Idea from Sinclair and James’s 1:1 Dec 7th

Why polls?

• Polls have a been a long-requested feature.
• Users often create markets that would have been better made as a plain poll.
• It’s fun and low-stakes to answer polls

New idea: pay users for taking the poll

• Paid polls would be a new contract type
• The creator can put up a bounty (minimum M$50)
• Each user who answers gains M$1 immediately, until the bounty runs out
  • [d] Should creator be able to set how much each answerer receives? Might want to set a higher payout as a stronger incentive.
    • [d] If the incentive is too strong, I almost wonder whether people will start opting to just using Manifold as a polling site instead of thinking how to operationalise it as a market which could be bad.
    • [A] Yeah, I think the default should be M$10, and creators can increase the amount. M$1 is meaningless
    • [J] Today, users bet M$10 at a time by default. With an expected gain of 10%, then that would be like M$1 profit. Because it requires so little effort, the reward should be small.
    • [J] Perhaps M$2-5 could be better. But it’s also nice if all polls pay the same amount to be simple for the user.

Advantages

• It feels like it fits on Manifold because of the mana transaction
• It allows people pay for information
• It’s simple
• It’s a great user experience to get an immediate reward every time you vote
• [AP] seems like a tool user researchers/market researchers might be interested in

Misc thoughts

• [A] For a v2, think about grouping multiple polls together (ala Google Forms); often there are related questions that the poller wants to know about
  • [AP] i think linking to the next question at the end of each market description is an acceptable workaround for now
• [A] People may want to tie markets to polls (like, “which result will be more popular” or “what will be the % of respondents who like Pineapple on Pizza?”
  • Should have an hidden-results mode to make these kinds of markets more fun
  • Should be able to embed Manifold polls inside of markets, easily
    • (Perhaps just %mention to create a new poll inline?)