Ian’s thoughts

Problems:

• Niche groups’ markets crowd out the home page of users typically not interested in that groups’ markets. This will get worse as we get more niche groups with more markets.
• We have too many groups for too few users, making the majority of activity in groups seem too little like a ghost town. Making groups is really easy and treated like tags, so people create more and more groups for small collections of markets.
• We’ve too many groups for users to be able to easily follow them all
• As a new user when you’re visiting the market page it’s not easy to see what group the market is in (or when inspecting the market slug) so after checking out the market you go to the homepage and easily lose your place on the site. The counterfactual where the group is explicit/more like a subreddit, the user would go to the home of the group full of related content. Similarly, IMO the related markets at the bottom of the market page are some of the most relevant markets to me, so we should make that very easy to access/built in to the group navigation flow

Solutions:

Proposal 1:

• Main categories are emphasized throughout website, including in market sharing slugs
  • categories are: ‘economics’, ‘crypto’, ‘world’, ‘culture’, ‘EA/rationalism’, ‘Destiny-gg’ etc.
• Each group fits into a single parent category
  • When creating a group you have to choose a parent category
  • e.g. this gives you leaderboards for tournaments under the ea category
• markets only show the category and the one group that they’re in, though ofc you can cross post into multiple groups/categories
• Links include the parent category and depending on from what group/category the link that is shared, you’ll be directed to that group’s parent category when you hit home
  • e.g. manifold.markets/g/economics/ian/us-inflation-rate-2023
  • this type of link will be instantly familiar to people bc of reddit
    • ([A] Specifically not a fan of very long links like this; shouldn’t mix both top level categories and users)
• allow users to add hashtags (and highlight them) to allow people to easily add subcategories for easier searching of markets
• show related markets section on the group homepage that draw from the users’ recent bets on markets and call the related markets function on them. If the user has no bets then use the users’ market views

Inga’s thoughts

• the process of adding to a group is kind of tedious and doesn’t really make sense unless you’ve joined from said group, and are making your market from there
• Ways other people do it

  • Instagram

    • Just tags
    • can look up categories/explore but no real community otherwise
    • your community is your friends on instagram

  • tiktok

    • all AI, user interaction based
    • also no real community except people with large following
    • discoverability is :chefskiss: though

  • reddit

    • all groups
    • homepage is just all the groups you follow
    • post from subreddit
    • recommends subreddits

    

    • shows adjacent groups

  • twitter

    • also more friend centered
    • hashtags, popularity from retweeting
    • constantly recommend new things
    • people never search for things
• we’re most similar to reddit
• I’ve found some people just naturally wanna add tags
• groups is only functional if we actually get good group usage
• I say we keep things as is, improve groups
• make groups less of an “it’s own page” things and more of something you can click into to see more, and then click back out
• homepage is for discovering though
• should not tackle categorization, but instead discoverability
  • things that are not categorized “correctly” should still show up to the user somehow
  • should just have a recommended section that uses some algorithm that combines
    • groups you already follow
    • people you follow
    • markets you interacted with
  • and shows you markets that may pertain to you based off of this
• May want infinite scrolling?