Why the positives of allowing predictions markets about anything outweighs the few controversial ones

Why the controversial markets themselves aren’t even bad

• People already speculate and make bets about lots of things which are death adjacent, just less direct.
• The people betting on these sites bets on everything indiscriminately. They aren’t thinking “oh I want to bet on someone dying”. That just what gets surfaced and noticed. The intention behind people’s action is important, and I think it isn’t to “profit” off of people’s deaths.

1. Markets on submarine from Polymarket went viral
   1. What happened?
   2. Ethics of markets
      1. Are prediction markets on a whole more valuable, even if there are some sketchy ones
      2. Are the sketchy ones even bad? Should we try to discourage them?
   3. Reports later came out that the navy had already been monitoring sounds in the area and had heard a sound that was likely the implosion. Why didn’t they report this sooner? What would have happened if one of the navy in the know decided to go and use their insider information to go trade on the PolyMarket which was going viral?
2. The hunt for the homepage
   1. Markets are “evergreen”. Not ephemerall content like Reddit and Twitter. More like stocks. But people get bored of seeing the same markets and content.
   2. Surfacing markets relavent to the specific user
3. Newsifying Manifold
4. New multichoice
5. Rebranding
   1. Droppings the markets
   2. Changing copy to “questions”
   3. Focusing on making things like limit orders more intuiative
6. Callouts
   1. Optic

The “death” market that went viral

A few weeks ago, 5 men died visiting the ruins of the Titanic in a submerisble.

While multiple sites had markets about it, Polymarket’s (crypto prediction markets) went giga-viral amassing over 40-million impressions on Twitter (1, 2, 3). This was then reported on by NBC News. We got to see thousands of people who had never seen a prediction market before reacting to the idea of people trading on events which were portrayed as “gambling on other people’s lives”. Most people thought it was “insane” and the disgust radiated through the comments.

I believe this could have been a great moment to educate people on the value of prediction markets, but unfortunately, Polymarket responded with memes and comments focused on driving engagement rather than improving the public perception of markets.

Next time this happens, how do we educate people?

I wanted to take a moment to present how I think we should strive to communicate and potray prediction markets to outsiders.