@FoldyOfficial
The official Manifold Markets account.
manifold.markets$8,647 in pending offers
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 600, 1400 Median Valuation: 1000.0
Tod Waddington: I personally don't use it, and I think it appeals to very few people. Count this 0 as a "I don't know", rather than zero
Rachel: No update, no change.
Austin: No real updates, but a slight bump in valuation for the presumed ability for mods to continue using it for the additional month. Thanks again for making this public tool for our community's power users!
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 50, 100, 500, 400
Median Valuation: 250.0
Eliza: Politics article was cool, I hope he gets paid for it. I don't know what the actual rate for an article is but 50 sounds like a good start.
Tod Waddington: Just read his article, loved it, but I guess that's it?
Rachel: The politics article is pretty good! 18 likes is impressive, seems like one of the most-liked articles from the Manifold Substack.
Austin: I appreciate the blog post that Conflux produced; it interweaves a bunch of Manifold markets into the story of the Biden nomination. This is a format that I'd like to explore more of, and commission consistent content showcasing how markets can tell a story! I think typical rates we'd be willing to pay for a commission for a single article are on the ballpark of $200-$300, but in this case I think the quality of the post merits a small increase in the rate.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 1000, 400, 400
Median Valuation: 400.0
Eliza: The overall impact of his moderation actions over the last few months has been incredibly positive for users who wanted to bring attention to markets. He bans spam users and resolves closed markets. He helps ask creators for clarification. He resolved many hundreds (!!!) of markets during the end of year resolution period. This project definitely had a DIRECT impact.
Tod Waddington: FWIW, I see this $400 as recognising some of the "excess effort" above other mods, particularly over the new year.
I think it'd be unfair to some of the others to give more, especially when there were a lot of other contributors and many others who would gladly help out if we modded them.
Austin: I encouraged SirCryptomind to apply for the community fund after hearing his personal story. While I'm sad that we couldn't bring him onto our team for the role he was seeking, I'd like to retroactively award him this amount as thanks for the moderation work he's put in. I think asking people to resolve markets is unglamorous work but helpful to traders, and I appreciate that he's poured out a lot of his own time into helping out others.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 100, 3200, 1500, 100, 1600
Median Valuation: 1500.0
Eliza: I'm not sure exactly if this is going to take off or not, but if Manifold pays Partners for recruiting users, 50 users should be rewarded.
Tod Waddington: I have never had a response from college confidential OR the drones that run r/chanceme. This is a no-brainer example of where manifold dominates the competition in practicality, it's just difficult to reach them. cc6 has >150 referrals, and the developed /college page is fantastic. We will certainly make use of it more in future when I finally convince reddit to let me run ads again.
Rachel: I still think this is cool, but I’ve updated down a bit since engagement has been lower than I would have predicted.
James: Not sure this got much further traction.
Austin: I'm glad that cc6 has put out the app in front of other college students and recruited 50 new users for Manifold through this; beyond the engineering work which cc6 has done great at, I think getting your work out in front of other people is super important and I hope cc6 has learned a lot from marketing this!
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 400, 900 Median Valuation: 500.0
Tod Waddington: Isaac does a fantastic job communicating manifold and if he thinks he can reach new people, I support it. (Plus, backlinks for SEO, from his own blog)
Rachel: No update, no change.
Austin: Unfortunately no new blog posts since last time, I think, but I've been seeing Isaac's post "Markets are not polls" cited in more and more areas (eg Calibration City) and I think this merits a slight bump in valuation due to greater realized impact. (note, we really ought to repost this properly onto the Manifold newsletter)
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 400, 200, 200
Median Valuation: 200.0
Tod Waddington: I don't really care about open sourcing the bot; the mood markets are only cool if he attaches an IF and tests the thing most likely to improve his mood (like a mini-study, I saw someone else was doing this too)
Fire the CEO markets seem cool, but I wouldn't just want the markets - I would want him to build a display page like the elections page, that shows companies with controversial leaders (e.g. Elon Musk, SBF pre-prison) and the expectation for company growth with/without them. The way the markets currently exist, they're boring. I think they have great potential & application, but it needs to be delivered in a more exciting way, otherwise it's just markets. I don't think there needs to be 1,000 fire the CEO markets, but a carefully picked 10-15 that are packaged and displayed effectively.
Arbitrage app sounds useful. If we indexed all the markets that are perfect to arb, it also provides a collection for us to see if we should be unlisting dupes (or maybe one day, merging) to clean the site up a bit.
Rachel: No progress, no change.
Austin: No change in valuation since there haven't been any updates (though I appreciate that NC Young took the time to write these in!)
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 300, 400
Median Valuation: 400.0
Tod Waddington: Good for building friendships around our product & very high-quality users. Funding could be replaced by a partner program referral $ bonus. It seems worthwhile to pay for a space to convert more EA/rationalist people onto manifold, and I'd happily give a higher valuation if there was a higher turnout, but for 10-20 people I think ~$500 is reasonable
Rachel: No update, no change.
Austin: No change in valuation since there haven't been any updates.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 2500, 3000, 2500
Median Valuation: 2500.0
Tod Waddington: I honestly cannot believe bro agreed to do this for 20k mana initially. It really is a fantastic way to source high quality markets, and jskf doesn't waste time or overcomplicate things, he's easy to communicate with and created exactly what I was looking for, but better - and solved all of the technical challenges.
Rachel: No update, no change.
Austin: No change in valuation given not much additional usage of the bot. I do appreciate that jskf took time to meet with Christian of Metaculus to talk through how to not spoil Metaculus tournaments -- thanks for helping clarify that.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 900, 600, 1000
Median Valuation: 900.0
Tod Waddington: I think it's a nice thing to have, even if it doesn't get much attention. This is something we could feature more prominently in future, so I think it's valuable to have them developing a routine and improving the show quality such that it's there when we want/need to take it further.
For example, if one day featured on site somewhere, it could also act as a live support/help/welcome to new users. It gives a layer of interaction that is friendship building and makes people feel more connected to manifold. It's like bottom-funnel conversion stuff and not really that important right now, but people who participate are likely to hang around on manifold a lot longer.
Rachel: No update, no change.
Austin: I'm sad that this initiative didn't continue past the end of the Community Fund -- consistently producing good content just turns out to be a hard problem. I imagine the Manifold Live also helped us with the idea to bring on Joshua as editor-in-chief for Politics, which has been going great so far.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 1000, 2000, 1500, 3600
Median Valuation: 1750.0
Eliza: I can't remember what I put last time but it seems like a real thing happened....
Tod Waddington: It would be cool if we set them up on a partnership thing, and paid them that way in future? Even if it were at a higher referral rate (e.g. $3)
I think the cost here should mostly cover the recruitment for the show, or other time commitments.
I would 100% sponsor something like this independently and get far worse results. Having skilled event organisers that are also committed manifolders running it makes it great.
Rachel: I’m giving the same valuation as last time, even though another event was run and it sounds like it went really well! This is mostly because of Manifold’s priorities changing: now they’ve put Manifold.love into maintenance mode, so my guess is they value contributions to that less now. There are also of course diminishing returns to more of these types of events, and now there have been two of these + Bet on Love, all around similar times. The event sounds cool and fun and like the people there had a good time—don’t get me wrong—I just think the surplus benefits to Manifold the company are not that large.
Austin: Happy to see that Sasha ran a second version of this show -- and it seems to have gotten wider reach, as well as set up several dates! I think it's quite an accomplishment to produce events that draw in a total of 100+ viewers, and report such a great experience as these did. We're not currently investing more into Manifold Love (as of Mar 15, at least) but I hope that we can reuse some of the skillset for making these go well for future experiments such as Manifold TV.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 3000, 5000, 2750, 3000, 8000
Median Valuation: 3000.0
Frankie: imo case's simplified onboarding flow + "first week" engagement checklist are both super valuable
Eliza: He's doing work that the Manifold team could/should/would have done but didn't have the bandwidth for. Users are ecstatic. Reward him.
