1. Distribution would suck.
   1. Distribution is king. An okay product with amazing distribution will beat a good product with zero distribution.
   2. It’s very hard to start from a userbase of 0. The core platform already has decent distribution among politically inclined users and is a much better springboard to launch a politics product.
   3. Even if the separate site would be slightly better UX, that’s not worth taking a hit in distribution.
   4. SEO would be awful and would compete with the core platform instead of augmenting it.
2. A separate site would not be the difference between success or failure.
   1. If play-money political markets are a good enough product to succeed at all, it should also succeed on the core platform, even if the experience is not optimal. It’s hard to imagine a world where having a separate site makes the marginal difference between success and failure.
   2. Betfair, currently the largest platform betting on US elections, is not optimized exclusively around US politics (if anything, it’s optimized for sports betting and includes US politics as an afterthought).
   3. The time to build a polished external site for this use case is after we’ve already verified demand.
3. We’re not on track to build a good product.
   1. We don’t care enough: What was the first thing that happened after we launched the new site? Did we immediately rush to build out new features and use it intensely? No. People abandoned it to work on random features on the core platform. This is not the level of intensity we need to build something that is good enough for people to want to use.
   2. It’s actually extremely annoying to have to switch from using the core platform to another site for what is nearly the same content. No one on our team will do this, and the product will be worse for it.
4. The goals of Politics are the same as the core platform.
   1. We want to make something fun, informative, relevant, normie-friendly, and viral.
   2. Insofar as our core platform is not these things we should change it.
   3. Nearly all the things we intend to build for Politics (better display of news, simplified UI, better curation) will also benefit the core platform.
   4. Unlike things like manifold.love, the UX of a well-designed political market site are not and should not be so different from the rest of the site.
5. We cannot maintain 2 separate sites.
6. Doing one thing is better than two things.
   1. We should have a very strong presumption against dividing our efforts across multiple products.
7. Building on the main site means we can retain users after the election ends.