It’s can be hard to actually get people to trade on your markets. Austin has been guilty of “featuring” his own markets just to get more eyeballs on this.
From Notes from Winter Solstice, one of the top requests from basically everyone I spoke to was make it easier to promote your own markets to other users.
We sometimes tell people to “add liquidity” but this doesn’t work too well — it’s hard for traders to notice high-liquidity markets, and also a highly liquid market actually makes it harder for users to contribute information
L1: Show a “sort by added liquidity” option
L2: Tie “liking markets” to “adding liquidity”?
L3: Intelligently suggest “you might have alpha in this market” to traders
A1: Auction off spots on the homepage
A2: Or in the banner
A3: Auction off spots on a separate page, like a “classified” section
A4: Target specific users/groups with paid opportunities, e.g. “I’d pay Zvi M$100 to guarantee he’s seen my market”
Problem: pits “advertisers” against “regular users”, sometimes.
(Not always! See “Why I Work on Ads”)
Possible solution: can pay mana or subscribe to Manifold to avoid seeing ads
I1: Give the first 10 traders M20 to place a bet
Problem: eaten by bots?