Tod Waddington: This stuff is really cool. I am comfortable with giving Case money knowing that when he sees something he can fix or improve, he does it. Hovercards are great, color picker is fantastic, plus I've seen him credited for some other fixes here and there.
James: Great contributions. I estimated $900 for the 4 major PR's, on top of the $2100 from previous rounds.
The hover card implementation was a little bit annoying because it triggered lots of hydration warnings, and was a little verbose by wrapping more components everywhere instead of making a new component that included the hovercard.
Still, hover cards are a great UI feature that makes users more likely to follow creators.
The other features are pretty strong as well. People liked the color-picking for answers, limit order improvements for answers are cool, etc.
Austin: Case continues to produce beautiful, thoughtful, well-executed features that are broadly popular with the crowd. Custom color picker for answers is my favorite of these; it places control over the look & feel of a market with the market creator, allowing people to do all kinds of neat shenanigans, and is very much keeping with the libertarian spirit of Manifold. The hovercards are a close second, a small touch that helps users new & old alike navigate our site. Contributions like these make me so happy that Manifold is an open source project!
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 3000, 3000, 4000, 8000
Median Valuation: 3500.0
Eliza: Awesome project.
Tod Waddington: These projects all seem like nice-to-haves, and it seems like a no brainer to direct funding here instead of current dev time.
(1) Calibration city is a very valuable tool which we should probably use more. It would be cool to be listed as a sponsor though if we are paying for its development!
(2) this is least important to me, people like pixels, pixels are free, postage is expensive. OTOH, it's a free ad/reminder in their homes, and
(3) Loan exchange sounds like a technical nightmare (short of having a manifold bank with fees & insurance built in), if he wants to try and work it out, I think it's worth at least ~2k (though afaik he hasn't done any of it).
(4) Maybe I'm pessimistic but I think this is unlikely to look good, even though it's a great idea
(5) This sounds like it has viral loop potential, so I like it! Plus, more leaderboards/competitive stuff is awesome. ~1k (it looks like he hasn't done this though)
(6) idek who would use this
Rachel: Last time I said $3000, and now I’ll up this to $4000 given that there have been some improvements, including a bunch that I suggested last time! (not sure whether that was causal. Regardless, it’s better.)
Some updated UI notes:
given that calibration is the default page, I think it should be the first one in the nav bar and that “introduction” should be called “about” instead.
the Calibration City logo should link to the home page, which afaik is the calibration page
“List” in the navbar should say “markets” or “questions list” or something more descriptive, because before clicking on that I have no idea what is on it
FAQ isn’t actually an FAQ which is odd. In fact, the introduction is structured like an FAQ whereas the FAQ is not!
Austin: Calibration City is now super polished and a joy to use; there are so many little thoughtful details, animations, and options that wasabipesto has provided on this site. I'm glad to see Polymarket data up as well, so that we have a beautiful and credible site to see how our different platforms compare.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Weighted Median Valuation: 0
Eliza: Zero because I don't see any progress, but I think this is very important for Manifold
cc6: Nothing been done
Isaac King: No product. $0.
wasabipesto: It doesn't look like there is any activity on this project.
Rachel: No progress
SG: No comment
James: Not started
Austin: $0 valuation based on no impact so far; but I think curation could be a valuable service, depending on how it’s implemented. I would also encourage Mick to just go ahead and try doing it (eg curating a bunch of series of markets as viral Twitter thread or blog article) instead of waiting for impact cert investment.
Also: I wasn’t aware of this but Mick has been consistently blogging about prediction markets for a while now; this gives me some confidence that he has the right background for executing a project like this one. Check out his work at https://mickbransfield.com/markets/
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Weighted Median Valuation: 0
Eliza: I don't quite understand this one yet.
cc6: Nothing been done
Isaac King: No product. $0.
wasabipesto: It doesn't look like there is any activity on this project.
Rachel: No progress
David Chee: No work/funding not raised
SG: No comment
James: Not started
Austin: This seems to still be in the idea phase, which is why the valuation is $0 for now (we aim to pay out prizes based on delivered impact, not just promisingness). That said, the proposal does have promise; making the results of prediction markets easier to grok could be useful. A lot comes down to how this is executed (eg where are these one-lines shared? which markets are chosen? who specifically is the audience?); I have been previously impressed by Marcel’s work on Base Rate Times, and would love to see what else he and Brooker come up with.
PS — I would encourage you two to get out a MVP of this quickly (rather than waiting for upfront investment), since the community fund is entering its third round. We’re happy to award prizes for good work, even if it hasn’t received any investment via certs!
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 200, 100, 0, 50, 0, 300
Weighted Median Valuation: 50
Isaac King: Useful. Implementation is awkward, but that's a given for anything that's not native. Likely has saved several people some time and effort. $200.
wasabipesto: I think this sort of thing is very important, and should eventually be a first-party feature. If I'm going to bet significant amounts on a market I want to be informed of any rapid changes! Unfortunately it looks like the bot is currently broken, and could use a more ergonomic interface (like a web app or something).
Rachel: Seems like cc6 doesn't really believe in this anymore. Last time I said I hoped they put effort into making it easy to use, and they basically decided that it wasn't and that would be hard to change so this wasn't worth pursuing, which makes sense to me!
SG: No comment
James: Seems like it's not well supported and not endorsed for usage by the creator. Such a tool has to be pretty good to be worth anything.
Austin: Unchanged valuation since last time; I think it’s very reasonable if cc6 decides that the college admissions site is much more worthwhile than the this one, and encourage her to focus efforts on whatever she finds most promising.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 200, 10, 0 Weighted Median Valuation: 0
Eliza: No progress, still seems cool.
cc6: Nothing has happened yet
wasabipesto: I think there could be interesting ideas here, but none of it caught on enough to be valuable. "Ways to win mana" like this should be featured more prominently on Manifold's home feed.
Rachel: No progress.
SG: Valuation mostly for first PDT.
James: Hasn't gotten too far. I guess the hardest part is organizing the people who want the tournament, not necessarily the technical part.
Austin: I think tournaments are pretty tricky, especially if “promotion” is a big part of what makes them successful. I would still love to have this work out, but maybe the best audience wouldn’t be “Manifold power users” but rather “existing community of gamers (eg MTG or Slay the Spire or Poker or sth) competing in a tournament that Manifold sponsors and run prediction markets on”. I recognize this is somewhat different than what Isaac set out to do though.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Weighted Median Valuation: 0
Eliza: It's a zero but it sounds like you found much better uses of your time than being an overworked, underpaid advertising intern for a website, so I think that's just fine.
cc6: Nothing has happened
Isaac King: No product. $0.
wasabipesto: I'm glad Jacob is taking some time for relaxation (but I am also looking forward to an updated nice numbers video!)
Rachel: No progress.
SG: No comment
James: There wasn't any progress.
Austin: Still very excited to see what Jacob comes up with!
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 200, 0, 1000, 3000, 400, 500, 100, 1200
Weighted Median Valuation: 500
Eliza: They made a PR but it seems like no one helped guide it to the finish line. You have to pay them something.
Isaac King: Great idea, but only a prototype so far, nothing usable. $0.
wasabipesto: I think this is a great project. It identifies people looking for high-value, specific information (how likely am I got get accepted to this college?) and tweaks the site to streamline the process for them to answer their question. I think Manifold can seem intimidating to a lot of people and niche on-ramps like this could be extremely valuable to get people using the site at large.
