Manifold: Live!

Manifold Community Fund EA community Forecasting

Joshua Fleming

CompleteImpact certificate

$1,612raised

$900valuation

Project summary

Manifold's Community Fund announcement included these ideas:

Organize & moderate debates that incorporate live-betting on markets
Host a weekly call on Discord to welcome new Manifold users and help them get oriented
An Actually Good podcast series interviewing top users and team members

We plan to host a weekly live show on Manifold’s Discord server combining all of these: debating/betting on markets live with an audience playing along, interviewing Manifold’s top traders and market creators, introducing new users to Manifold and old users to great markets they might have missed.

The Manifold community is great - some of the most memorable moments on the site have been due to a bunch of traders all betting at the same time and chatting as it all unfolds. We want to foster more of this sense of fun and community by providing a Schelling point - a time and place when everyone knows that a bunch of people will be online simultaneously betting and chatting.

Our market If there is a Manifold Live Show on Discord/Twitch/YouTube, what recurring segments will it include? has all our ideas for segments and their odds of being included. The top three results are currently:

The hosts discuss the most popular/dramatic/hidden gem markets from the past week. They place bets as they discuss and debate whether those markets should be higher or lower.
The hosts pick a market that doesn't have a lot of traders, ideally one created by a new user. The hosts and audience all research the question and bet on it live, and the new user gets a warm welcome to the site.
The hosts compete in a forecasting/trivia game, and the audience bets live on who will win.

The show will likely evolve as we find out what people enjoy most, and if it really takes off we aspire to one day be able to invite on prominent users like Eliezer Yudkowsky or sponsored streamers like Destiny. We also have many community members interested in appearing on the show, as can be seen in our market here.

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

We are committing to producing a minimum of 4 shows, and our goal is to produce as many as 10-12 before the end of the current community fund initiative in Mid-February. If the show is successful, we hope to continue hosting it long after that.

We aim to:

Foster a sense of community by getting a bunch of users all online and Manifold-ing simultaneously
Provide users a fun way to learn about Manifold and how to use it, by watching some of the most experienced traders on the site place bets and share their strategies
Provide users an easy way to catch up on all the wild things that happen on Manifold as the hosts recap the week’s most dramatic events
Provide newcomers a warm welcome to the site by highlighting markets by new users and sending the show’s audience to go bet in the market at the same time
Provide a platform to invite sponsored content creators or prominent forecasters from outside the manifold community to show them around the site while getting their opinions on various markets
Show off how fun Manifold can be by creating video content that can be clipped and posted on Twitter/TikTok/YouTube Shorts

After the show, we’ll make a recording available on YouTube and/or Twitch, with the possibility of editing them into more polished podcast episodes later.

How will this funding be used?

Honestly, we could probably put on a decent version of this show with no funding at all! But money always helps, so here are some ways we can pay to make the show better:

Compensating top traders and prominent community members as guests, ideally 1-2 guests per episode (~$50-$100 per featured guest)
Paying an editor to condense the recordings to something more watchable/listenable (~$100 per episode)
Purchase mana to be given out as prizes to audience members for good questions/contributions (~M$5,000 per episode)
Purchase boosts/subsidies to advertise markets about the show, and inform people about what it is and when it will happen. (~M$5,000 per episode)

That brings the total estimated costs to $150-$300 per episode, and M$10,000 per episode. We are initially selling 34% of the project’s equity through the automated market maker to secure funding in time for the early episodes, and we intend to then sell additional equity to fund additional episodes after we’ve produced the first couple episodes and have a firmer idea of our budget/valuation.

We believe that the first episodes would especially benefit from a solid advertising/prize budget to draw in an audience. If we can build an initial audience, we hope it will grow organically because users will want to be there for the show to live-bet against the audience.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

We currently plan to have two recurring co-hosts, Joshua and N.C. Young, and one or two guest hosts each week from among the top traders and market creators on Manifold: bet here on who will appear!

N.C. is a PhD Student in AI who has been an active community member since the early days of Manifold. Joshua is a Civil Engineer who became active on Manifold this summer, and has since climbed the ranks to become #11 on the all-time top trader leaderboard. Several other prominent community members have also expressed interest in appearing on the show.

We don’t have any experience hosting live shows, so we’ll be learning on the job just like the hosts of the Manifold podcasts before us. We hope to immediately begin running shows, to see what works and what doesn’t. We both have nice microphones and we're in the process of learning the ins and outs of OBS, Twitch, and YouTube.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

Show fails to be entertaining enough to engage Manifold users
It is too difficult to advertise the time the show will happen to the potential audience, so not enough people show up
It is too difficult to schedule time slots where enough people are free, especially considering time zone differences
Top traders are hesitant to come on the show and share their strategies/insider info
Most users are only casual users of Manifold, and would not show up to a livestream
Technical challenges with recording/uploading/editing the show are overwhelming for hosts who have not done this before

What other funding are you or your project getting?

We’ve been told that Manifold may be able to provide us a mana budget independently of the community fund, though the details of this are not finalized.

Special Request

Aside from funding, the biggest request we have of the Manifold team is Discord Moderator permissions so that we can run the show in its own voice channel with its own chat, and that we can mute/unmute people.

