Final Evaluation Results

Valuations: 100, 3200, 1500, 100, 1600

Median Valuation: 1500.0

Eliza: I'm not sure exactly if this is going to take off or not, but if Manifold pays Partners for recruiting users, 50 users should be rewarded.

Tod Waddington: I have never had a response from college confidential OR the drones that run r/chanceme. This is a no-brainer example of where manifold dominates the competition in practicality, it's just difficult to reach them. cc6 has >150 referrals, and the developed /college page is fantastic. We will certainly make use of it more in future when I finally convince reddit to let me run ads again.

Rachel: I still think this is cool, but I’ve updated down a bit since engagement has been lower than I would have predicted.

James: Not sure this got much further traction.

Austin: I'm glad that cc6 has put out the app in front of other college students and recruited 50 new users for Manifold through this; beyond the engineering work which cc6 has done great at, I think getting your work out in front of other people is super important and I hope cc6 has learned a lot from marketing this!

What progress have you made since your last update?

I've managed to recruit over 50 new users to Manifold, and the College Chance Me group has a handful of markets for people to bet on.

What are your next steps?

Is there anything others could help you with?

January 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 200, 0, 1000, 3000, 400, 500, 100, 1200

Weighted Median Valuation: 500

Eliza: They made a PR but it seems like no one helped guide it to the finish line. You have to pay them something.

Isaac King: Great idea, but only a prototype so far, nothing usable. $0.

wasabipesto: I think this is a great project. It identifies people looking for high-value, specific information (how likely am I got get accepted to this college?) and tweaks the site to streamline the process for them to answer their question. I think Manifold can seem intimidating to a lot of people and niche on-ramps like this could be extremely valuable to get people using the site at large.

Rachel: I love this! The creation step looks really easy to use and understand. Possibly this is a good way to be introduced to Manifold/prediction markets, to start with a simple use case with a lot of guidance, and something Manifold could experiment more with. I do think the chanceme landing page is slightly confusing/cluttered. It might be better to, instead of showing the normal Manifold market selection button and the full market displays, just show an "ask about my chances" and a "bet on other people's chances" button. If I were new, I imagine I'd find the "choose question type" thing a bit confusing, since there's only one option shown and, as far as I would know, there would only be one option available ever.

David Chee: This is great! The only reason for the valuation is because this is something the Manifold team would have been able to put together relatively quickly.

What is the much harder thing for us to do, and therefore more valuable, would be actually getting students to try it as we are not in those circles.

SG: Most of the impact will come from getting Manifold to make further refinements and decide to promote it. The median impact of this proposal is probably 0, but there's a small chance the impact could be huge.

James: I merged the PR for this. I see 5 created college markets in the ChanceMe topic: https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=college-chance-me

That's a start. One has 21 traders.

With more promotion, I could see more impact from other students using this tool to create their college admissions markets.

We should link this page in our newsletter. Not sure what else to do for promotion. It's a shame that neither the markets nor the topic link to the page to create your own college market (https://manifold.markets/chanceme)

Austin: It is super awesome that this is now shipped and live; I think domain-specific prediction market templates are a very promising direction and I love that cc6 put in the work to skin Manifold and make it work for this specific use case. If this approach ends up working well, I could imagine being inspired to support many more kinds of landing pages and market templates on our site!

Right now, the project still has a lot of unrealized potential as it doesn’t have many users. What I’d be excited to next see is actual college applicants and other students interacting with the site, and learning about whether this form factor is good for them. Getting feedback and iterating quickly is super important for making the site understandable and usable by a wider audience!

The PR has been merged. You can now make a market at https://manifold.markets/college

What progress have you made since your last update?

I have created a PR on Github. You can see the preview here. I made a custom landing page, onboarding, and market creation template. I also created a bunch of groups that people can join relating to different ECs that they participate in, such as Swimming, Debate, and Math Competitions.

Your username is also automatically randomized when you create an account, unlike when you signup on the homepage and your username is the name associated with your Google Account.

This is not only useful for College Admissions--the flow can potentially be useful for Manifold in the future if they want to streamline the market creation process for other topics.

What are your next steps?

Get my PR approved and find users! I'll create a bounty in the college admissions group and try to get new 10-20 markets before sharing it with friends, then on subreddits and other online communities

Is there anything others could help you with?

If you're in high school, you can create a market after the PR is merged.

December 15th Evaluation Results

Valuations: 0, 0, 0, 500, 0

Median Valuation: 0

James: Not implemented yet, but promising.

SG: Not started.

Rachel: Seems like nothing’s been shipped, so valuation is easy. I am excited about this! Another attempt to find an actually useful application of prediction markets. Good that cc6 is doing user research first, because one big thing I’d be worried about is students wanting to be private about this since it can be a sensitive/stressful subject, and maybe they’d find it embarrassing to be publicly rejected or bet against for admission to a school that their friend got into. On the other hand, it can have positive effects on mood about all of this as a sort of wall of rejection.

Inga Wei: This is a niche that I think is worth trying prediction markets on!

Austin: I’m excited that cc6 is working on this, and am looking forward to seeing an early demo! I think the key will be whether the site makes it enticing enough for high schoolers to understand what the markets are and why they should go through the effort and cost of listing their application in public. In principle, a collaborative public way to talk through your application can be really cool — one of the stretch goals I would aim for would to encourage people to help each other out with their apps!

I'm really hopeful for this! College admissions are really stressful, there is an existing market for likelihood of admission, and the group of people who would even think about probabilities of college are noticeably more likely than the general population to like manifold. Further, @cc6 is positioned well to get a first set of users (and it could also separately be quite valuable to/get early users from proofniks, who already sporadically make markets like he is describing).

This looks cool! @cc6 has been a fun person to interact with in Manifold, and I love to see people working on projects that solve their own pain points (where I imagine cc6 has lots of expertise). Hooking in to the Common App APIs (which I didn't know existed) seems smart, but I'm sure they can figure out other ways to accomplish "Manifold x College Admission" if that doesn't work out.

I'm funding this most of the way, leaving room for others to express interest; if nobody does in a few days I expect to fill the rest too.