Rachel: I love this! The creation step looks really easy to use and understand. Possibly this is a good way to be introduced to Manifold/prediction markets, to start with a simple use case with a lot of guidance, and something Manifold could experiment more with. I do think the chanceme landing page is slightly confusing/cluttered. It might be better to, instead of showing the normal Manifold market selection button and the full market displays, just show an "ask about my chances" and a "bet on other people's chances" button. If I were new, I imagine I'd find the "choose question type" thing a bit confusing, since there's only one option shown and, as far as I would know, there would only be one option available ever.
David Chee: This is great! The only reason for the valuation is because this is something the Manifold team would have been able to put together relatively quickly.
What is the much harder thing for us to do, and therefore more valuable, would be actually getting students to try it as we are not in those circles.
SG: Most of the impact will come from getting Manifold to make further refinements and decide to promote it. The median impact of this proposal is probably 0, but there's a small chance the impact could be huge.
James: I merged the PR for this. I see 5 created college markets in the ChanceMe topic: https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=college-chance-me
That's a start. One has 21 traders.
With more promotion, I could see more impact from other students using this tool to create their college admissions markets.
We should link this page in our newsletter. Not sure what else to do for promotion. It's a shame that neither the markets nor the topic link to the page to create your own college market (https://manifold.markets/chanceme)
Austin: It is super awesome that this is now shipped and live; I think domain-specific prediction market templates are a very promising direction and I love that cc6 put in the work to skin Manifold and make it work for this specific use case. If this approach ends up working well, I could imagine being inspired to support many more kinds of landing pages and market templates on our site!
Right now, the project still has a lot of unrealized potential as it doesn’t have many users. What I’d be excited to next see is actual college applicants and other students interacting with the site, and learning about whether this form factor is good for them. Getting feedback and iterating quickly is super important for making the site understandable and usable by a wider audience!
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 100
Weighted Median Valuation: 0
Eliza: I don't see any updates.
cc6: Nothing has happened
wasabipesto: It doesn't look like there is any activity on this project.
Rachel: Seems like nothing has been published. Sorry Manifold took over, but I bet they'd still appreciate designs from Tobi!
SG: No comment
James: Barak ended up taking this over. It was kind of tricky to figure out the arrangement of what to do with profits anyway.
Austin: Barak was so excited by the idea of something like this he couldn’t help but try to in-house it, haha. That said, we still don’t have an operating merch store yet, and I’d really love to have one exist.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 250, 400, 500, 400, 400, 800 Weighted Median Valuation: 400
Eliza: Keep writing! The more, the better.
cc6: High-quality, but no new posts since last valuation
wasabipesto: Isaac is a very good technical writer! His articles "Prediction Markets Are Not Polls" and "Understanding Subjective Probabilities" are great introductions into important concepts and should be linked to prominently in Manifold's documentation - these are the sorts of things that would have convinced me to start using numeric predictions (and Manifold specifically, if it had existed) five years ago. I'd love more in this series!
Rachel: No progress since last time, and the posts seem to be ~meeting my expectations.
SG: No comment
Austin: I appreciated the Subsidies article (though I suppose I would the most, given that I was the one who sponsored the “subsidize a bunch of markets” experiment), and am adding another $150 in prize funding for this one.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 50, 20, 50, 200, 75, 200
Weighted Median Valuation: 200
cc6: Only mood market is out at the moment, and while it is creative, it's not enough to warrant a high valuation
Isaac King: The mood market seems like more of a personal project than anything prosocial. (At least until the writeup comes out.) $0.
Fire the CEO markets are an interesting idea, but low engagement and no one is making decisions based on them. This kind of conditional market is also strongly affected by correlation-is-not-causation bias; seems more likely that a CEO will be fired because the stock price went down than vice versa. $20.
wasabipesto: > Fire the CEO markets seem interesting, but I don't see any evidence they're more useful than most other stock-related markets. I'd be more interested if there was some evidence that they had been cited/used for some decision making, which is unlikely with play-money.
I don't think the mood market is particularly interesting, it's a question format that has been done many times before on Manifold without much to show.
Rachel: It seems like most of the Fire the CEO markets still don't have very many traders, which makes them not worth much.
SG: No comment
Austin: I think Fire the CEO markets show the most promise to Manifold as a business, especially if they serve as a viral/fun intro into how prediction markets can work. We haven’t seen this happen much yet — maybe we should try to get Robin Hanson to tweet this out or something?
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 250, 600, 400, 250, 300, 500, 400
Weighted Median Valuation: 400
Eliza: Five new users is good, go get more.
cc6: I think having regular in-person meetups is a creative idea and I think it's good to do it somewhere where there's not much popularity yet. Who knows, this could start a new trend in the area!
Isaac King: Similar to the London meetup but smaller. $400.
wasabipesto: Casual in-person meetups are fun, and I'm glad you got some new users! Prediction markets are a great tool, but I think you should be looking for something unique to really bring people in - local activities or politics, or tournaments about something important to your group. I think you'll have a better program if you include things more people care about than Manifold itself
Rachel: It sounds like the first meetup went really well and the second one was meh, so lets say those were worth 250 & 50, respectively. Agree that making them a regular thing would be better. Also, I'm just really glad this exists—hearing about it on demo day made me smile :)
SG: No comment
Austin: It’s cool to hear that 2 meetups have happened already, including a very well-attended pilot! As I mentioned on the stream, consistency/regularity/predictability is pretty important IMO in turning a meetup into A Thing, so I’d love to see what the feedback from Seattle Manifolders after a few more consistent gatherings.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 1400, 2000, 2000, 3000, 1500, 2500 Weighted Median Valuation: 2500
cc6: Good to bring together the prediction market platforms and add more high-quality questions to Manifold
Isaac King: Very useful. High quality questions are a necessity for Manifold, and why not outsource the writing to other platforms? $2000.
wasabipesto: In my opinion Mirrorbot should have existed since Day 2 of Manifold. It plays to Manifold's strengths (create any market!) and alleviates its weaknesses (not being taken seriously) while also allowing people to see a direct comparison of the same question on different platforms. Often I see someone nitpick differences in resolution criteria between platforms but Mirrorbot solves that problem entirely.
Rachel: I gave a high valuation for this last time and still think it's great! I've updated upwards slightly because of the ACX 2024 markets, which make awesome posts like Zvi's recent prediction one possible and which I witnessed a new user being very interested in.
SG: No comment
Austin: One major awesome thing that Mirrorbot enabled was mirroring the ACX questions from Metaculus, so that people could trade them on Manifold as well. These markets have been pretty popular, reflecting the perennial demand for high-quality questions to forecast on. This also led Zvi to create a really great post breaking down each of his own forecasts for the ACX questions and where he would buy the market to — Manifold is extremely interested in having these kinds of quality writeups get produced and shared.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 700, 3000, 600, 500, 1200
Weighted Median Valuation: 600
Eliza: The bulk actions toolbar for regular moderators to be able to do group actions without manually using the API is awesome.
Manifold should built this into their main product.
cc6: Very useful for people on Manifold, but not for non-Manifolders. Glad that you have been continually improving the search
wasabipesto: Isaac's search tool is invaluable for how I use Manifold. The onsite search bar has come a long way - and it's fine for a lot of casual searches - but when I want to do something serious Isaac's search is 1000x better. I have a folder of jupyter notebooks I used to use for searching and filtering markets around the end of the year but they have been completely replaced by this super-convenient tool.
Rachel: Increasing my valuation slightly from last time. Letting moderators improve group sorting easily does seem nice for everyone on Manifold.
