Weren’t things just fine before? Manifold proved for the first time that entertainment and community, NOT gambling, can extract accurate predictive crowd wisdom. The whole appeal of it is being wiped away.

The whole 18+ thing is also not going to satisfy the obsession with maximizing MAU. I was 17 upon being referred here.

@thepurplebull Manifold would shut down in a year, if nothing changed

@nikki why do you believe this?

@TiredCliche it's been mentioned many times in discord. also check out https://www.notion.so/manifoldmarkets/Manifold-Finances-0f9a14a16afe4375b67e21471ce456b0

@nikki why does everything have a loginwall ahhhh

@TiredCliche Because privacy is passe and you're a bad person for wanting it.

@nikki They say that but it's not true. The site makes more money than it spends on server hosting, so really all they would need to do is either find a rich partner who wants do donate a lot of money to charity and doesnt care where it goes or suspend donations entirely, then fire all their staff.

@f Firing all their staff would be changing something, no?

I don't understand why Manifold thinks the world needs another real world prediction market. Kalshi already exists. Manifold is the way it is precisely because it doesn't use real money.

@ThisProfileDoesntExist Theoretically this allows for both play-money betting and real-money betting to exist side-by-side, whereas I gather Kalshi, PredictIt and the rest are real-money only. Like I gather it should mostly still be possible to interact with the site without ever spending or earning money (just using the free starting Mana and converting your Spice or whatever it's called back into Mana whenever a bet pays out).

That said, some of the changes do make it sound like it might be a bit less feasible for free users to do some things so idk

@Nat Under the changes they announced, mana is de-facto real money. This is the opposite of what they'd do if they wanted to have play money markets side by side. It's also extra dumb because as @Mira pointed out, forcibly converting everything over like this makes real-money success do or die. There's no path back for them now.

@ThisProfileDoesntExist I get your point that it's effectively just real money but it also should still be possible to interact with the site in a way that treats it as purely play-money (i.e. by just using the starting Mana and converting your Spice back into Mana when a bet pays out).
(Again, in theory)

@Nat Generally, if something can be easily converted into money, it is treated as money. And Manifold clearly wants people to treat mana like money or they wouldn't be doing this. They're just trying to figure out what the minimum amount they have to change in order to comply with the law is (going by Kalshi, I'm guessing it's a lot more than they think.)

@ThisProfileDoesntExist Hmmm. Generally, I think you're right, if something can be easily converted into money, it is treated as money. But as a counterpoint: if I'm a new user post-pivot and I receive my starting Ṁ100 (i.e. $0.10) I'm really not gonna care about the real-money value of that mana. And then even if after a few months of really good betting I'm up to a whole Ṁ1000 (i.e. $1.00), I'll have had fun researching and betting and turning 3-digit number into 4-digit number etc... and I'm still not gonna care about the real-money value of it.

Like, to be clear, I don't necessarily disagree with your point - I think there's a good chance Manifold just wants to make the site a real-money market and this is simply the easiest way to do it; and I think there's a good chance that the end-scenario is that 90%+ of users who treat it as real-money betting. But I don't think what they're planning to do necessarily precludes an (intended or end-result) world where both play-money and real-money betting (and spectrum between) coexist.

Voted for indifferent but I don't think 'indifferent' is the right word, more just uncertain

@Nat Yeah I should've labeled it "mixed".

My main dissatisfaction comes from the fact that market creation will be tightened now that real money is (potentially) on the line. The play-money model has enabled a rather freewheeling culture of markets including many fun, experimental, and personal questions, and of course birthed a classic meme. I'll have to wait and see what the new rules are for markets, but right now I don't think such markets will last.

I recognize that Manifold is a business at the end of the day, so I understand why it's decided to do this. Still, it's going to take a lot of the joy out of this site for me personally.

@CollectedOverSpread I've created a market about what types of markets will still be allowed: /CollectedOverSpread/a-year-after-the-manifold-pivot-wha

I literally made a market a while back (that nobody bet on) that they will decrease the daily free charity money per user (which was 0.25 to 0.4$ depending on how time you put in).

Seems like I was right that this was unsustainable and they had to make it disappear

Getting rid of the M5 bonus per new trader is a disaster for my account. My questions were never aimed at my personal profit, and this bonus was what enabled me to open several markets every week, which, let me remind you, only last 4 days.

What's more, the impossibility of resolving the markets in N/A will create major complications with a story as unpredictable as One Piece.

I've opened an account so that One Piece fans can make quick bets (and I insist on this point, it was cruelly lacking on this site) on their favorite manga.

But from the first of May, I don't know how it's going to work.

@FYNOP 20 mana per trader? I only ever get 5 lol

@TheAllMemeingEye yeah my bad I meant 5 too

My concern is that there'll be far fewer markets and it will only be viable for rich accounts to make markets.

I dislike the pivot a lot.

• I really liked bounties. They were a great invention.

• The lack of ability to resolve markets N/A also removes the ability to create conditional markets as binary markets (I think 2x2 combination markets are less interesting if they're the only replacement we've got). It also removes one of the most powerful tools we have for handling spam markets and edge cases.

• The use of real money also makes Manifold more gambling-adjacent which in turn makes it feel shadier. The separation between "prize points" (which I think was the "spice" people were speculating about) and "mana" also decreases the incentives to predict accurately because even though they're technically supposed to have the same value, they're displayed separately which makes you think of them as separate things. Plus the cashing out of prize points into real money incentivizes gambling-like thinking, which is much worse than our current state of prediction-market-like thinking.

• I really like Manifold's friendliness to kids (I'm barely a non-kid myself!) and I think it would be terrible if that went away. Some of the youngest Manifolders (eg @Conflux and @Celene) are also some of our brightest!

@duck_master yeah, this captures a lot of my hesitance. however, I wanna give this pivot a bit of time to prove itself. also I suspect this is logical for manifold the business…a shame but makes sense

@duck_master (Also tying things into verification contributes to the continual erosion of privacy on the internet, which is A Bad Thing.)

@Najawin @Conflux also, y'know what, I'm going to be switching to Metaculus. see y'all there

@Conflux While I'm here, I'm unsure if I'm gonna immolate / donate my mana to charity before the deadline and leave, but one concern I have is the markets I've created. At least one is subjective, so if I'm leaving I'll just N/A it. But for the others, I think with the situation we're in many people might want to pull mana out of markets for charity at the best rate possible before the devaluation. I've tried looking through the guidelines and there's nothing specifying when, precisely, you shouldn't resolve things N/A.

Would it be theoretically appropriate to resolve markets as N/A under these circumstances, provided that all the traders agree? Or, at least, provided that within 48 hours if I do @ traders nobody objects? Obviously this is somewhat selfish on my part, I'm thinking of not wanting to extract my own mana at a worse rate, but I'm sure other people in the markets might also be in the same boat.

@Joshua Maybe you can help with my dilemma here? Obviously if the pivot stalls before May 1st no need, but I'd like some guidance so I can ask traders on my markets.

@Najawin I think you shouldn't make any big decisions until friday at the earliest. There is still a lot of behind the scenes lobbying and deliberation.

But to answer the question, I suggest you don't N/A objective markets. Mods can resolve them.

@Joshua I mean the goal is to allow investors in the markets to withdraw the mana at the early rate before the devaluation if they want to donate. But I hear you on the Friday bit.