Motivation

Is our site really ready for normies? Are we confident that normies want to use the site? I’m not convinced and I think there’s very little evidence for it. Until there is, we shouldn’t be catering to them. We have no normie atomic networks on our site, but we do have atomic networks made of contrarians and nerds. Therefore, there’s no justification for branding/grouping markets under normie categories. We saw what communities our users want to be a part of and we should encourage the growth of those communities as they’re going to be the most active in terms of market creation and betting. We should focus on making the platform better for those communities: i.e. finding markets within your community to bet on, bringing their leaderboards back, maybe even more advanced features like allowing paid subscriptions to communities to fund market creation, etc.

We need to focus on cultivating our atomic networks which are our user’s self-organized communities. The hard side of these networks is bettors, so we need to focus on how to incentivize bettors to earn mana. The ways I propose to incentivize them is community leaderboards and allowing communities to vote on what goes in the mana store/what mana can be exchanged for (charity & mana swag soon, what do the communities want?).

Proposals

1. P1:

   1. Clicking on a tag brings you to the tag (fold) page

   2. Manually fill in the about page for each community/category

   3. Limit communities to one tag

   4. Allow users to follow the tag

   5. Add in highly followed communities (ACX predictions, Effective Altruism, Rat Social) to replace the least used categories

   6. Bring back leaderboards for each tag ( is there any eng work needed for this?)

   7. show rapidly growing/most active communities on right had side for newbs to follow

      

2. P2: do P1 and also start investigating what more can we build to enhance community members’ experiences like:

   1. Create new metric that defines what communities are show: i.e. communities with top 10% followers or top 10% liquidity ([q] rank by liquidity in community markets!) get to be shown in the communities toggle list
   2. communities get to vote on what goes in the mana store/what mana can be cashed out for. If we can make communities happy with what is in the mana store they’ll be more incentivized to earn mana which will strengthen the atomic network
      1. Science is most followed community rn, can we allow cashing out to fund scientific studies?
   3. Allow DAO-like coordination of communities to pool funds to fund market creation of curators
   4. Subscribe to a community will cost M$1 per week or per month, which will go towards curator’s discretion

[Austin] Some questions:

• Who creates the communities? Who moderates the communities?
  • [i] users create communities and the top 10 on the leaderboard including the creator can moderate
• What is the experience of using a community? Is it…
  • Like a Subreddit?
  • Like a Discord server?
  • Like a Discord channel?
  • Like a Fold?
  • Like an instance LessWrong/EA Forum?

Also some prior reading: Subreddits

Discussion

• [i] Limiting our users to predefined categories is against the ethos of Manifold - a market for every question and a community for everyone
  • [A] Uh — in some philosophical sense, yes. But in some practical sense, no.
    • Reddit started out without subreddits! And then split up into 3 subreddits afterwards!
    • [i] yes exactly, they had a small number of communities/subreddits that fit their comms really well, they didn’t throw in 10 categories that the admins thought best. We’ve seen the communities that our early users made and the highest one was science and a few others, lemme go see what the highest ones were. They were:
      • science, acx predictions for 2022, manifold markets, x-risk, effective altruism
    • I almost feel like we have too many predefined categories, for cohesive community forming
      • [i] definitely, I don’t think they all fit well enough to be a category
    • But also, there’s some sense in which there should be a #glowfic community, absolutely.
      • [i] I don’t think it should be up to us to decide winning and losing categories other than define a criteria i.e., the communities that garner like 100 supporters should get their own tag
    • I think getting community support right is super important fwiw. Problem is, Folds were not the right model (too early IMO)
  • [A] Basically, “category” ≠ “community”. We don’t support communities yet. When we do support communities, we’ll do it right.
  • Folds/communities make up our atomic networks, full of early adopter contrarians and nerds - not people who easily fit into broad categories like sports, fun, personal, etc. And we need to cultivate our atomic networks to get retention & sustainable growth
  • I.e. aella might be more inclined to keep posting if she could form her own community that she feels like she has ownership over. She won’t feel like she fits into #fun or #personal, etc.
    • [s] Fair enough. Bringing communities back in some form is definitely a good idea. But how?
    • [s] Categories were always a short term solution to make the site usable for new participants.
      • which incidentally, seems to be working. Activated users has been going up.
    • [A/J] agreed with ^
  • Communities could also pool money to vote on important markets like voting for what they can spend their mana on. I think making mana useful and desirable to our highest value users should be a high priority as bettors are the hard side of the network and they must be incentivized to bet, i.e. earn mana.
  • DECISION: [i] writes prooposal to move categories→communities