I agree with basically everything you say here. For me Metaculus is a good source of "wisdom of the crowds" that I often use when Poly has low volume / no markets. It's not like play money poker, where lack of risk incentivizes going all-in all the time for fun. Predictions there are good.
The one issues with play money i have is lack of incentive for being right - forecasting is incredibly difficult (90%+ of Polymarket wallets are in red and it's hardly even mainstream yet, meaning the proportion of sharp forecasters is skewed vs reality) and IMO you should be able to earn for good forecasts. And you should earn good. Metaculus has tournaments, but the winnings are too small to actually allow you to live off it.
Agree play money markets like Metaculus have a weird incentive problem. I think this has been resolved the past generally w good forecasters starting a consulting business or building something similar.
Agree there should be more sponsored (and higher sponsorship) tournaments for top forecasters
Yeah, platforms like Metaculus and Manifold need to work on their monetization. For now Metaculus has the tournaments with partners - biggest one is with Bridgewater, but the prize pool is only 25k. Looking at leaderboards it would need to go up to small millions to make it lucrative.
Manifold sells mana (not sure if anything else) and they have monthly revenue of 6k so this is clearly not scalable.
Some kind of revenue share between platforms and top forecasters could work, but the platforms would need to actually sell something... one idea could be tailored market creation for specific industries, etc. with a guarantee of certain volumes and forecasters participating. Or paid access to markets for viewers (trades would get for free contingent on volumes). Or ads, but that would hurt the UX
Agree I like the idea of like selling certain aggregated forecast data along w commentary (kinda like big good judgments forecasting line that’s like 1k/mo).
Also think there’s an opportunity for say Polymarket who has a ton of cash to acquire the something like manifold given their strong community
This was fascinating
I agree with basically everything you say here. For me Metaculus is a good source of "wisdom of the crowds" that I often use when Poly has low volume / no markets. It's not like play money poker, where lack of risk incentivizes going all-in all the time for fun. Predictions there are good.
The one issues with play money i have is lack of incentive for being right - forecasting is incredibly difficult (90%+ of Polymarket wallets are in red and it's hardly even mainstream yet, meaning the proportion of sharp forecasters is skewed vs reality) and IMO you should be able to earn for good forecasts. And you should earn good. Metaculus has tournaments, but the winnings are too small to actually allow you to live off it.
Agree play money markets like Metaculus have a weird incentive problem. I think this has been resolved the past generally w good forecasters starting a consulting business or building something similar.
Agree there should be more sponsored (and higher sponsorship) tournaments for top forecasters
Yeah, platforms like Metaculus and Manifold need to work on their monetization. For now Metaculus has the tournaments with partners - biggest one is with Bridgewater, but the prize pool is only 25k. Looking at leaderboards it would need to go up to small millions to make it lucrative.
Manifold sells mana (not sure if anything else) and they have monthly revenue of 6k so this is clearly not scalable.
Some kind of revenue share between platforms and top forecasters could work, but the platforms would need to actually sell something... one idea could be tailored market creation for specific industries, etc. with a guarantee of certain volumes and forecasters participating. Or paid access to markets for viewers (trades would get for free contingent on volumes). Or ads, but that would hurt the UX
Agree I like the idea of like selling certain aggregated forecast data along w commentary (kinda like big good judgments forecasting line that’s like 1k/mo).
Also think there’s an opportunity for say Polymarket who has a ton of cash to acquire the something like manifold given their strong community