For anyone who participated in the original launch market for socialpredict here, you might be interested in this new market, adjudicated by @jack who is not on the club/team rather than @BTE who is. So, if we don't succeed in this goal, which I hope is difficult, then you may have chance to take some of BTE's money back. https://manifold.markets/jack/will-socialpredict-be-run-by-two-pu

Actual footage of the launch of the BrierFoxForecast platform last Friday.

How is this possible???

@BTE Leagues only include bets made in the month, and includes "selling" YES shares as buying NO shares, since otherwise there would be issues with wash trades to get large positions in a single month. If you had bought the YES shares in December it wouldn't have been a problem, but since you bought them earlier it counts against you.

@Gabrielle Wow that seems to be a conflicting incentive. Why not just count the realized profit as, idk, profit??

@BTE Yeah, definitely not ideal. I see the reason for it, but I don't like it.

@BTE you really still don't understand the fundamental setup of leagues after all these months and all the time spent on this platform?

@AlexbGoode I didn't know selling profitable YES bets from last month counts as buying NO. Or maybe I did and still can't wrap my head around it. And that is nonsense because that disincentivizes long term bets. Strange dynamic.

@BTE it took me a while to realize why monthly profit != league profits and then I figured some of this out. Long-term trades are handled a bit strangely, in my view, and leagues seem to incentive fast-churning & low time-horizon bets. AFAIK it's like this (I could still be wrong; would need to experiment with some trades to find out):

1) buys initiated in a month are marked to market during and at the end of that month for leagues

2) buys extending beyond a month are compared using initial end-of-month pricing versus sold price in the subsequent month

3) therefore, if you're carrying an unrealized profit in a live market, you may not have all of the credit for the current expectation value of a buy until you sell the position or the market is resolved (similarly for losses)

Fortunately, I don't care about leagues since my goal here is to learn how to become better at making calibrated predictions, and league standings are not a great signal of that metric.

What I find the most interesting out of this entire exercise is that, at least for the purposes of resolving a market here on Manifold, folks seem to be overwhelmingly concerned with the look and feel of the site relative to how it works. Almost all negative comments (which are appreciated), are along the lines of, "the UI is bad," but there hasn't been even a single hint about the math or market resolution, or whether a market resolution even works, or whether I faked that completely. No one checked as far as I can tell to see if once a market is resolved in a particular direction, the betting pool gets distributed...or, no one asked for the code to verify this. (How Things Look) >> (Math) for this audience...? I would have thought that at least someone would bring this up...although maybe people did check and they just convinced themselves and kept silent about it...?

The thing about how something looks is that you can see it.

@jskf You can see the code here as well though (commented earlier but I'm sure it's buried to your point). https://github.com/openpredictionmarkets/socialpredict/tree/main

I basically trust that the site works to the extent required to resolve this YES. It looks very unpolished and I assume the "release" is mostly just timed to let this resolve YES, not because the product is ready. I don't have a problem with that, but since I'm not contesting the resolution I might as well wait until it's a bit more polished and not hosted on a laptop in a basement before I try it out myself. I did see you linked the repo, but as I said there's no urgency, so I haven't checked it out yet.

@jskf The release was not, "timed," ... honestly I did not think I could do this in time for the release date and I thought that BTE was yet again going to lose a ton of money on another market, which I would have felt kind of bad about (although it's his decision how he wants to play Manifold). This is why I didn't buy in until towards the end, and BTE basically gifted me shares (he believed in me more than I in myself). However the mental exercise in creating an early release pushed me to think differently and go harder than I would have otherwise. There was nothing, "timed," ...I think I'm a fairly OK software developer...but I am not that good. I believe the original Manifold prototype took like a week whereas this took me months (although I was doing this nights/weekends). But believe me, there was nothing timed...this was hard on me.

@PatrickDelaney by "timed" I just meant that if this market didn't exist I would have expected you to work on it for a bit more before launching. I didn't mean to suggest anything beyond that.

@PatrickDelaney @jskf I promise it wasn't timed because if Patrick and I had even discussed that I definitely would have advocated for "timing" it differently!!

@BTE lol if you mean you'd have waited until the last moment, I think that would have been ill-advised. You need to plan some buffer in case anything unexpected happens.

Once I had bought in, I had already successfully launched the site but didn’t have it on an old computer. BTE knew all this. Joshua caught wind because he saw my trade. So there was still about what…7 days buffer? Now again, admittedly I caused a problem by believing Linux ports work differently than Mac ports, thought that was preventing launch, and that was very stressful for about 8 hours, and also got sick. I had planned on launching Monday and it turned into Friday. If I had not had my flu vaccine this year I might still be sick and this might have resolved no, but it’s not like it was planned to have hours to go. We needed time for people to verify too.

@jskf Yeah, I see, honestly though I am grateful for having a șcrappy project done rather than a clean vaporous nothing. There are tons of do nothing critics out there who never finish anything…way more than actual doers. To a certain extent you have to just be ok with a little public humiliation and shaming or it just remains a comfortable fantasy. I currently have users asking for features now as opposed to me sitting alone in a chair thinking.

the site exists, but it looks like ass and no one is using it

@JonathanRay I wouldn't say, "no one." We just had a user create this market minutes ago after I messaged them on Discord and then I bet on it. However to be perfectly honest, it is an alpha. That being said, thanks for your help and checking the site out!

@JonathanRay Also you can see that this user made a small bet of 2 points ... (your account balance starts at 0 and you are allowed to go to -500 under the current settings).

@JonathanRay Vast overhaul of the front end in the works.

Website was down at night because I closed my laptop and it went to sleep. This website is running with a service called ngrok which is a vpn tunnel to a local machine. I typically just keep this computer down in the basement on always on mode so that should not happen too much. I aim to get this on Digital Ocean at some point but as of now this is really an extremely part time thing so you can just message me on Discord if there is a problem. Thanks!

so the website doesn't exist if you don't have a discord account???

@TiredCliche it looks like it doesn't exist at all at the moment

@AlexbGoode Try again

@TiredCliche No, the discord is because we are looking for feedback and help building this. If you are not willing to communicate with us on Discord but really still want to be able to contribute we can find some other way.