Well, one day, our CEO James was coding away inventing new binary market mechanisms for independently resolving multi-choice markets. And although laser-focused on building Manifold, at the back of his mind he wished for a companion. Someone with whom he can share his grand utilitarian ideals and perhaps even envision a life together.

So, he decided to download a couple of dating apps! But alas, as a busy startup founder, he has little time to allocate to swiping. So James does what any savvy entrepreneur does best and outsources his Hinge swiping to a third-party service which helps optimise his profile and find matches.

But, as the first dates go by, James has yet to meet a woman he finds himself compatible with. He begins to lose hope until listening to Robin Hanson’s Manifest talk about finding a more practical, widely desired use case for prediction markets. This gives him an idea! Why not save everyone’s time hopelessly swiping, by inventing a new way to match-make using the power of prediction markets!?

The Manifold community’s existing interest in dating docs and our existing relationship markets gave James the conviction he needed to pursue this project. Our co-founder Austin’s market on his marriage was previously one of the most popular markets on Manifold.

Final thoughts

I wanted to conclude this by saying we still plan to focus on our core product. Regardless of how well Manifold Love does, we intend to keep working on manifold.markets.

While I want to take care not to detract from James’ excitement about this idea, I do hold reservations and intend to continue spending the majority of my time on core Manifold-related tasks. But like any startup that has yet to find PMF, it is necessary to take risky moves that have a skewed distribution of results with incredible upside or complete failure, with little in between. So while I am one of the largest NO shareholders about manifold.love, I am still eager to see where it goes. And honestly, if even a couple of people find a lifelong partner through it, it’s hard to say it wasn’t worth it.

But, hopefully my skepticism is proven wrong! And you can help make that happen by sharing manifold.love with your friends so you can bet on their chances of love!

Thanks for reading!

David Chee