From Akhil’s Product Suggestions
See also Groups
[Austin] Yeah, my very rough sense is we've leaned too far in the direction of "free for all, anything goes" to the detriment of the typical user browsing our site, and should test a more moderated approach (e.g. having major platform-owned categories of "Sports", "Politics", "Finance", "Crypto" that we curate).
[Austin] I'm less sure about increasing info density (though, I did hear the exact same feedback from another product person I respect a lot!)
[James] Better browsing could have great ROI. I think we should invest in this as well as the feed.
Perhaps the default Explore view (formerly Markets) should be organized by category.
One reason to focus on the feed is for mobile. You can only only show 1-2 markets at time on a mobile screen. Average users don’t want to click to navigate to different categories, they just want to scroll.
[James] Re: density. A unique part of markets is you want check back to see how the prices/probabilities changed. A denser, dashboard-like view for all the markets you care about seems like a use case that we should fill.
[Akhil] More on browse in the twitter vs. reddit question below. re: information & engagement density - at the risk of stating the obvious, but relevant to many of the suggestions:
The Portfolio would probably cover the dashboard like use case; the important question is what info should be included by default everywhere in order to drive engagement and prediction updates. My guess is that Daily/Recent Changes and my existing position on the market would likely be some of those things.
A major difference between reddit and twitter is that the former centers around the content, and the latter around WHO created the content. They both have advantages/disadvantages of course; though I do consider reddit more conducive and welcoming to new/unknown users getting the community to engage with their content. Is this something you've explicitly thought about, and taken a call on one way or another?
[Austin] That's a great distinction! The axis I had been thinking about was "community/topic-driven vs algorithmically/follow-driven", but that's a mechanical split; your division captures the spirit of the two sites. Thus far, I've been referencing Twitter as a guide to product and visual design (as you may have noticed!). However, I'm now less sure that's the right model; I think having an engaged community eg Reddit is more important than speed of creation.
[Austin] Some models to consider, by how good they are for Manifold (in my rough estimation):
Reddit / Hacker News / LessWrong - Subcommunities coalescing around the news of the day
StackOverflow / Quora / Wikipedia - Wisdom of the crowds seeking out a single, collaborative truth
Twitter / Substack / Twitch - Emphasis on individual creators putting out entertaining content
Discord / Slack - Gated communities allowing for quick, intimate discussion
[Austin] As you might know, we already have communities in our app; they’re currently an optional “super-tag” that aggregates markets based on whether they fall into a tag. I’d propose one simple but major change: require that every market be grouped into one of eg 10 major categories:
So that as with Reddit, all markets are categorized under at least one community. There are further questions around who moderates these (I think us, at first, and then we can delegate or hire for this as good moderators step up), and when to create new categories.
[James] This is an important question and Austin’s suggestions sound pretty good.
I think that because mobile pushes usage into one feed, that also leads to a world where sub-communities are less important and discussion on individual markets is more important.
The creator of a market is still important because they decide the resolution, which is why I think we should support following individual users like Twitter does. But the feed ultimately should be algorithmically driven IMO because that surfaces the best content.
I think communities are something we can expand later. Austin’s categories does sound like something that could be useful today, so maybe we should try that as well.
[Akhil] Yeah I’d think one could follow both topics and people; as do both reddit and twitter. The question then is one of whether the product and engagement revolves around individuals or topics/markets, and the design decisions that follow from that choice. It sounds like you guys are generally in agreement that the individual, while important, isn’t the primary focus?
re: feed vs. communities - related to James’ point, the default user is unlikely to perfectly curate their communities; nor should that be a requirement to start using the product. So surfacing stuff algorithimically makes sense. And the relevant question is one of depth vs. breadth.
A product mechanism which I think can accomplish both is Swipe vs. Scroll. Swipe being the primary way of navigating, and scroll being a signal to see more of the same (comments, news, related questions etc.). Importantly though, they needn’t be mutually exclusive (eg. swipe may also bring up related markets) - they only serve as suggested signals to see adjacent/general/broad content (swipe) or more depth (scroll).
Combine this with news driven new markets, news driven updates to existing predictions, and minimal clicks to add/update a bet, and I’d probably start every day on Manifold!
Ok, thanks for engaging with all the feedback and my brain dump 🙂. Sounds like these are all things you’re already thinking deeply about, and I look forward to seeing where this goes.