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Manifold Markets

8 months ago

Final Evaluation Results

Valuations: 900, 600, 1000

Median Valuation: 900.0

Tod Waddington: I think it's a nice thing to have, even if it doesn't get much attention. This is something we could feature more prominently in future, so I think it's valuable to have them developing a routine and improving the show quality such that it's there when we want/need to take it further.

For example, if one day featured on site somewhere, it could also act as a live support/help/welcome to new users. It gives a layer of interaction that is friendship building and makes people feel more connected to manifold. It's like bottom-funnel conversion stuff and not really that important right now, but people who participate are likely to hang around on manifold a lot longer.

Rachel: No update, no change.

Austin: I'm sad that this initiative didn't continue past the end of the Community Fund -- consistently producing good content just turns out to be a hard problem. I imagine the Manifold Live also helped us with the idea to bring on Joshua as editor-in-chief for Politics, which has been going great so far.

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Manifold Markets

10 months ago

January 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 250, 300, 400, 1000, 600, 5500, 350, 1000

Weighted Median Valuation: 600

Eliza: I think the idea is cool but I haven't actually watched any of this so I don't know what to say. It's got to count for something, though. Did they add new users or encourage existing users to act in a way that will help the site grow?

cc6: I think this is a nice event, but still not that much impact because only people who are really into Manifold attend. It can also still be more interactive

Isaac King: A nice project, but doesn't seem to be engaging new people. Some general community-building aspects to this, but seems fairly minor. Mostly doesn't make people feel directly engaged, except the guests themselves. $300.

wasabipesto: I sat in on an episode of Manifold Live once and it was actually pretty fun. It's not typically my thing but I think the hosts really like what they're doing and know how to make prediction markets fun and interesting. I think having coordinated "events" like this are invaluable to keeping the site fresh, and maybe something that can go viral!

Rachel: Idk, number just feels right. There's a lot of content, but none of it super popular or high quality. Resolving a bunch of markets is nice.

David Chee: I'm including the NYE resolution call and work as part of my valuation which accounts for the majority of the value.

The calls are really really cool and are "high-value" content. But with a small audience Manifold probably wouldn't pay much for it at this point. It needs more marketing, I'd be happy to help with that if you reach out to me and keep me looped in on what you want marketed. I might suggest trying to partner with an existing podcast and see if we can provide content and they can provide an audience.

SG: No comment

Austin: The NYE stream, live bet between Marcus & Domer, and Hard Forkasts episode all seem like nice instances of providing camaraderie and solidifying bonds within the Manifold community. I’m glad that this project continues to draw in viewers from Manifold power users. I’d really love to see a more newbie-focused episode as well (eg walking someone new to Manifold through the process of betting, creating a market, etc).

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Joshua Fleming

10 months ago

Evaluators can check out our latest stream with Marcus and Domer here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2032737192

Was great to get two of the best traders of all time together, we covered a bunch of stuff and we got a bunch of audience members in the discord. Maybe our best show so far!

Older vods can also be found on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManifoldLive

We're still working on getting up the videos for the Hard Fork bets show and the New Year's Resolvathon show. The episodes were both so long that the video files are a bit unwieldy 💀. Both got a lot of attendees though, we facilitated a lot of bets between Marcus/Robert/Chris, including a $100-$900 real money bet: https://manifold.markets/Joshua/will-marcusabramovitch-win-the-1009

And on the NYE stream NC and I resolved some 300 markets by inactive creators, while other users popped in and out to help out and resolve their own markets:

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Manifold Markets

11 months ago

December 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 400, 400, 500, 1000, 100, 600

Median Valuation: 450

David Chee: These are the sort of things I would do if I had more time and was truly a "full-time community manager" as my sole role. The funding is also going to be given back into the community by compensating top traders, guests, editor's and audience members which is fantastic!

Based on one live stream I can't give it a high "this is what Manifold would have paid for what has been produced so far" number, but looking forward to this one.

James: Meta: It's hard to find information about the live shows in order to judge the impact.

Found the manifold live topic, which suggests 2 episodes have happened.

I think I remember Joshua saying about 20 people turned up for each episode.

I think it's more valuable than than the small number of viewers suggests, but that still limits impact. It probably inspired activity on markets they created or talked about. Just having a Manifold Live show at all makes Manifold sound like a more welcoming place so that's worth something too.

Currently valuing it at roughly $150 per episode + $100 for having this project exist.

SG: The episode I listened in on was fun. If the audience for this grows, it could be impactful.

Rachel: Marcus seems to think this is worth a lot, given that he set a limit order to sell at $8k. This doesn’t seem that helpful for Manifold, given that it’ll only interested people who are very bought into the Manifold community. But maybe it makes people who are kind of bought in more bought in, and helps with retention? The focus on Manifold events (as opposed to the biggest news events as reflected by Manifold) seems kind of strange as a model—do any other social media sites have this unified community thing? Basically, that doesn’t seem very helpful for Manifold to raise a series A.

I do like the live betting idea. Seems like a good way for people to learn about forecasting.

Inga Wei: Cool idea, but bearish on the potential for growth here

Austin: I’ve only been able to sit in on one of the episodes so far (with Chris J Billington), but I appreciated listening to it and would extrapolate each episode’s value to be about ~$200 each. Maybe I’m one of the people who would most appreciate learning from this show though; it doesn’t seem to be the case that Manifold live episodes produce much long-lasting value.

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