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Hawaii return flight musings

Manifold Ideas

  • Note: new features don’t bring back users. interesting markets might?
    • TODO: validate through link-tracking on Substack
  • Daily/weekly recurring markets:
    • S&P 500; bitcoin prices
    • Our World in Data: population
    • Covid counts, deaths
    • Manifold metrics:
      • DAU; code commits
  • Piggyback on Metaforecast?
    • Exotic: Bring up Metaforecast results in search; “phantom” markets that get instantiated when you try and bet on them
      • Or actually: Just create all the markets on Metaforecast with Metaforecast bot, keep them in sync
    • Theory: Doubling our daily markets will double our comments
  • Execution:
    • Tuesday: catch up, hiring plan, close out funding
      • Discuss: how does working with devs work?
        • Who is managing?
          • Managers: should have weekly 1:1, be point of contact for onboarding, understand their needs
          • Better to have single head of dev team, than e.g. 3 reports to 3 people?
            • Unless we’re moving away from direct work ourselves.
        • Time to carve out roles
      • Async: create projects to spec out our timeline
    • Wednesday: Retro for March, planning for rest of April
      • Start with OKRs:
        • 10% WoW growth; 40% by end of month
          • = average 140 DAU by end of week
          • Retention: to 50%
            • Bringing back old users
        • Sign on 2 devs
        • Land Charity Prediction Markets
  • TODOs:
    • Check in with Cynthia
    check in with funders:
    • Snowball Fund
    • Lucy?
    • Stevo
    • Ping everyone, closing in x days
    Thank Nathan
    Write up job descriptions
    Send to Clay & Andrew

Hooked notes

Chapter 3:

  • Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Trigger
  • Motivation: Think advertisements.
    • Seek hope/avoid fear
    • seek pleasure/avoid pain
    • seek acceptance/avoid rejection
  • Ability: make things easy to use. Nobody reads anything.
    • Ability > motivation
    • Share to twitter - make one for Metaforecast
    • Infinite scroll on Pinterest
  • User’s mental heuristics:
  1. Scarcity: subjects valued scarce cookies more than plentiful ones
    • Current example: scarce M$ on Manifold
    • New example: scarce daily trophy? scarce leaderboards? scarce daily free market? scarce timing (market is closing now!)? scarce opportunity (bet here while the odds are good; you bet up here, want to double down?)
      • Artificial scarcity (M$) vs real scarcity (attention, prizes)
    • Bad example: loans decreased M$ scarcity
  2. Framing: Joshua Bell playing at a subway
    • Current example: giving 1000 M$ = M$ are this plentiful
    • New example: framing your scores vs other people’s scores?
      • Frame Manifold value prop vs Twitter, Reddit
      • Twitter derives value from lots of good tweeters
      • Reddit derives value from large community, people competing to find and upvote interesting things to share with each other
        • Manifold: competing to highlight good questions, post good responses, correct bad probabilities
      • Manifold: spend your downtime on figuring out the future
      • Frame twitter disagreement vs Manifold voting
      • TODO find better examples
    • Social proof as framing: Showcasing great markets or examples of when markets have helped
    • Reducing psychological barrier: framing of “trade” vs “bet”
      • Though: “bet” is much easier to grok than “trade”
      • “invest”? “Buy higher”?
    • How to frame upvote/downvote symbol to indicate a commitment
      • Manifold dollars could have a specific color? Instead of just a symbol
        • Context: video games - how is gold represented? see Storybook, mihoyo screenshots
          • Golden? Dark orange?
        • Proof of your contribution, your action “did something”
          • Moved the market, stored in
          • “Market mover” achievement: largest % change in market?
  3. Anchoring (availability heuristic): “On Sale” may not be the best deal.
    • Current example: showing possible returns with DPM
    • New example: highlighting favored EA charities (ala Momentum?)
  4. Endowed progress: punch cards nearing a goal
    • Current example: Manifold leaderboards, kinda
    • New example: market creation badges; reputation scores; number of followers; money donated to charity via trading; comment upvotes; number of markets created
    • Oh, endowed progress: adding artificial punches. Linkedin profile strength

Chapter 4: Reward

  • Before reading, thoughts:
    • Should include achievements (Smartest Money, top trader, proven correct) in email
    • At least identify profitable trades as good! C.f. Anthony’s feedback, check how much of it we’ve accomplished