We can use this doc to include proposals and discussion on the future of Manifold comments.

Why do people comment?

• Commenters may want to:
  • Clarify some information
  • Provide new insight about the market
  • Encourage others to jump in on their position
  • Prove that they were right about something
• Like markets, each new comment imposes an attention cost
  • How do we respect this in our site?

Proposals

Sort ordering

(Not an exclusive choice; could provide multiple orders. Have to pick a default though)

• Most recent first (used today)
  • Austin thinks this still makes for a weird reading experience
  • [J] With nested replies that are oldest first, this sort order at the top level is even better. You could then read a back-and-forth conversation in order, while seeing the most recent conversations.
• Oldest first
• By “quality”
• By bet size/liquidity size
  • Aka: pay more to get your comments rated higher
  • Makes sense if you think about bidding for attention
  • See also: https://manifold.markets/hawkebia/will-manifold-auction-off-the-top-m

Quality indicators

• “Free” indicators
  • Upvotes/Likes
  • Upvotes & Downvotes
  • Reactions
  • “Retweets”?
• “Paid” indicators: Comment Tips
  • Tips
    • Users directly send some M$ to comments they find useful
    • We can show “highly rated” comments above
    • Leaves space for a Quadratic Funding bonus for good comments
    • We can subsidize tips to m
  • Bets
    • Could use the same AMM system on each comment
    • Q: What are you betting on? Could be:
      • Whether this comment will get “curated” or win a bounty
        • From the market creator
        • From the community
        • From the platform
      • Whether this comment will get “banned”
  • Reactions
    • Proposal 0: Reactions each send M$ 10
    • Proposal 1: Reactions can be a quadratic function on how much to tip
      • 🙂 = M$ 10, then 💌 = M$ 20
    • Proposal 2: Different reactions tip different amounts

Threading

• Single Thread
  • Live chats tend to do this (eg Twitch chat)
  • Old-school forums tend to do this (Discourse)
  • Pros: dead simple
• Tree structure (Nested comments)
  • Depth 1:
    • What our Free Response, StackOverflow, Quora already have
    • Slack, Discord, Discord kinda support this now
  • Depth N: What Reddit, LessWrong has
    • Cons: Bad on mobile? Lots of logical depth?
• Graph-like threading
  • This is how Twitter works - via directed acyclic graph
    • [J] DAG’s are just a set of trees. Isn’t this the same as tree structure depth N above?
    • [i] tweets are probably not directed, just a big network - but they have a timeline so nvm
      • [J] that’s true you can reference other tweets
      • [i] yeah I think twitter is just the tree structure from above but with a crap-ton of branches for tweets that actually receive attention
      • [i] tree just doesn’t feel like the right name, dag makes more sense

Also: How should comments work in Free Response markets?

• [i] I’d think each answer would have a comments timeline just like the binary contracts

Costs of Commenting

• Free
  • Ian just implemented this