SG: No comment
Austin: The updates are fairly minor, but I think this is one of those projects that continue to deliver value to our users and thus I’m bumping up my scoring here.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 250, 300, 400, 1000, 600, 5500, 350, 1000
Weighted Median Valuation: 600
Eliza: I think the idea is cool but I haven't actually watched any of this so I don't know what to say. It's got to count for something, though. Did they add new users or encourage existing users to act in a way that will help the site grow?
cc6: I think this is a nice event, but still not that much impact because only people who are really into Manifold attend. It can also still be more interactive
Isaac King: A nice project, but doesn't seem to be engaging new people. Some general community-building aspects to this, but seems fairly minor. Mostly doesn't make people feel directly engaged, except the guests themselves. $300.
wasabipesto: I sat in on an episode of Manifold Live once and it was actually pretty fun. It's not typically my thing but I think the hosts really like what they're doing and know how to make prediction markets fun and interesting. I think having coordinated "events" like this are invaluable to keeping the site fresh, and maybe something that can go viral!
Rachel: Idk, number just feels right. There's a lot of content, but none of it super popular or high quality. Resolving a bunch of markets is nice.
David Chee: I'm including the NYE resolution call and work as part of my valuation which accounts for the majority of the value.
The calls are really really cool and are "high-value" content. But with a small audience Manifold probably wouldn't pay much for it at this point. It needs more marketing, I'd be happy to help with that if you reach out to me and keep me looped in on what you want marketed. I might suggest trying to partner with an existing podcast and see if we can provide content and they can provide an audience.
SG: No comment
Austin: The NYE stream, live bet between Marcus & Domer, and Hard Forkasts episode all seem like nice instances of providing camaraderie and solidifying bonds within the Manifold community. I’m glad that this project continues to draw in viewers from Manifold power users. I’d really love to see a more newbie-focused episode as well (eg walking someone new to Manifold through the process of betting, creating a market, etc).
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 1600, 800, 500, 1500, 3200, 1000, 500, 1800
Weighted Median Valuation: 1500
Eliza: I heard about this happening and it sounds cool but I don't know the first thing about marketing. It's normal to pay $$$ for new users so if they manage to attract a lot of users it's worth paying for!!!!
cc6: I think this event is a fun way to get people into prediction markets. It has a lot of potential.
Isaac King: Difficult to evaluate, but it seems like a good community-building effort. Worth more than 2 blog posts. $800.
wasabipesto: Wow, getting 50 people to attend a show for a betting-slash-dating-website is no small feat! I'm still extremely skeptical of Manifold Love as a product but if it fails it won't be because of a lack of enthusiasm.
Rachel: Sounds like the event went really well, better results than I was expecting! I'm mostly evaluating this as a big and cool meetup, rather than media production, both because videos haven't been released and because I expect the in person part to be most of the benefit.
David Chee: Some great buzz for Manifold. The show probably created more entertainment value than my stingy valuation, but this is based on how much Manifold would pay for the value created for us.
Things that are already in the works that I know will increase the valuation: -Short videos and marketing material for Manifold(love) to use. -Show #2
It's really difficult to evaluate events and their knock-on effects. So this valuation isn't reflective of my experience at the show, just its potential to generate value for Manifold (which isn't even the goal of the show, so feels unfair to evaluate it accordingly).
SG: No comment
James: Amazing. This is a great way to promote Manifold Love. Neat that 50 people came. Builds a lot of buzz and confidence when real people are using and talking about the app.
It's also helpful for getting feedback (e.g. that Manifold Love is not quite there as a product). I hope the feedback is more positive on the Feb 10th showing.
I ballparked the valuation as $10 per attendee.
Austin: I’ve given Sasha lots of feedback already (kudos to Sasha proactively asking about how they could make the project valuable by Manifold’s lights!) A dating show is a super awesome idea, and the fact that they pulled it off is even more awesome.
I think the raw numbers in terms of signups, etc aren’t super meaningful as of yet — but that’s understandable given the scope of the event as an in-person. I’d be interesting in seeing what improvements they make in the second iteration — hopefully it’s an actually good experience in terms of convincing people to match up with each other!
(Note to self: I need to connect Sasha with GoblinOdds, I’m sure they would have great ideas on how to integrate the event & videos into the marketing strategy for Manifold Love!)
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Weighted Median Valuation: 0
Eliza: Zero because I don't think he made much progress on it, but I still think that it is critically important that Manifold figure out a way to correctly price extreme probabilities. This is one of the most unintuitive parts about forecasting and giving 'regular people' the ability to understand the difference between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 and 1 in a million seems like one of the most +EV things Manifold could do. These are the kind of probabilities that affect life-altering risks. I hope someone can find a way to support or work with Evan on this.
cc6: Nothing done yet
Isaac King: An extremely important problem to solve, but this project hasn't solved it yet, or made any progress as far as I can tell. $0.
wasabipesto: It doesn't look like there is any activity on this project.
Rachel: No progress yet.
David Chee: Doesn't seem to be any work produced yet.
SG: No comment
Austin: No updates yet? Excited to see what Evan’s been up to though!
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 1000, 1600, 1000, 2500, 2100, 5000
Weighted Median Valuation: 2100
@case if you want to be included in the final evaluations, please hit the "reactivate" button at the bottom of your project description. Since your project isn't active, we can't actually make buy offers.
Eliza: The 'random' PRs is a great model for a community member and I really hope it encourages other community members to contribute in the same way. Notice how positive the reception to Case's PRs has been and think how much more good will Manifold can gain with the power users by prioritizing the experience for community members to contribute.
Joke: Negative $1000 for the end of year resolution page, because it almost killed SirCryptomind.
cc6: Pull requests are useful of course. I like that you are doing lots of fun projects relevant to current events (new year markets + manaunfolded), but they also don't have as much potential for growth.
Isaac King: I appreciate the work you put into the onboarding flow, but it looks like Manifold decided they didn't like it. My understanding is that we're supposed to value these projects based on their actual realized impact rather than potential impact if the world had been different, so I'm calling that $0.
The various QOL PRs are difficult to value, I'll put those at $600 collectively. I really appreciate people who do the unglamorous stuff like this.
Manifold bounties looks nice but I don't see how this improves on native Manifold bounties. Making people check multiple websites in order to see all potential bounties seems like negative utility, it's better to have those in a single central location. Unlikely to have wasted more than a few hours of total time though. $-100.
Manifold Tools is interesting. It looks a lot nicer than my dashboard, though it seems to be focused entirely around New Year's? I'm not sure if anyone actually used this, but it seems like it could easily have saved a few hours of moderator time in total, so $100.
Mana Unfolded was very well done, seems good for user retention. $1000.
wasabipesto: > Mana/unfolded is pretty cool! I remember seeing it around Christmas and liked it a lot better than the one Manifold made. It's a nice clean interface with a bunch of neat information in one place, and more importantly it's easily-shareable. I'd love to see you build on this for even more cool information next year!
Manifold Bounties is interesting. I think it's a neat proof of concept to re-skin a manifold product for a specific use-case but I don't see why I would use this site over just searching on Manifold. I think it needs to bring something else to the table in order to be useful and I don't see what that is. The PRs to Manifold (mostly adjustments to the API) seem useful, though I've not encountered any situations where I would use those specific endpoints. Exposing more control to external clients is always nice, and I'm glad someone is keeping the docs up-to-date.
SG: Beautifully executed projects! This submission may have the most effort/polish/execution level of any but may be less impactful given lack of integration into the core platform. The PRs have been helpful too!
James: Very cool. It's great to see Case continuing to make valuable contributions over time!
Valuation:
From previous evaluation - 1300
Manifold Tools - 300 This was heavily used during the resolve-a-thon, although it might not have any further use.
New PR's - 500 Adding the Yes/No outcome to the unique bettor notification for multiple choice answers is very helpful. I already saw one person organically screenshot this to make a point. The PR's were short, easy to review, and none got rejected. That minimizes our attention cost, which is good. The 6 PR's are valued $50-150 each.
