I'm new to Manifold and it's interesting to see so many duplicate questions with multiple questions asking the same or similar thing. At the same time, the variety and depth of the questions are rather underwhelming given the size of the user base and the accessibility of not using real money.
What are the reasons for this?
Is it duplication for market arbitrage? Incentives created by question creation cost and the free questions for new users? Too much effort and too little payoff for asking good questions and managing the topic? Targeting hot-button topics rather than interesting and unique issues for traffic? People are really dumb and unoriginal, and Manifolders only modestly less so?
This is a serious question and not asked to insult. A response will be rated higher if it has the qualities of being analytical, comprehensive, and succinct. You are free to use, refute, or ignore my own speculations above. Sorry small bounty because I'm new and mana-constrained.
1,000
1.00Question askers are incentivized to create questions that a lot of people would bet on, since they earn mana based on the questions. Meanwhile, betters are incentivized to take the best odds for a certain question. If a question is asked multiple times, then the odds for each question, especially at the beginning will be arbitrageable. If there is opportunity for arbitrage, more people will bet on it, which gives the question asker more mana. So basically win win for everyone
Because it works. When you see a random post on your Home page, there’s no indication that the market was a clone of another one. If the odds are good, why wouldn’t you bet on it?
This, combined with no punishment for directly copying another post, leads to only positive incentives and no negative incentives.
I'm also a new user and I agree with your assessment. I lose a little bit of my soul every time I see yet another question about AI from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
One partial solution is to follow people who create high-quality questions. That way you get notified when they create a new one.
I think this has a lot to do with the homogenous background of the user base. A ton of people in tech, similar life experience/worldviews.
For example, I joined the site after hearing about it on the Hard Fork podcast, and so did others. This immediately selects for a certain subset of the population with similar interests and life experience.