Summary: Commission high-quality articles involving prediction markets, on our own journal (separate from our newsletter)

Why?

• Our newsletter is pretty boring atm…
  • Rare that people are excited to read about “Manifold product updates”
  • None of the core team have the bandwidth to do a lot of writing; we sometimes go months without posting an update
• At the same time, there’s a lot of cool stuff that happens on Manifold that someone could write about; LK99, Sam Altman, etc
  • And a lot of timeless content; cf Isaac King’s blog, eg “Predictions are not Polls”
• Could create a contest for articles from our own users
  • Issue an open calls to our audience “submit articles, if we like them then we’ll pay for them & publish them”
    • And of course, prediction markets on “Will this article get approved”!
  • Example: ACX Book Reviews generates really, really good stuff to surface to our audience
• Could also commission from writers we like
  • E.g. Resident Contrarian article on Whales vs Minnows, was cited by Byrne Hobart
  • Spoken with ‣ on some ideas here
  • Tracing Woodgrain? Or recruit literal ACX Book Review winners
• Could aim for well-researched, academic-quality articles

Why not?

• Building an audience from scratch would be hard
  • We’d prefer to get citations from NYT, Bloomberg, etc
    • (Not necessarily in conflict though!)
• Could partner more closely eg with Asterisk Magazine instead?
• Evergreen blog content might not be that good for growth
  • though, it might be good for prestige, cf Dylan Matthews on convincing more journalists to cite these markets
• Could just do this on our main newsletter, without separating out updates