Austin: The new Manifold Tools dashboard is great! Very shiny & effective leaderboard encouraging people to work on the end of year resolutions, with all the polish I’ve come to expect from case’s websites. The fact that this dashboard got organic usage and Discord screenshots from Manifold’s mods and power users, makes me value this project particularly highly — it’s quite rare to see projects have people who like the idea & execution so much that they end up sharing it with each other.
Manifold Markets
about 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 1500, 300, 2000, 3000, 4500, 1500, 6000
Weighted Median Valuation: 3000
Eliza: They are working in #market-math to discuss future changes, they already made a lot of updates. The site looks cool. This is the kind of thing that can broaden interest in PMs in general and also help Manifold grow.
cc6: Calibration city looks useful. Currently it's still limited, but I like the features that you are planning to add. I think it would also be cool to see the calibration of prediction markets at certain points in time to see if we are improving our accuracy over time
Isaac King: Calibration City is extremely cool. Main utility would seem to be convincing people that prediction markets are accurate, and knowing which ones to trust the most. Having a well-known, reliable, central hub for this data would be worth a lot. However given past experience with passion projects like this, I'm not confident that this will be kept up to date indefinitely. If this came along with a credible guarantee of future uptime and maintenance I'd value it at several thousand, but as an as-is project that may go down at any time, I'm calling it $400; comparable to a single blog post on market calibration, but slightly more versatile.
(Calibration City could also be a good data source for bots that correct systematic miscalibration, but I'm hesitant to assign it any value on that note since such bots can turn a profit themselves and I don't think they need to be subsidized. Regardless the current API appears to not support custom queries, so I don't need to think about it for now.)
The other 5 projects appear to have not been started, so I'm valuing them all at 0.
wasabipesto: (I'll do my best to be unbiased!) The basic structure of Calibration City hasn't changed that much since the Community Fund started. It's faster, which is a good improvement but a sub-one-second loading time is largely table stakes. It's a little prettier but it could still use a nice design pass. The main value-add right now is that it has integrated additional platforms with room to add more. I think the main value for this project is the niche it will fill in the prediction market community: a third-party data source for people investigating prediction markets, evaluating platforms, and learning about forecasting. I've already seen great conversations about prediction markets in lesswrong and discord as a result of people experimenting with the data and asking question
Rachel: This is really cool, I had fun playing around with it, and yeah it was nice to not have to wait 10 seconds for it to load! A bunch of little things I noticed about the UI:
the "instructions" tab is default open, and doesn't really contain instructions, which was distracting/confusing.
it's strange that the explainer parts of the sidebar basically look the same as the adjustment parts of the sidebar. A possible alternative would be to have one info/FAQ button that opens up a modal with all the info.
on a smaller window, I'm not sure how to open up the sidebar to make adjustments.
it would be nice if clicking on the platforms in the sidebar took me to their sites.
it's confusing that there's an explanation of the brier score when the scores themselves are on the opposite site of the screen and not prominent—that's actually what caused me to search for another mention of it, which means it was basically a distraction. It might make more sense to have a little info tooltip right next to where the score is displayed.
David Chee: It's such a useful place to point people towards and has a fantastic, responsive UI.
Love it. Need to market it a bit more on our side for sure.
SG: Cross-platform calibration/accuracy comparisons are very useful and important!
Austin: Calibration city 2.0 is super awesome! I’m learning a lot just by playing with these sliders; it’s presented in a very user-readable fashion, encouraging you to explore and figure out some data points. I’ve said elsewhere that I think this is better than our current calibration page at manifold.markets/calibration, and hope to be able to use some of this information or directly refer to it when we talk about prediction market trustworthiness. It’s also awesome to have a third-party validation that Manifold’s play money markets provide calibrated results.
Minor note: I do kinda wish the framing of the site was a bit less competitive between prediction market platforms” though (I don’t think that was Wasabipesto’s intention, but the graph makes head-to-head comparisons very salient). Manifold would really want to be sending the message “prediction markets & platforms are much more trustworthy than pundits & polls”, and I’m wondering how to best make that case — eg could the same graph contrast against historical individual predictions?
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 10, 100, 0, 500, 300
Median Valuation: 100
James: Not launched yet. $10 for the feedback on the difficulties in the API
SG: Fun project. I could see power users liking this, but it still needs more work. I see most of the impact coming from figuring out precisely which notifications users want and (ultimately) getting that incorporated into the core platform.
Rachel: Seems like cc6 took the bot offline because of some issues, which makes sense but also means that at the moment impact is void. I like the idea—on the one hand, you don’t want Manifold notifications every time someone bets, but it’s also sad to miss out on big news as it’s happening, and this seems like it’s trying to strike a balance and give useful market movement notifs. Also makes me think maybe this should just be a setting on Manifold though. My hope is that they put effort into making it really easy to access and use.
Inga Wei: cool idea!
Austin: Like mirrorbot, this market is a cool example of using Managrams for fun and profit. I especially appreciate that this project is completely shipped, though unfortunately it’s broken at the moment so I would reduce the valuation somewhat.
As with most projects, this would be a lot more valuable with wider adoption. Try sharing the bot with people on the Manifold discord, and talk about what their experience using it has been and what pain points with following markets they have!
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 400, 0, 100, 0, 0
Median Valuation: 0
SG: Valuation just for first iteration of the prisoner's dilemma tournament.
Rachel: Looks like nothing has shipped yet, reasonable idea though.
Inga Wei: I think we've done similar things with varying degrees of success.
Ian Philips: Looks like Isaac hasn't made much progress yet, but I know community members appreciate these games! Would give it a few dozen $ valuation if y'all had some fun with the community, but ideally the fun itself is enough of a payoff.
Austin: I have fond memories of both the MtG tournament and the prisoner’s dilemma code golf challenge! I think the community got a fair bit of value for just having regular events that encouraged people to hang out and play together, and I’m looking forward to what Isaac cooks up.
Both MtG and prisoner’s dilemma require a fair amount of specialized domain knowledge, though. I think the most ambitious, most valuable goal would be some kind of Manifold tournament that draws outside excitement and participation — maybe something like a “new user create a prediction market on your personal life” tournament? idk.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 500, 420, 0
Median Valuation: 0
SG: Not started.
Rachel: Looks like nothing has shipped yet, though I’m excited to see what Conflux comes up with.
Inga Wei: Conflux is great and I think whatever he puts his mind to will be successful
Sinclair: This exact amount will motivate conflux more than a higher amount
A project with no details!? I do think conflux has been good for us but even so, there's just not enough in the application to justify a higher amount
Austin: My prior on Conflux is also quite high; we’re just waiting to see what he comes out with. One idea is to set up some kind of puzzle hunt for Manifold users (I’m continually impressed that Conflux published a puzzle book and also made a puzzle for NYT). His writing has also been high quality (eg on the search for nice numbers), and I think some articles contributed to the Manifold newsletter/journal could be very valuable.
I also think that collaborating on projects is good, and would encourage Conflux and cc6 to team up somewhat
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 500, 0
Median Valuation: 0
James: Not implemented yet, but promising.
SG: Not started.
Rachel: Seems like nothing’s been shipped, so valuation is easy. I am excited about this! Another attempt to find an actually useful application of prediction markets. Good that cc6 is doing user research first, because one big thing I’d be worried about is students wanting to be private about this since it can be a sensitive/stressful subject, and maybe they’d find it embarrassing to be publicly rejected or bet against for admission to a school that their friend got into. On the other hand, it can have positive effects on mood about all of this as a sort of wall of rejection.
Inga Wei: This is a niche that I think is worth trying prediction markets on!
Austin: I’m excited that cc6 is working on this, and am looking forward to seeing an early demo! I think the key will be whether the site makes it enticing enough for high schoolers to understand what the markets are and why they should go through the effort and cost of listing their application in public. In principle, a collaborative public way to talk through your application can be really cool — one of the stretch goals I would aim for would to encourage people to help each other out with their apps!
