manifold.love is now back up and running. If you don't know, manifold.love was an experiment in prediction-market matchmaking which was put on hiatus about a year ago. I'm happy to say it is no longer on hiatus. manifold.love has transferred ownership a new company managed by me, Sinclair, and I am responsible for maintaining it going forward. Let's go through the changes, then I'll say a bit about why we're doing this.

• prediction markets have been removed from manifold love. (this happened a while ago)
• the data for the whole site is now separate from manifold, in a whole new database. accounts, questions, ships, everything has been ported over.
  • manifold love dm's used to be the same as dm's on manifold, but now they are seperate. existing dms between manifold love users have been copied over, but they are now seperate from manifold dms. they will not sync. if you continue an existing dm on either site, it is basically a fork-off point and your message history will not be the same across each site. if you send a message to a new person on manifold love, it will no longer send on manifold. nor vice versa.
  • profile avatars, usernames, and display names will no longer sync between manifold love and manifold. new accounts will not be pre-seeded with manifold user info.
• most importantly, the site is no longer broken and actually works. check it out! let me know if you run into any issues.

Here's what I'm thinking of working on next:

• Fix email notifications for love dm's.
• Support for showing existing friends, relationships, and exes. This provides social proof and makes poly dating easier.
• Significant simplification of the UI.
• focus on a core flow of "answering questions." onboarding is questions. break the ice with questions. share questions with friends. answer anonymous questions.
  • also significant simplification of the data model.
• Do open source well. follow best practices and integrate with open data standards. make it easier for other devs to contribute.
• Better feed experience?
• Cross-city relationships? gender ratio arbitrage the NY fashion girlies with the work-from-home SF techbros.
• A new name. Suggest here:

Why I’m doing this

The deal I arrived at with @SG is that Manifold Markets the company gets 10% of my new company, in exchange for giving me the ownership of manifold.love. In their eyes, this is better than them owning 100% of an unmaintained side project.

As for why I'm doing this - well there are a two shallow reasons.

One, I personally want to satisfy my own sexual and romantic needs. existing dating apps are both too political and also not good at queer and poly. And I mean, it's not like the swipe-based paradigm has been a great success for straight vanilla people either. There's a lot of room for improvement.

Two, I feel a sense of responsibility to the rationalist community. I buy Tracingwoodgrains' argument that Copenhagen Ethics is basically correct - when you tell people "I'm here to help" you are implicitly also saying "and I should have the power to do it". When Manifold took on the dating-network-effect of this crowd it assumed a natural monopoly. It sucks the air out of other attempts - recprocity.io, dating bounties, paying a community member to do centralized matchmaking. I think manifold.love was better than what came before, but I think there's at least a bit of an obligation to do a great job. If we had just let manifold love be in a bad state forever, that definitely would have not sat well with me. For similar reasons, I want to help people not be locked into the manifold love ecosystem. I'm not exactly what that means yet. let people export their answers? integrate with other dating-ish things?

Now, there's a more meaningful reason but it's a long story. Or a long rant. As you may know, I left Manifold Markets in January to work on a secret new startup. I was going to build AI girlfriends. Sadly, after two weeks I decided to part ways with my cofounder. We weren't working well together. Like, she wanted to build something good, but I wanted to build something fast. The technology is still a bit too early to build someone that I would actually want to date. I had never worked on manifold.love much myself during it's heydey, partly because I always had a very different creative vision for what a dating site could be and should be. I am skeptical that betting the right mechanism for aggregating matchmaking knowledge from friends. at a high level, people do not want to mix the material and spiritual. dating bounties in the rationalist community aren't very effective. it seems to me people do not want to be rewarded in complicated, numerate, power-seeking, competitive, bayes-bucks - but rather in affective, intuitive, cooperative, social currency. yang vs yin. Now I get to try my hand at building manifold love my way. More personal, community-focused, while still holding freedom as a high virtue, while still having a clear-eyed view on the taboo truths about sex and romance, and having no fear about who we are.