Project summary
Manifold's Community Fund announcement included these ideas:
Organize & moderate debates that incorporate live-betting on markets
Host a weekly call on Discord to welcome new Manifold users and help them get oriented
An Actually Good podcast series interviewing top users and team members
We plan to host a weekly live show on Manifold’s Discord server combining all of these: debating/betting on markets live with an audience playing along, interviewing Manifold’s top traders and market creators, introducing new users to Manifold and old users to great markets they might have missed.
The Manifold community is great - some of the most memorable moments on the site have been due to a bunch of traders all betting at the same time and chatting as it all unfolds. We want to foster more of this sense of fun and community by providing a Schelling point - a time and place when everyone knows that a bunch of people will be online simultaneously betting and chatting.
Our market If there is a Manifold Live Show on Discord/Twitch/YouTube, what recurring segments will it include? has all our ideas for segments and their odds of being included. The top three results are currently:
The hosts discuss the most popular/dramatic/hidden gem markets from the past week. They place bets as they discuss and debate whether those markets should be higher or lower.
The hosts pick a market that doesn't have a lot of traders, ideally one created by a new user. The hosts and audience all research the question and bet on it live, and the new user gets a warm welcome to the site.
The hosts compete in a forecasting/trivia game, and the audience bets live on who will win.
The show will likely evolve as we find out what people enjoy most, and if it really takes off we aspire to one day be able to invite on prominent users like Eliezer Yudkowsky or sponsored streamers like Destiny. We also have many community members interested in appearing on the show, as can be seen in our market here.
What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?
We are committing to producing a minimum of 4 shows, and our goal is to produce as many as 10-12 before the end of the current community fund initiative in Mid-February. If the show is successful, we hope to continue hosting it long after that.
We aim to:
Foster a sense of community by getting a bunch of users all online and Manifold-ing simultaneously
Provide users a fun way to learn about Manifold and how to use it, by watching some of the most experienced traders on the site place bets and share their strategies
Provide users an easy way to catch up on all the wild things that happen on Manifold as the hosts recap the week’s most dramatic events
Provide newcomers a warm welcome to the site by highlighting markets by new users and sending the show’s audience to go bet in the market at the same time
Provide a platform to invite sponsored content creators or prominent forecasters from outside the manifold community to show them around the site while getting their opinions on various markets
Show off how fun Manifold can be by creating video content that can be clipped and posted on Twitter/TikTok/YouTube Shorts
After the show, we’ll make a recording available on YouTube and/or Twitch, with the possibility of editing them into more polished podcast episodes later.
How will this funding be used?
Honestly, we could probably put on a decent version of this show with no funding at all! But money always helps, so here are some ways we can pay to make the show better:
Compensating top traders and prominent community members as guests, ideally 1-2 guests per episode (~$50-$100 per featured guest)
Paying an editor to condense the recordings to something more watchable/listenable (~$100 per episode)
Purchase mana to be given out as prizes to audience members for good questions/contributions (~M$5,000 per episode)
Purchase boosts/subsidies to advertise markets about the show, and inform people about what it is and when it will happen. (~M$5,000 per episode)
That brings the total estimated costs to $150-$300 per episode, and M$10,000 per episode. We are initially selling 34% of the project’s equity through the automated market maker to secure funding in time for the early episodes, and we intend to then sell additional equity to fund additional episodes after we’ve produced the first couple episodes and have a firmer idea of our budget/valuation.
We believe that the first episodes would especially benefit from a solid advertising/prize budget to draw in an audience. If we can build an initial audience, we hope it will grow organically because users will want to be there for the show to live-bet against the audience.
Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?
We currently plan to have two recurring co-hosts, Joshua and N.C. Young, and one or two guest hosts each week from among the top traders and market creators on Manifold: bet here on who will appear!
N.C. is a PhD Student in AI who has been an active community member since the early days of Manifold. Joshua is a Civil Engineer who became active on Manifold this summer, and has since climbed the ranks to become #11 on the all-time top trader leaderboard. Several other prominent community members have also expressed interest in appearing on the show.
We don’t have any experience hosting live shows, so we’ll be learning on the job just like the hosts of the Manifold podcasts before us. We hope to immediately begin running shows, to see what works and what doesn’t. We both have nice microphones and we're in the process of learning the ins and outs of OBS, Twitch, and YouTube.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)
Show fails to be entertaining enough to engage Manifold users
It is too difficult to advertise the time the show will happen to the potential audience, so not enough people show up
It is too difficult to schedule time slots where enough people are free, especially considering time zone differences
Top traders are hesitant to come on the show and share their strategies/insider info
Most users are only casual users of Manifold, and would not show up to a livestream
Technical challenges with recording/uploading/editing the show are overwhelming for hosts who have not done this before
What other funding are you or your project getting?
We’ve been told that Manifold may be able to provide us a mana budget independently of the community fund, though the details of this are not finalized.
Special Request
Aside from funding, the biggest request we have of the Manifold team is Discord Moderator permissions so that we can run the show in its own voice channel with its own chat, and that we can mute/unmute people.