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 500, 0, 100
Median Valuation: 0
SG: Not started.
Rachel: Excited about this project! Contrary to the suggested failure mode in the description, I think nerds actually do more in-group signaling via graphic tees than most other groups. I’ve loved Tobias’ Manifest card decks, so excited to see the final designs here. All that said, nothing has been shipped yet, so have to give a $0 valuation.
Inga Wei: Yay merch!
Ian Philips: I don't see any progress, yet! But would be awesome to have a store selling manifold merch! Probably $300-500 valuation if you sold some shirts and had some cool designs?
Austin: I agree that the merch store is something that the community would love! I also have high priors on Tobi, who made the amazing playing cards used that we gave out at Manifest. That said, since the store itself is not yet launched yet, this low valuation just reflects the groundwork put into the brainstorming and the designs posted so far.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 300, 400, 100, 5000, 650
Median Valuation: 400
SG: This is a very high-quality blog in general, but overall traffic numbers seem low. The value to Manifold also is also not that high. If subsequent articles are more Manifold-focused and more widely shared, this could be more impactful.
Rachel: I like the idea—it seems right that people who are really into game strategy are the same types of people who are really into prediction markets, so reaching out to that audience seems promising. It sounds like results so far are middling, though skimming through the posts they seem pretty high quality. Would be curious how Isaac is promoting the posts.
Inga Wei: Get those MTG nerds.
Sinclair: I think Isaac is very driven and he's already gotten started!
The numbers seem good. And this obviously is a thing that has "room for funding" in the EA sense. I'm skeptical that the content will be as evergreen as he claims, but it would be a win if it were.
Austin: I think the articles here are quite good — I’d value “prediction markets are not polls” at $400, “Understanding Subjective Probabilities” at $200, and “Manifold Betting Calculator” at $50 in terms of subjective quality. I already reached out to Isaac about this, but I think the first 2 could be published in our newsletter (or some kind of spinoff “Manifold Journal” or something). “Predictions Markets are Not Polls” in particular is a great reference piece that I expect to be able to point other people to in the future.
(Note on the article: I do think one key advantage of markets over polls, not mentioned in the article, is that markets allow individuals to convey strength of belief via bet sizing, unlike polls.)
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 500, 0, 100, 150
Median Valuation: 50
James: Looks like it's still in progress.
SG: It seems they haven't released anything yet.
Rachel: I like the fire the CEO markets as another part of the same experiment Manifold.love was made for: trying to find an actually useful application for prediction markets. I also like the lifestyle market as a test of a theory Austin has put forth (which I mostly disagree with, but would like to see tested more) that personal markets are the most useful and underrated. It sounds like some work has been put into that, but nothing’s been shipped.
Sinclair: I don't believe in fire-the-ceo markets. I think robin hanson is just wrong; prediction markets do not imply causality.
open sourcing the bot seems somewhat useful...
Inga Wei: A little too broad, but I do like the idea of the fire the ceo markets.
Austin: I like the ideas here, especially seeing the demo of Fire the CEO markets that are underway. I agree that they could be a fun spinoff site that gets lots of traction. (For this kind of spinoff site to work, though, I’d expect that you’d need some polished design in addition to the markets). Since they aren’t launched yet, though, my valuation just reflects what I’ve gleaned from the demo.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 350, 0, 167, 400, 400, 200
Median Valuation: 275
David Chee: First even organised which I think is worth around $350 as the first one is often the hardest!
If this continues as a weekly thing and turns into something like Austin's Taco Tuesday I think it would be worth a few thousand easily due to all the knock-on effects. How much of this value is to Manifold and prediction markets will be less clear.
Excited to see where this goes though! I think once they prove it becomes a reoccurring event with decent turn out with at least a couple of new people each time then the valuation will really soar.
SG: First meeting has yet to happen.
Rachel: Props for the name. The overall valuation is pretty consistent with my expectations. My understanding is that there has been one meetup so far, and 1000/6 = $167—though an update on how that went would be helpful.
Inga Wei: Yay for spreading community to non-SF cities!
Ian Philips: Glad you're hosting meetups! I'm guessing you get around ~50 people using Manifold and getting involved in the community. Hopefully y'all have fun as well, and make some new friends! Valuing 50 folks at $8 per capita. I'd value this higher, maybe $20 per capita if you were able to take notes/record peoples' experiences getting signed up.
Austin: Pretty excited for this! As the first meeting hasn’t yet happened, this valuation so far reflects the fact that many people seem to be looking forward to coming to the event; I expect this to go up once the meetings are happening regularly.
I’d be looking for attendance numbers, good reviews, and something like word-of-mouth growth (people organically deciding to invite their friends) as indications of runaway meetup success.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 1500, 2000, 1000, 600
Median Valuation: 1250
SG: Adding more high quality content to the site is good!
Rachel: This seems like it should obviously exist. It’s already created a bunch of markets, many of which have resolved, and has 4.92 stars on Manifold as a market creator.
Inga Wei: Cool! Think this would be a great way to be able to directly compare prediction markets
Austin: It’s cool that now anyone can mirror any market via managrams! This is an example of a project that I’m quite happy exists and am happy to award retrospectively, even though it was mostly built before MCF kicked off. If usage continues along these lines, I expect to continue awarding prize funding to it.
I’d love to see more work along the lines of popularizing this bot, eg some kind of way to get it in front of more Manifold users and encourage them to take the first step of mirroring a market. One idea would be to run a tournament for whoever mirrors the market that gets the most traders, or something like that.
(Also nit: I’d include the simplest example in the bot profile description like “mirror <https://www.metaculus.com/questions/17280/frontier-ai-lab-in-china/> with 60 mana” so people don’t have to find the github link. I’d also link to GitHub from the bot profile description)
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 400, 400, 500, 1000, 100, 600
Median Valuation: 450
David Chee: These are the sort of things I would do if I had more time and was truly a "full-time community manager" as my sole role. The funding is also going to be given back into the community by compensating top traders, guests, editor's and audience members which is fantastic!
Based on one live stream I can't give it a high "this is what Manifold would have paid for what has been produced so far" number, but looking forward to this one.
James: Meta: It's hard to find information about the live shows in order to judge the impact.
Found the manifold live topic, which suggests 2 episodes have happened.
I think I remember Joshua saying about 20 people turned up for each episode.
I think it's more valuable than than the small number of viewers suggests, but that still limits impact. It probably inspired activity on markets they created or talked about. Just having a Manifold Live show at all makes Manifold sound like a more welcoming place so that's worth something too.
Currently valuing it at roughly $150 per episode + $100 for having this project exist.
SG: The episode I listened in on was fun. If the audience for this grows, it could be impactful.
Rachel: Marcus seems to think this is worth a lot, given that he set a limit order to sell at $8k. This doesn’t seem that helpful for Manifold, given that it’ll only interested people who are very bought into the Manifold community. But maybe it makes people who are kind of bought in more bought in, and helps with retention? The focus on Manifold events (as opposed to the biggest news events as reflected by Manifold) seems kind of strange as a model—do any other social media sites have this unified community thing? Basically, that doesn’t seem very helpful for Manifold to raise a series A.
I do like the live betting idea. Seems like a good way for people to learn about forecasting.
Inga Wei: Cool idea, but bearish on the potential for growth here
Austin: I’ve only been able to sit in on one of the episodes so far (with Chris J Billington), but I appreciated listening to it and would extrapolate each episode’s value to be about ~$200 each. Maybe I’m one of the people who would most appreciate learning from this show though; it doesn’t seem to be the case that Manifold live episodes produce much long-lasting value.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 400, 500, 1000, 800
Median Valuation: 500
SG: Impactful largely through getting us to improve our own search page. There are a few other features here we might want to copy as well.
