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Community Guidelines

We believe users should have autonomy over their own markets as much as possible. Our philosophy is to keep moderation to a minimum and empower users with tools to control the content that they want to see. That being said, our site is still small and inflammatory/spammy messages can have a disproportionally large effect on the quality of our site. So we hope our users strive to be excellent to one another as you can help shape the culture of our site as we grow.

<aside> 💡 Note that these are guidelines, not rules. They are not written to cover every possible situation, nor are they ironclad. Good participation in the Manifold community includes getting a sense of the prevailing norms.

</aside>

General expectations

Users strive to be excellent to one another.
Users don’t take advantage of bonuses and other free mana sources we provide.
Users don’t maliciously take advantage of ambiguity, loopholes, and technicalities, at the cost of others. This is especially true if they are the market creator.
Users report any bugs, mana hacks, and security concerns to a dev asap.
Users don’t engage in inflammatory discussion and look to evoke flame wars.

Below we have outlined a list of some examples of circumstances that could result in warnings or moderation of some kind. This is not an inclusive list, so please refer to the general expectations or ask an admin if you are unsure about something.

Account rules

Accounts impersonating someone may have their name changed. This means pretending to be someone you are not including individuals, groups, and organisations.
Creating multiple accounts (alts) is permissible under certain conditions:
- Trading bots with a Pull Request for a bot tag.
- A single pseudonymous account for making predictions you don’t wish to be tied to you.
- Any other alts created should have a clear indicator in the name or bio stating which accounts it is associated with.
Alts used for the following will be met with punishment, regardless of if you are abiding by the rules outlined above:
- Abusing the unique trader bonus by consistently betting on your own markets with multiple accounts.
- Abusing referral, signup bonuses, or daily streaks to funnel mana to your main account.
- Attempting to re-distribute bonuses to others’ accounts
- Using alt accounts as fake identities to deceive others.
- Created with the purpose to manipulate the resolution of a market (eg. “will this market get more than X traders?”).
- Leveraging balances of multiple accounts to boost an account up the profit leaderboard.
  - Holding positions which are then traded off to another account
  - Making trades with multiple accounts on the same market to manipulate the price/odds an account can buy in for.
  - Any other action that could benefit the profit of an account that involves a second.
Usernames violating the content guidelines will be changed to a different name until the user changes it to something appropriate.
NSFW profile pictures showing nudity or extreme violence will be changed to a default image until the user changes it to something appropriate.

Resolving markets

We expect market creators to decide on the correct resolution and resolve their markets accordingly.

Once resolution criteria are met users are expected to resolve their market promptly.
Market creators typically have the final say on what the resolution is, even if it is inaccurate.
- However, be warned you may be tagged with a warning next to your name: “This creator has a track record of resolving their markets incorrectly.”
- Manifold reserves the right to re-resolve markets to N/A if we believe they were resolved fraudulently, including markets resolved prior to this policy coming into effect. A fraudulently resolved market is not merely an incorrectly resolved market, but one designed to benefit the market creator (or associated users) by intentionally tricking or deceiving users
If a user who has been tagged with a warning badge attempts to evade it by creating new accounts to misresolve markets on, then Manifold Markets may ban them.
If clear resolution criteria are met and someone has commented to notify the creator, 10 days after the comment admin may step in and resolve markets on the creator’s behalf if they are unresponsive. This may be faster if there is evidence the creator has stopped using the site.
- Markets will be added to the please resolve group and receive an @ comment to the author. For very large markets we may send an additional personal email reminder.
- Note: We won’t be able to send a personal email reminder or manually resolve every unresolved market. But we will prioritise those which have a large amount of mana invested or those requested in Discord.
Manifold reserves the right to re-resolve markets to N/A if we believe they were resolved fraudulently, including markets resolved prior to this policy coming into effect. A fraudulently resolved market is not merely an incorrectly resolved market, but one designed to benefit the market creator (or associated users) by intentionally tricking or deceiving users.
Manifold also reserves the right to intervene in any market that is part of an official Manifold-hosted tournament or event and correct any misresolutions.

Types of markets subject to delisting

Delisted markets do not show up on the home page, but can still be found through the search bar, profile pages, and groups. Users can choose to delist a market during the creation process.

Admins may choose to delist a market for the reasons below. We intend to use this sparingly. We won’t always delist the types of markets below, it will be a relatively subjective process. Upon doing so we will inform the creator in the comments of the reason and any actions they can take for it to be relisted. We don’t intend to shadowban anyone’s content.

Markets containing images, videos, or links of sexually graphic content or significant violence (including death).
Markets that are hateful in nature including those that discriminate based on race, gender, sex, or disability status.
Markets that clearly encourage and could directly lead to terrorism or abuse.
Markets with acceptable content which we nonetheless don’t want on the front page for one of the following reasons:
- A large quantity of related markets.
  - eg. the Fantasy football tournament markets.
- Markets with titles containing spoilers.
- Markets only about their own activity.
  - e.g. “Will this market get more up-votes than down-votes?”
- Markets designed to to exploit the manifold codebase
Non-predictive markets.

Types of content subject to N/A or deletion

Users who post this type of content may be banned from posting content. They may also have their mana balance partially or fully reduced if related to fraud.

Markets that attempt to systematically harvest and/or redistribute bonuses given out by Manifold.
Markets designed to defraud users.
- This includes markets that say in the title or description that they will resolve inaccurately
Content that is illegal in the US.
Markets about mass trading/commenting (eg. will this market have 10,000 trades) that could lead to substantial server costs.
Markets and comments revealing people’s personal private information.
Sexual content involving minors.
Sexual exploitation, blackmail, revenge porn etc.
Spam
- Repeated commenting of unrelated topics to the market and discussion.
- Posting low-effort or promotional markets.
Markets and comments that are made with malicious intent to harass an individual or specific group of people, particularly those who are users on Manifold.
Media showing self-harm or suicide.
Markets promoting or incentivizing criminal acts.
Markets encouraging or incentivizing users to trade, comment, like, or post content indiscriminately
Markets that are created with the primary intention of abusing the unique trader bonus. Such as:
- markets that state they will resolve a certain way and cap the amount any individual can bet.

Insider trading

Unlike many other places, Manifold encourages you to make markets more accurate by trading based on private information you might have. (This is sometimes referred to as “insider trading”). As long as you didn’t have some other duty to keep the information private, such as:

duty to your company,
duty to the person who told you this information, or
a public commitment made on the market,

the Manifold community welcomes insider trades. Caveat emptor!

Aside: Insider trading is not about fairness, but about theft

Keep in mind…

Offenders to the above guidelines may receive a warning, mana fine, partial ban, or complete ban.
Manifold Markets reserves the right to unlist or delete any comments, markets, groups or accounts we see fit.
These guidelines are subject to change as our site and community develop. You can view changes made here.
You can see our ban log here: https://manifold.markets/post/ban-log (not really kept up to date).

Introduction

Account rules

Resolving markets

Types of markets subject to delisting

Types of content subject to deletion