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.

We’re not exactly sure what the show will look like, but If there is a Manifold Live Show on Discord/Twitch/YouTube, what reoccurring segments will it include? has all our ideas and their odds of being included.

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

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 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

We’ll run a poll in the Manifold Discord to find out what time would be best, talk to potential guests, schedule a show, and have fun discussing markets with you all!

After the show we’ll make a recording available on YouTube, 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:

• Purchase mana to be given out as prizes to audience members for good questions/contributions ($50-$100 per week)

• Purchase boosts/subsidies to advertise markets about the show, and inform people about what it is and when it will happen. ($50-$100 per week)

• Compensating top traders and prominent community members as guests, ideally 1-2 guests per episode ($50-$200 per week)

• Paying an editor to condense the recordings to something more watchable/listenable (~$100 per week)

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 an 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 #12 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 this month, to see what works and what doesn’t.

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 live stream

• 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?

None.

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.