Rachel: People like this, give the people what they want. It’s pretty hard for me to judge the value of the work done so far, since the product doesn’t mean much to me and idk what it was like before, so I’m mostly just going with my gut for the number.
Inga Wei: If power users like better it then I'm for it.
Ian Philips: It sounds like users in the community love your search, are already paying you for it! Seems useful now and should continue to be in the future! It hurts to look at, though 😅. Would love to hear what features your users appreciate the most that we could add in an 'advanced' search mode
Austin: I think “a better search interface for Manifold” was not one of the things that seemed like an obvious good fit for an API integration (compared to something we do ourselves)… but it turns out that there was a lot of demand! I’m a fan of projects that solve a pain point that the creator themselves have, because they have the potential of solving problems for a lot of others; in this case, Isaac’s search/dashboard clearly found a lot of happy users, and for that reason I’m happy to award prize funding to this project.
I do think it suffers a bit from “designed by an engineer” vibes, aka the interface is somewhat cluttered. But maybe that’s the interface that power users want!
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Median Valuation: 0
SG: Is this promotional content for Habr? Doesn't seem impactful.
Rachel: I like that this is aimed at getting new users (and turning them into power users), which is probably what Manifold values the most. However, it’s unfortunate that it’s in Russian (since Manifold is generally in English) and that it will require upkeep from the Manifold team. I also think the valuation is too high.
Inga Wei: cost of corporate blog doesn't seem to be worth the benefit
Sinclair: This one's a bit hard to evaluate, and probably Steven's evaluation would be better. We currently don't have many Russian users, and we don't really understand the russian tech market. I see Intl being valuable eventually, but even then we'd be competing against real money prediction markets. And right now a top-down promotion to Russian users is probably just going to draw skepticism and not accomplish much, with some chance of being very counterproductive.
Austin: I do also think that Manifold’s corporate structure has interesting tidbits in it! I would be amenable to awarding prize funding to this project if one or two articles had already been written.
General note is that we’re also happy to pay for and publish guest articles on our own newsletter; I’ve made this offer to several Manifold users. Note that we expect to have a reasonably high quality bar for what we would publish, though.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 100, 0
Median Valuation: 0
James: The project as stated is infeasible. Maybe possible after we migrate off of firebase
SG: Making it easier to run Manifold locally may not be in Manifold's business interests. True valuation could be negative.
Rachel: No progress so far as far as I can tell, which makes putting a number on it easy. In terms of projected valuation/general feedback, I imagine the main upside of this is making open source contributions easier? Though it seems like the Manifold team isn’t generally that excited about that because they still have to review all of the PRs.
Inga Wei: Think this would be super useful but have doubts about it working
Austin: FWIW I also think this project could be a good idea; for testing and for creating a bunch of other neat API integrations. However, the devil’s in the details/execution. I think this project as stated would probably not be a good fit unless the developer was both very familiar with the Manifold codebase and confident in their ability to proceed.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 200, 0, 800, 500, 1000, 400
Median Valuation: 400
David Chee: Nothing happened yet so it's 0. But I have a feeling this one is going to much higher value once it happens. Looking forward to attending!
SG: Valuation of the publicity so far; we'll need to see how the show goes...
Rachel: Seems like they’ve already done a bunch of planning, though the event hasn't happened yet, so current value is still 0. I'd think a lot of value is lost if it’s not recorded/streamed. That said, they have a decently sized live audience, and just a straight Manifold.love meetup would be valuable. I think the public value of this is higher, because relationships are great and in person events are underutilized relative to apps which kind of suck, but we’re talking about value to Manifold here.
Sinclair: I feel like Steven is the best at evaulating this since he knows how much our manifold love dating show costs and probably has a much better sense of how to counterfactually evaluate advertising.
The current London population of Manifold Love users is like 1/3 of Manifold proper. How much do we want more advertising for that city? Probably not much at this time.
How good is it to promote Manifold prediction markets to people in London? A reasonable amount of good?
Inga Wei: Cool!
Ian Philips: This looks really cool! I'm guessing you get ~20 women (the scarce resource, $10 per capita) signed up per event, ~40 men, ($3 per capita), which gives a $640 valuation. I'll throw in another $360 bc it could get bigger than anticipated, maybe more people sign up afterwards, or due to social media.
Austin: This is super, super cool! Exactly the kind of event I was hoping that Manifold Community Fund would create (note, MCF doesn’t get to claim counterfactual credit as Sasha was already planning this and then I nudged him to apply).
I expect to put increasingly higher valuations for this project as it hits a variety of checkpoints, such as 1) running the first and then second show, 2) producing some kind of writeup about the experience (especially if there are learnings for our own Bet on Love show!), 3) actually matching up people, 4) education people on how to use manifold.love. As is, this current valuation reflects an increase in Manifold.love’s brand value that we’ve already gotten, from having a cool user-driven show in the works. (Congrats on the shoutout from ACX!)
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 2000, 1000, 0
Median Valuation: 0
James: I don't see any output yet.
SG: It seems they haven't released anything yet.
Rachel: Writing docs for the API is probably good, and something Manifold would pay for. Though I agree with Austin’s comment that the current valuation is too high. Let me know if you (via Discord or reply to this comment on Manifund) want it changed.
Sinclair: I think this is extremely valuable, and is the path through which a lot of other community projects flow through. I'd love to see people in the community owning more the task of making the api great, because 1) that's probably the only way it stays good, and 2) it's not the kind of thing that the Manifold team is good at. I think a more community-run api is quite likely to be better performing and cheaper, paying for itself.
Inga Wei: Yes for more bots!
Austin: I don’t have much to add beyond my original statement. Making the API more accessible (either with better documentation, or an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to get started) is something I’d love to see; please let us know when you have something we can test out!
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 50, 200
Median Valuation: 0
David Chee: Think it's unlikely it would work, but would be extremely valuable if it did. So I don't think $5000 is a bad asking price at all. But no work produced yet.
SG: It seems they haven't released anything yet. Not sure they're on track to solve the problem of exteme probabilities.
Rachel: I think this is pretty important, and unlike most other projects, makes the experience of Manifold better for everyone, not just power users. Plus it makes the information Manifold can provide to the public more helpful, and might help other prediction market platforms too. Big fan of the goal, as it seems like other Manifold mods are! But no reported progress so far, so have to give a valuation of 0.
Inga Wei: I think this may depend too much on curation and community to be wildly successful
Ian Philips: Your markets look interesting and I'm happy your thinking about how to improve Manifold! The only problem at this point in time is I don't think this is super relevant to Manifold's success.
Austin: This is a pretty ambitious goal, and one that would benefit the Manifold community (and the world!) a lot — if you can discover a way to do so. As of right now, there’s a few markets created with interesting ideas behind them. I think these templates are somewhat valuable (one thing I’d be happy to fund is something like “a directory of easily duplicatable market templates for a variety of common scenarios, eg date, numeric, low% markets”). However, my current valuation reflects the fact that these templates have not yet been adopted widely.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Median Valuation: 0
SG: It seems they haven't released anything yet. Don't estimate this as being very impactful once complete.
Rachel: Not a comment on the value of the site, just hasn’t reported on any progress so far. People are saying they’d use it, so that’s a good sign!
Sinclair: idk seems kind of a developer trap - the kind of nerdsnipe prestigious project that is fun to toy around in, fun for other very smart people to play with, but ultimately not that useful. Austin made a simulator for dpm or something - was not used very much.
Inga Wei: I think this is probably to big brained to be meaningful to an average user
Austin: I think the idea here is promising; I myself would love to use a good sandbox for testing out new trading mechanisms. But as we outlined in the launch post, we’re really looking to pay for good executions instead of just good ideas. Consider shipping a v0 of your sandbox as soon as you can, so we can try it out and give feedback!
