Ban accounts of spammers/users using fake photos

Consider adding even stronger weight “deal breaker” to compatibility questions. That is if the criteria is not a match compatibility would be zero. When answering the compatibility question it’s hard to get a sense how different answers influence the compatibility score. “Deal breaker” brings back the control to the user. I think it’s very important to add this feature when considering compatibility questions like social status level explained in my previous comment:

https://manifold.markets/JamesGrugett/how-can-manifoldlove-be-improved#C21P1Rsk9QTDCHPgSIUl

Add social status level for the compatibility check. David Buss says this is a primary selection criteria for females. @Aella explicitly stated she is looking for somebody equal or higher status. I think this is a primary compatibility criteria potentially for male too, yet it’s not reflected in the interface. Of course this is awkward to set it publicly so consider adding ability to make the answer private.

I think that the fact that there isn’t a manifold.love app on the App Store or Play Store is seriously getting in the way of adoption.

Other apps have verification systems for what school someone says they are going to (and other systems to check that they match their pictures). Are you planning to implement those? Safety is priority one; if someone gets hurt because you didn’t implement widely-used security protocols, then the whole project can be destroyed.

I think you need a landing page that makes it super clear that you can make bets on the site without making a dating profile.

I've had a number of convos with people who expressed surprised that they could use manifold.love without making a profile, and at least one case where the other party was really psyched about it.

Let users edit the geographic radius used to filter for the suggested list of compatible profiles.

It seems like maybe what we want is to allow users to submit any question they want about a pair of daters, and then we can see which kinds of markets attract traders. Instead of trying to figure out what the right market structure is top-down, just let a thousand flowers bloom, and let people create the markets that are most interesting to them.

This seems like it might be a moderation nightmare. Overtime, Manifold.love might learn which kinds of questions work, and create a limited, but well-selected, suite of markets for each pair. Or offer a number of options of different kinds of markets to create about a pair.

In the meantime, maybe mods will need to manually approve every proposed manifold.love market before it is allowed to go live, for decency reasons.

Or maybe the daters themselves have to approve each market? I think that's too much overhead for users, especially the new users who don't understand what this site is, and that's putting to much on them.

(Maybe in the longer run, daters can have a dash-board of what kinds of markets they're comfortable with. ie "Yes to questions about who I'll be in relationships with, but no to questions about one-night stands". This could have some tasteful defaults, and people have to opt into there being markets about what sex-acts they'll engage in. )

It looks like some users are putting in explanations for all of the match questions, even when the explanation is just their multiple-choice answer again. Maybe you want to have clearer signaling that the explanation is optional?

User data: I talked to my sister today. She's definitely non-rationalist (24 year old law student).

She went from thinking that manifold.love was weird (when I talked to her about it a few weeks ago) to thinking that it's fun. Apparently she and a friend of hers were looking through the matches on my profile, and talking about which ones were good. The friend said that she was going to make an account.

My sister had a take which sounds right to me: what manifold.love needs is social media integration (facebook, instagram, and whatever the kids are using these days), so that when you log in, it can suggest matches of people who you know.

I've pointed out that you could use profile info for assessing pairs that you don't know, but it seems like that's a lot less interesting for her. That makes sense. It's at least 10 times more fun to speculate about the matches of people, when you know at least one of them.

Profiles should maybe have a section where match makers can ask questions of the dater. Like, I'm considering a pair, and there's some piece of info that I think would strongly swing my decision, I should just be able to ask.

Probably the questions should be sent privately, and then if the dater answers them, they can decide to post the question + answer on their profile, or answer only to the person who asked?

The profile pages are currently too busy and don't feel "nice" to look at.

I don't know UX, but my guess is that one thing that would help is if each of the "text" categories (free answer questions, match questions, endorsements), were on their own pane, and you could toggle between them, instead of having them one after another on the webpage.

Possibly also a way to hide the match markets?

....actually, now that I think about it, I think a lot of the busy, overwhelm feeling comes from the fact that there's a row of personal photos, and then a row of match photos. Probably if you went back to UI element for markets that didn't include the photos, that would feel easier on the eyes. (Maybe you could hover over their name to display their photo?)

Also, tone down the bold text? There's bold text in a lot of places that don't make sense, like the free form questions and the explanations to the match questions. This makes them harder to read.

But take this with a grain of salt. I can tell that the pages hurt my eyes, but I'm not sure what the fixes are.

• The "vouch for this person" section is good. There should be a subsection of this called feedback. Feedback should probably be gated only to verified dates (how this is truly verified, I don't know)

• Feedback should be anonymous and time delayed. Anonymous to prevent retaliation, and randomly time delayed by a few days up to a few weeks to prevent the feedback recipient from immediately deducing the feedback provider

• Feedback is good vs just vouch, because many people act very differently in a one on one romantic or sexual context than when they are on display in front of their peers

Let the user set the location preferences (with a default set to no preference). Currently the „browse matches / compatible tab” seems to only show people from the same city. This substantially limits ability to find matches. I guess a lot of people will be interested in matches from that are removed geographically e.g. women who are looking for a long-term partner, wants to have their own kids and are in their mid thirties.

Add a compatibility score to each profile in the browse matches / compatible tab.

Require clear requirements for markets to solve, Incentivize creating markets but forbid participating in them.

Allow for more complex betting beyond Yes or No that would allow for bigger risks and odds. Allow to report bad market solving.

• As a newish user, I'm not suggesting new matches because the cost is a full 10% of the initial funds I have to work with. Lower friction matches from more users might be beneficial.

• Since the betting is the focus here, a more data-oriented interface might help - a list view compared to a gallery view, maybe?

1. You must have at least a reporting method to handle scammers. They are already coming in. And you should also declare where you stand on libertarianism vs. illegal prostitution.

2. The "wisdom of the crowd" (not teally a crowd, as they are competing INDIVIDUALS WHO DON'T COMMUNICATE" is at the crux of the weakness of orediction markets, a dud of an idea that this group is infatuated with. In reality, there is no escaping the foundational principle, which is that results will ALWAYS reflect selection procedures and sample size in relation to the population. But prediction markets tout "the wisdom of the crowd" and what that means. It is not the crowd per se, it is a subset of individuals with intelligence and knowledge. Please point out what the THEORETICAL basis of prediction markets is at this point in history.

Offer mana to users who share an invite link that someone else uses to sign up for manifold.love.

Taking it down

Use the "youtube thumbnail" system for photos/avatars. Instead of allowing a person to just set a profile pic, ask him to load 3+ pics. And over time the one which generates the higher conversion (pic view -> profile opened) is used more often.

Filter by amount written- I'm tired of seeing people who haven't written anything.

You should make it so that if you select all available answers for what you'll accept from a partner, the "importance" scale, defaults to "not important", to save me the click.

cross-posting from discord, since i just realized this bounty exists:

i'm someone who's not (currently) looking for love, but i think it'd be fun for me to make matches. right now, there's no like "matchmaker mode" where i can quickly + easily make matches between people, bet on markets, etc. letting ppl-who-aren't-normally-on-dating-apps-because-they're-not-looking-for-love still participate on manifold love seems like (a) pretty key for the model of manifold love, and (b) a great path for growing the user base.

some ideas for what a matchmaker mode might look like:

1. like tinder, but it shows me two profiles and asks me "Match" or "No Match"

2. a more comprehensive setup that lets me sort on multiple sides for people who could be potential matches

3. ???