Oh, I won't ask for much this Christmas

I won't even wish for snow

I'm just gonna keep on watching

Observing this market's row

I will type comments and send it

To Manifold for reimbursement

Just to be clear, we will send sweepcash to the following users who bought YES once this market resolves such that they are made whole relative to their cost basis. This way none of you will lose any sweepcash over this market.

@10thOfficial @dominic @bubbleston @LostFutures @EmilAbraham @GammaLaser @beevoid @PH @CHRISRIVERA

If you've already exited and managed to recover some of your initial cost basis, we will send the remaining difference.

This is a one-off event. If something similar occurs in the future in a different market we may not necessarily be able to compensate everyone. Trade at your own risk and research the question and description before making any trades.

@Manifold Don't forget about @GleamingRhino!

@bagelfan Correct! Thought I had already tagged them.

@Manifold I think @beevoid is owed an apology and an unban.

@Predictor I disagree.

@bagelfan Yea, ok. Have you ever had your rights trampled or been conned? How did you feel? The guy was clearly very upset and distraught. Didn't help that there was no response to his initial complaints from the site admin. There needs to be 2 people handling this so there is cover when 1 is out of office.

@Predictor Does that give him the right to post nearly 30 spam comments on random markets, falsely accusing manifold, mods, and mattyb of stealing sweepcash and mana, and advertising Kalshi?

Note that Manifold is being very generous here by making Yes holders whole.

@bagelfan I suppose not, but he does deserve forgiveness and a second chance. I understand how emotional it can be to go through what he went through.

@Predictor beevoid was already given that second chance? they were told "stop spamming advertisements" (that is obviously against the rules), and then the next day they started doing it again. you can go pretty far with whining/complaining on manifold tbh and there won't be any action about it but banning people who spam ads after being told to stop is like, as simple as any case can be.

it is annoying to have people spam ads on your market and i would very much like the mods to ban the users who choose to do that.

@Ziddletwix I know and I get it. I also know what it's like not to have a voice to state your case. He was wronged here and felt some type of way without any support from anyone. I would call this episode of his all one incident and offer up a second chance for redemption. That's all. Just looking out for the little guy on this site, I know how it goes sometimes.

@Manifold ty kings

@Manifold This is a fair solution and well handled by @Manifold. It was an honest mistake by Matt and a lesson to us as traders to have a more critical eye.

@mods fix this bullshit now

@beevoid What a shit show. Can you tell me more about Kalshi? Do they typically have non-misleading descriptions?

This is a tangent, but Kalshi and every other prediction platform has the same problems with accidentally misleading or ambiguous questions (less often, though). E.g. they resolved a market on whether Biden would enact forgiveness for student loans NO, because of a technicality (it wasn't by executive action or legislation) - https://kalshi.com/markets/kxsdebt/student-debt-forgiveness-via-bill-or-executive-order-please-see-rules (The clarification was added to the title later)

The sweepstakes market for this question will be resolved per the title which states whether or not she will reach #1 in November.

The inaccurate context accidentally provided by the creator in the description is not relevant to the criteria. That said, while people are expected to do their own research before participating, we recognised some people were misled and will look to compensate sweepstakes yes holders who entered the market prior to clarification. To prevent this from reoccurring in the future we will probably ask creators to include any context as a pinned comment rather than as part of the description where it can be confused with the criteria.

@Manifold Is the resolution for the mana market still undecided? If not N/A, will there be any compensation for mana losses?

I think there is some case to N/A based on the questions in the description:

Will she do it again this year?

Can Mariah Carey get her 6th consecutive #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 before December?

These aren't added context but rather revisions/rewording of the question, and both are invalid given that "again" and "consecutive #1 before December" aren't possible.

@cthor Manifold doesn't manage the mana market, it's @mods and @mattyb who will decide what happens.

@Manifold this is idiotic. Just gonna move over to Kalshi.

IMO this is a good solution if and only if previous YES holders (from before the revelation that the description was wrong) are refunded.

The description being wrong is very bad for just resolving according to the title, and it's not really just "context" that's wrong, because the way the question is phrased ("Will she do it again this year?") is dependent on the assumption that it did happen before, which was wrong. And it points to a data source (Wikipedia) that, if misinterpreted as stated, would probably indicate a YES again this year.

But on the other hand we don't want the resolution to unfairly punish anyone who already bet no because they correctly thought it wouldn't be number one that early.

The fairest thing for traders is to make everyone whole - refund YES purchases made before the error was discovered, while still paying out those who had bought NO. The second best thing would be N/A, imo.

@Manifold I was a previous YES holder before clarification that sold after clarification, at a significant loss—will I still be made whole?

@jack What's wrong with an N/A resolution? This seems like the kind of situation N/A was made for. If you're going to do something other than N/A, I hope it's based on some sort of policy instead of an ad-hoc attempt to avoid making anybody angry.

"don't want the resolution to unfairly punish anyone" - I don't think it's much of a punishment to not win mana you had hoped to win. The mispricing only existed in the first place because of the inconsistent criteria, so those NO profits were in some sense unfair gains to begin with.

The main argument for paying out NO holders is that some NO holders might be upset if you don't give them a bunch of mana. If that's how things work around here, then I promise to be very upset if you don't give me some free mana tomorrow. My anger will be only marginally less justified than that of the NO holders.

@placebo_username to be clear I think it's much more important to refund YES. N/A is much better than not doing anything to refund YES

Having trades that you relied on cancelled is pretty bad too. Sometimes it's the best option. But imagine if everyone who bet YES on e.g. Trump winning got their trades cancelled because of a technicality of some sort - they would be fairly outraged too.

@jack Certainly the NO holders would prefer to be paid out instead of refunded, so in that sense it's "pretty bad" for them. You not giving me a bunch of free mana is also "pretty bad" for me, in the sense that I would like the alternative better. Ultimately, I think setting a clear future policy of what is done about ill-specified markets is much more important than what you do in this specific case.

I thought we already had a policy (N/A), but let's think about what incentives a switch to a general everybody-gets-what-they-ask-for rule would create. If you notice an ill-defined market, you should dump a bunch of mana in before reporting it, since you can be pretty sure you'll at least get your money back. Also, since ill-defined markets are positive-sum, you could make money by creating ill-defined markets and getting friends to bet on them.

I will also observe that printing more mana to make everyone happy is not a free action, since mana itself is pretty much zero-sum (at least as far as league standings go). So in this case your preferred solution basically redistributes from everyone else to the NO holders. It's probably true that this impact is diffuse enough that no one but me will bother being upset about it, though.

@GleamingRhino yeah