Background

• We’ve previously tried versions of groups that focus on the subreddit-like use-case of communities centered on a shared interest. We’ve also tried a more minimal version of groups as a curational tool centered around a set of markets on specific topic. What we haven’t tried is the other vision of groups as a place for friends or an online community to compete.
• Sleeper achieved PMF after introducing fantasy sports leagues. What if we just try to build out the equivalent version for our own product?
  • [d] Geoguesser, game where u get placed in google street view in a random location and u have to guess where u are in the world. People played it but it was treated as a bit of a fad and just something interesting to do while in queue time for their main game. They then introduced leagues and a ranking system. Caused it to become people’s main game and for people to become full time geoguesser “pro players”.
  • [d] Duolingo also introduced monthly leagues where u advance to the higher tier if u complete more classes than the other 100 ppl u randomly get placed in a league with that month.

Proposal: A venue for friends to compete against each other on Manifold

• Unlike our current iteration of groups, the focus of leagues is on the participants rather than a specific topic
  • Markets from multiple disparate topics can be included in a single league
    • Default might be to include all markets
  • From a UI perspective, the focus will be on the live activity feed of members of that league, showing recent trades, etc.
• Leagues will replace Leaderboards as the main vehicle through which competition happens.
  • The global leaderboards are mostly of interest to our power users and can’t scale by definition.
  • Leagues will get a slot in the sidebar and on the mobile navbar
• UI
  • /leagues
    • Will list each league you are a member of along with your current rank
    • Create new league button:
      • choose a name, initial members, which groups or markets are included (everything by default)
  • /leagues/[slug]
    • Shows current rankings and activity feed for league participants
      • Rankings: Compares your total profit on included markets since league creation date compared to other members of the league
      • Activity feed: Bets and comments from other league participants in league-relevant markets
    • Settings panel: add/remove users, change allowed market groups
    • Ideally, everything is displayed nicely on one page; no tabs
  • Notifications
    • Get notified when someone passes you on a league leaderboard

Should we actually do this?

• Maybe, maybe not.
• Lower priority than improving basics of our site today

Misc thoughts:

• Timebound vs running forever?
• Auto-league for your followed users

Use cases

• [S] Signal chats of tech people

  • Non-overlapping friendgroups.

    • College friend group
    • Austin friendgroup (Dwarkesh)
    • Parents (4 of you)
    • Want to see how they’re doing, what they’re betting on the site

  • Leaderboards, notifications

    • Some groups can be competitive, some groups can be collaborative
      • Noticeably: can send out notifications about changes on the leaderboard. People that you know

  • Following is a different relationship. Want to interact with friends on a different level

    • Follow is about markets
    • Friends is about betting, commenting, marketing

  • Would try to have both - collaborating and collaborative

  • [J] Anecdote:

    • At ACX meetup, guy said he’d like to play with friends
    • When asked if he would prefer to compete against them or form a team with them to compete against others, he said he wanted to compete against them with a leaderboard
    • When asked if this feature existed whether he would actively invite his friends, he said yes!

[J] Leagues: private groups + tournaments

• Create an invite-only group of friends first