What do you think can be done to improve monifold

How will Manifold combat inflation? (with all the daily quests, user referrals, user trades, the amount of mana in circulation rises every day). 

Right, I forgot that most markets don't even get to 10 traders (mine included)! Thank you!

 Note that this bounty is basically closed (I don't expect to keep answering questions). 

That said - I'm not specifically worried about inflation; while mana is both purchaseable and donatable, there's a natural ceiling and floor on how much 1mana is worth. We do have ideas on other kinds of mana sinks to combat inflation (such as boosts and trading fees), but at the core, making markets and betting costs mana and so there'll be demand as long as these actions are useful or fun. 

What feature of the site is least intuitive for people with no prior gambling or investing experience? Have you thought about ways to use Manifold to help increase betting literacy in those groups? 

 thanks! Some specific things I think Manifold could offer mini-tutorials on, to improve understanding and enjoyment of the site mechanics and forecasting generally:

*implying that they don't have a strong model of what happens once the question resolves)

 Hard to say -- I'd guess that the way the payout structure works is not super intuitive (often new people I show it to think that they're "voting" instead of "investing/betting", implying a 

I would phrase it as "forecasting literacy" instead of "betting literacy". I do think just the practice of the game of Manifold gets people into the habit of making predictions with probabilities.

If there weren't rules/laws about gambling, what feature would you most like to exist?

 I feel like if you allowed mana withdrawal it would incentivize people to try to abuse infinite mana glitches and botting, and would also make it a lot harder for manifold to be profitable in the future.

 uh the simple obvious one is a feature to allow people to withdraw their mana into money. We could build all kinds of interesting applications on top of that!

(Note that the laws around gambling are usually less pertinent to Manifold compared to the rules around trading securities, as far as we can tell)

I'm not sure "withdraw to money" would be a silver bullet towards making Manifold good, but it is a thing lots of people have asked for.

What's your favorite Haikyuu moment and why is it when Nishinoya pointed at Kinoshita?

 Haven't watched Haikyuu, this is a question for my brother instead!

Did it take courage to leave your previous job and start your own company? How did that go?

 it took a bit of courage to leave Google to start freelancing because I hadn't been familiar with others who did it. Leaving Streamlit afterwards didn't take too much courage; I'd been looking to cut back my time to work more on personal projects, and was much more financially stable as a result of Google stock doing well.

(note that there was a long period of time between Streamlit and Manifold, though, something like 10 months)

What are some differences (both good and bad) you've noticed working at Manifold compared to the previous startup you worked at?

Any learnings, things you wish Manifold still did better, anything when working at the previous startup you assumed was good/normal but were surprised by how different it was at Manifold?

 yay more mana to dump into market making limit orders on super colliders!

 Awarding this +M500 for "hardest question!"

 shrug, I've been a senior eng/tech lead at Streamlit. I guess I meant specifically "management/VP experience".

Not actively looking to grow atm but we'll always bring on world-class talent! 

 wait none of y'all have senior or lead exp? are you looking to expand the team?

 This one is tricky as I've basically set the norms at Manifold to be "all the things I liked about Streamlit, minus the things I didn't like". So in some sense I'm the worst person to turn to, to ask about how our processes could be better.

Off the top of my head, I feel like our general business processes and project management could be much better, wrt triaging issues, scoping projects, knowing what our OKRs are, etc. This comes from a lack of senior expertise across the founders and other team members; we've all basically worked in individual contributor roles, rather than project/product management. I'd love to have a seasoned tech leader come in and tear down our current systems.

The best thing about Manifold process is how easy it is to ship! Really good for productivity/developer happiness.

What made you decide to focus on Manifund vs Manifold?

 A sense that Manifold hasn't grown significantly in the last 6 months. That means that the site feels a bit static to me, atm. Also, the initiatives that I'm excited about on Manifold are already being well handled by the rest of the team (such as this specific question format -- kudos a million to 

 for bountied questions!), and I think my comparative advantage is working on the frontier of something new.

What event(s) would make you want to pull the plug on Manifold, or put it in hibernation mode?

 if we found something that seemed like a much better use of our time? idk, maybe AI starts talking to us soon, or we trip over a much larger opportunity in the course of experimenting on new directions.

Or another answer is if it turns out that most Manifold users regret the time spent on the site, because it made them much unhappier compared to what they would have done otherwise.

Would love to hear what questions you have for me!

Related questions

Related questions