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 100, 0, 0, 0, 0, 100
Median Valuation: 0
David Chee: I thought something like this already existed? Also my understanding is this is something that would be extremely quick and easy for a Manifold dev to set up. Valuation would go up though with some sort of track record and gamification element.
James: Project is not launched or accessible so 0 impact.
SG: It seems they haven't released anything yet.
Rachel: Seems to have some of the same problems that the old swipe interface did—people don’t want to bet on most markets. And I’d think that if you would be willing to bet on almost any market, wouldn’t you still prefer to bet on markets that suit your interests, so isn’t the feed still a better discovery mechanism? The hiding the probability does seem like a useful feature, though I think that would be better as an optional mode on the main site.
Inga Wei: Unsure of how useful this is
Austin: I appreciated seeing the demo of this tool at demo day! I wish you had a link up so we could have played with it ourselves and given feedback. My general advice is to “ship early, ship often” — as a builder, it’s easy to get stuck endlessly polishing your work, but the feedback you get from users is a lot more valuable and helps guide you.
The other thing (I think I mentioned during demo day) is that improving the design of your work would go a long way towards convincing people to give your product a try. The bar for UI quality is fairly high among consumer apps nowadays; I’d recommend https://www.refactoringui.com/ as one resource that helps a lot with honing your skills.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 300, 1300, 1000, 2000, 3000, 1000, 3000
Median Valuation: 1300
(Because the median valuation is below the minimum valuation and this is a proposal, we can't create a limit order at this valuation)
David Chee: This is a tough one. It's either going to be a bunch or relatively polished, really cool things that just don't get used. Or, something very valuable. I think a little bit of input and guidance from Manifold would greatly empower Case to create a lot of value. I do think though this is a high risk investment and so far I wouldn't pay that much for his current projects. Mana/unfolded is cool though.
James:
Open source PR's merged: 500 The sort option for manifold love was helpful to the product because I had wanted it and then changed the default sort to newest profiles rather than recently active. ($300) A few API things were helpful and enabled another projects. ($300) Tracking bets ($100) Some other useful stuff, but also some negative stuff that took time away from us as we reviewed PRs. Several closed PR's probably costing a decent amount of our time.
Mana unfolded: 500 Cool project that people will use for a moment and think is cool. The Vercel CEO liked it. Very little ongoing value though.
Manifold bounties: 300 Another nice site, but doesn't seem like it's getting much usage. Useful as an example open source contribution for other people.
I have the sense that if we could direct Case to actual high priority tasks he would be orders of magnitude more impactful.
SG: Mana Unfolded is cool and people have already been sharing it on Twitter. The smaller PRs have helped fix a few things. I’m not a fan of the bet-based onboarding or longer onboarding flows in general.
Rachel: Like that manaunfolded isn’t a power-user-only feature. With both that and Manifold bounties, seems like the biggest benefit might be inspiring the Manifold team to incorporate elements from the UI into their own features. Hard for me to value the Manifold PRs.
Inga Wei: Great projects, wish we could've collabed on mana unfolded, you have some very cool stats! I think these would be super effective especially if implemented onto the core site.
Ian Philips: The PR's have been helpful, and I love manaunfolded! Integration into the site would make for a great, shareable link on social media. We can reuse it next year, too!
Austin: $1000 for Mana/unfolded
$500 for Manifold Bounties
$500 for A dozen PRs
$1000 Bet-based onboarding for Manifold
I’m so grateful that someone as talented as case is interested in hacking on these cool ways to help out the Manifold community. mana/unfolded and Manifold bounties are both very polished products, surpassing Manifold itself wrt presenting a slick user experience. I generally appreciate case’s API contributions — a clear example of helping out other developers.
And finally I think bet-based onboarding is still quite promising; at least, it’s clear that our current onboarding is quite lacking (as shown by our ND1 and ND7 retention metrics) so experimentation generally is a good thing. The fact that case went ahead and implemented this entire feature on his own, makes this stand out above eg the many suggestions for improvement we get, which we appreciate but rarely have time to evalaute.
Manifold Markets
over 1 year ago
Valuations: 500, 0, 0, 5000, 3000, 1000
Median Valuation: 750
(Because the median valuation is below the minimum valuation and this is a proposal, we can't create a limit order at this valuation)
David Chee: I've personally invested some mana because I want him to succeed and he has already provided a lot of value to Manifold. Also when creating the track record page I felt like a lot of data which I knew does exist, but just wasn't compiled, would have been great to have. Not valuing at his asking though just because of the rough guidelines Austin set out in how to value projects and because we are meant to be evaluating based on how much we think Manifold would have paid for the work done so far (and I'm not counting his work that happened a while before Manifund).
SG: It seems like they haven't done anything yet. But an updated Calibration City would be cool.
Rachel: Since nothing’s been shipped yet, have to give it a valuation of $0. The old version looks pretty good: more polished design than I was expecting, seems pretty easy to use. In terms of helping Manifold though, even a perfect version of this wouldn’t be that great for getting new users or boosting engagement.
Inga Wei: I love most of these ideas! Particularly Calibration City, Physical League Awards, Market Stories and Brag Board (especially if you can get the UX right).
Sinclair: I love calibration city! I reference it a lot whenever people ask questions about our site accuracy. Calibration is a kind of signal that's hard to fake, and it gets us cred among rationalists even if it's kinda hard for ordinary people to parse. I think it has informed some of our product decisions somewhat - knowing that most accuracy comes from the first few traders made us focus a bit more on the "great variety of markets" strategy
Austin: Really appreciate all of your past contributions! FWIW I’d rank them as 3, 1 > 2 > 5, 6 > 4. It’s promising that several users are specifically asking for 3 to exist; meanwhile, 1 has been a useful prompt for our team to show Manifold calibration (and it would be really, really awesome to just use your Calibration results on our site — that could be worth like an order of magnitude more.)
And on the brass foldy: I remembered being floored when I opened them up in the mail. Do you know just how rare it is to get a physical token of gratitude? I think that was one of the early signs that Manifold was something special, that our users would be inspired to send us a real version of our logo. TBH I don’t know if I’d want them to be a reward restricted to Master’s League, but rather like, a token we send out to people who are nice to each other on the site; maybe you can pay 5000 mana to send someone a physical “foldygram” as thanks for something they’ve done.
| For | Date | Type | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | 8 months ago | user to user trade | 20 |
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 19 |
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 481 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 1 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 1 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 1 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 1 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 1 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 277 |
| N.C. Young's Umbrella Project | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Trading assistant bot (Remind Me) | 11 months ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| London Manifold.love dating shows | 12 months ago | user to user trade | 1487 |
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | 12 months ago | user to user trade | 100 |
| N.C. Young's Umbrella Project | 12 months ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Mirrorbot | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Mirrorbot | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Trading assistant bot (Remind Me) | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 3 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 16 |
| N.C. Young's Umbrella Project | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 16 |
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 24 |
| Manifold: Live! | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 502 |
| Manifold x College Admissions | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 600 |
| Trading assistant bot (Remind Me) | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 30 |
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 2 |
| Mirrorbot | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 1 |
| SirCryptomind Moderation | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 400 |
| Wasabipesto's Umbrella Project | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 3500 |
| N.C. Young's Umbrella Project | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 0 |
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 22 |
| N.C. Young's Umbrella Project | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 56 |
| Isaac's power-user Manifold search and dashboard | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 44 |
| Manifold x College Admissions | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 48 |
| Mirrorbot | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 63 |
| Invest in the Conflux Manifold Media Empire(??) | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 100 |
| Mirrorbot | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 200 |
| Isaac's Blog Writing | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 33 |
| Mirrorbot | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 307 |
| Mirrorbot | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 13 |
| Trading assistant bot (Remind Me) | about 1 year ago | user to user trade | 1 |
| Manifund Bank | over 1 year ago | deposit | +30000 |