Muahaha, I in my evil non-laissez-faire moderator ways have resolved this market to YES. 😈

@Gabrielle based

@Gabrielle on what basis?

@RanaG The simplest answer is that it wasn't even possible for moderators to resolve open markets when this market was made, so me resolving this market to YES is in itself proof. The longer answer is everything Eliza wrote below.

@RanaG also:

(posted in mod channel, links to Oleg's comment below)

@CodeandSolder A very fitting result for this market.

For some reason, this market keeps showing up in my feed and it's simply impossible for me to not take the bait because every time I see it, the probability seems to have gone down again. It doesn't make any sense.

Here are some real figures in a condensed format, and I will put a follow-up comment below with more detail. Ask me anything. I personally witnessed massive shifts in the way market creators have been treated since this question was created. Maybe we are suffering from a collective forgetfulness here? (2023-09-01 was still the wild west! There was almost no control!)

Before and after this market was created:

• Before: moderators could only resolve questions that had already closed
  Now: moderators can resolve any question where the criteria have been met
  

• Before: I do not know how many questions were resolved by admins/mods, but the figure was quite small, maybe a couple hundred in total?
  Since: 3612 questions have been resolved by someone other than the creator
  

• Before: moderators could not "unlist" questions
  Now: moderators have "unlisted" 1806 questions
  

• Before: moderators could not edit closing dates.
  Now: there have been at least 868 instances of moderators adjusting a closing date without resolving the question
  

• Before: Users such as Levi Finkelstein were allowed to create 'nonsense' markets and resolve them how they wished
  Now: Levi Finkelstein is banned and no longer allowed to create these markets

Maybe people don't think this is significant, but to me, "zero to one" is a huge, huge barrier that has already been crossed. It is quite clear that question creators no longer have (near-)absolute autonomy on this site and moderators are now quite happy to overrule 'fraudulent' and 'wrong' resolutions quickly and without hassle. Moderators have also recently been seen 'unlisting' markets they think are bad for the site. Regardless of what the community guidelines and site founders think, the moderators running the show have been pushing on rogue creators pretty hard for some time now.

Some anecdotes plus data about things I understand to have happened on the site after this market was created:

For reference, all moderator abilities mentioned below were introduced to the site after this market was created (unless otherwise noted).

Market resolution: Moderators are now allowed to resolve markets where the criteria have been met. Before this market was made, if a market had met the resolution criteria but the creator was absent, it was a big task to get a resolution, even if it was relatively unambiguous. Users needed to ping the creator multiple times, try to get in touch with SirSalty, and post in a #please-resolve channel on Discord. Response time varied between "half a day" and "a week" in most cases. If there was even a sliver of ambiguity, requests for prompt resolution were often delayed for weeks.

In total, over 3500 markets have been resolved by Moderators since this market was created.

User 'protection': Moderators have been given the ability to "unlist" markets that they deem are not suitable for the average site user to encounter. This has been used in various cases to protect unsuspecting users from finding a misleading market and to limit exposure of markets deemed questionable or possibly against the site guidelines. I think it's reasonable to assume some users would characterize this as 'censorship' -- it is certainly a major shift from the situation we had in the months before this market was created where almost no content was hidden by staff/moderators.

There are currently 1806 unlisted markets where the unlisting was done by someone other than the creator. Some of them are 'spam' but others are/were 'real' attempts at markets that were deemed inappropriate for the site. (Spam markets were also sometimes hidden before this market was created.)

Market maintenance: Moderators can now adjust market closing dates and toggle other options on markets, without even asking the creator first. For example, if they decide the closing date looks incorrect, they can choose to just immediately fix it.

Since this market was created, closing times on markets have been updated at least 868 times by moderators. (Something that had never happened before.)

Moderator power expansion: The community guidelines now give moderators the ability to modify the criteria of almost all moderately popular markets, unless the creator specifically requests not to:

By default, mods and admins now have permission to edit markets on Manifold. However, to preserve creator ownership, certain guidelines must be followed, including attempts to contact the creator.

There are numerous other expansions of moderator power since this market was created -- the entire Mod guidelines are all new and none of that was in place on 2023-09-01.

Corralling rogue users: Moderators have a button called "Ban" which they were originally instructed to use only on spam users, but this button's usage has also expanded beyond that basic use case. Several users have been banned from commenting due to their poor language choices, and the limits on 'banned' users have increased more than once over the duration of this market. Banned users originally were restricted only from commenting, but their participation is even more limited now. There are some specific cases I can recall, but I think it is better to avoid going into specifics.

@Eliza Wow, yeah that really is a lot of progress since this market was created.

@Eliza I think it will be fitting if this market is resolved as YES by a moderator based on this comment.

@Eliza I definitely agree things have come a long way, I was selling a bit of YES to realise profits because it's definitely a thing that people have short memories and I was worried people would be totally unable to remember what Manifold was like six months ago. But I think they're being reminded pretty well!

Are mods expected to moderate the comments sections, too, or just markets?

@GazDownright this market was intended to be about moderation in relation to markets and their operation

@CodeandSolder Got it

Whilst I don't know how this will resolve, note that the relevant fact is not how lax moderation is now, but whether it is significantly less lax than start of Sep 2023.

At the start of Sep 2023 there were no "mods" per se, some users were called "trustworthy-ish", and their role in moderation was more limited.

Manifold did not even have a policy to re-resolve blatantly modresolved markets, unless the creator engaged in fraud (i.e. the misresolution was for their profit). Now we do have that policy.

Mods (again, not called that at the time) could not hide comments in Sep 2023, that functionality was added in late Oct.

Blatant profit manipulation for leagues used to be much easier, it started to be punished more, and trustworthy-ish users playing more of a role in decision-making, a little after this market was created:

/chrisjbillington/will-the-council-of-trustworthyish

That and and related events led to the creation of the "unranked" toggle for markets, to make it more difficult to manipulate leagues profits via subjective or self-fulfilling markets.

I don't know what the creator will count as "significant", but things have trended in the less laissez-faire direction.

@chrisjbillington I have been way more busy lately than I expected when creating this market but I'm very open to arguments one way or the other and will do some research of my own too.

Open to suggestions of how to do this!

@Joshua fix broken markets instead of suggesting new, competing ones be created. When you fix an existing market you are increasing average market quality by quite a bit more than if someone just copies it but better.

@Joshua Try stuff and see what sticks. Attempt the "by default, moderators can change your market" thing from the guidelines a few times, for starters. See what happens. Tweak and repeat.

A great many of the things that happened between September and ~November were purely "let's try something and see how the site users respond" and a lot of good things came out of that which seem normal today.

@Eliza if Manifold lacks the people to try things and see what sticks, it would be a win-win if they reallocated frontend devs from the net-negative task of moving UI items around.