This doesn't use real money? Just worthless "points"?<p>If it doesn't use real money the predictions will be garbage.<p>"Why do you have to use real money?"<p><i>Prediction markets work best when players have some stake, however small, in the outcome. With play money, many players take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take or don’t attend to their holdings as carefully. Such markets may therefore have less research value than real money ones. Besides, we think real money is fun too.</i><p><a href="https://www.predictit.org/support/faq" rel="nofollow">https://www.predictit.org/support/faq</a>
Hi HN, I helped build Forecast. We're a small team within Facebook's New Product Experimentation group. We think prediction markets have the potential to create structured conversation spaces, to drive constructive discussion about what might happen in the world in a time when that's pretty hard to find. Please give the product a try and let us know if you have feedback!
I'll join the crowd and say, if this doesn't use real money, it's essentially worthless.<p>Even if people value a "reputation" the way they want HN or Reddit karma... people's behavior is ultimately extremely different. They make wilder bets "just for fun", because the rewards are highly asymmetrical: everybody cares if you're top of the leaderboard, nobody cares if you're in the bottom 95%, so the rational strategy is to make wild improbable bets and hope you get lucky, because there's lots of upside if you win and zero downside if you don't. (Or create 1,000+ different accounts to cover every combination of outcomes, and only publicly claim ownership of the one that wins the most.) All of this necessarily "pollutes" predictions making them ultimately worthless.<p>Prediction markets <i>have to use real money people care about not losing</i>. There is simply <i>no way</i> around that principle.<p>Poker players are well aware of this: advice on learning poker stresses how important it is to play for money as opposed to "fake money", because you and the other players will all play differently. (Play money is only when you're learning/practicing the basic mechanics of the game.)<p>Now of course, prediction markets have the unfortunate necessary side effect of people making money off of morally abhorrent events -- literally profiting off of a genocide or terrorist bombing -- when they successfully predict them. And a lot of people also see it as closer to gambling than investing. Which is why I can't ever imagine a large corporation like Facebook designing one -- it would be suicidal PR.
This seems like a strange thing for Facebook to build. I'm sure I'm missing some grand idea of why Facebook would make this. I just don't see how they get much out of this and how it fits into their mission.<p>Edit: I missed that this was coming out of NPE (New Product Experiments). Still I'm not sure why this would make sense for FB to run, but it's less odd knowing that it's an experiment.
Did not see this mentioned in any of the comments, but Metaculus [1] has been around for a while.<p>Do you directly compete with them? Nothing wrong in competing, I have a feeling that people are probably more _aggressive_ (in a positive sense) in their outlook when "Facebook profiles" are not on the line. Nevertheless, I think it is a great experiment.<p>I do imagine that at some point, if this product goes mainstream, journalists would start referring to these statistics for topics which really require correcting for exposure bias. For instance, exit polls. In places where Facebook penetration (or even internet penetration) is not-so-great, this will blindside decisions. Of course, this by no means will be Facebook's fault but I am curious to see how Facebook is proactively adjusting for this adverse outcome.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.metaculus.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.metaculus.com</a>
New products from Facebook are like the fruit from a tree in the yard of a witch’s house. Even if the fruit is ripe, it is cursed and you should not eat it.<p>I am interested in prediction markets however I think that it lives in Facebook is a net negative.<p>Facebook’s monetization of personal data and behavioral insights disrupts the potential value of even trying a new product.
This doesn't appear to be a prediction market at all. There's no price signal or equivalent constrained property (and no - reputation isn't the same: You can't "stake $X of my reputation on this precise prediction").<p>It seems to be more like a clone of the Good Judgement Project.<p>Edit: Apparently there are shares. I can't tell because I'm not in the US/Canada and they don't appear mentioned anywhere.
I have a small feature request after using this product.<p>When showing how many points another user has, such as next to a comment they made, it would be better to show their entire net worth of points (if they sold everything how many points would they have) instead of their available to spend points. I’m interested in knowing how successful their previous predictions have been, not in how much liquid capital they have.
What I find most interesting is the system for attributing online credibility to both experts and non-experts by history of prediction performance.<p>Prediction markets also typically use money to incentive people not to make garbage bets, but by having web credibility be the stakes, the conversation of bad incentives for bad events is a little more distant.
So this is fortune teller gambling? Like people are trading and betting on people's predictions?<p>Facebook's version of betting on horseraces and other sporting events?<p>Am I wrong? I'm not sure exactly what this is other than you're trading in people's predictions.<p>Which pretty much sounds like when you go down to a bar and place bets on a boxing match or something....except with everything and it's run by facebook.<p>Like this sounds like a marketplace for people to put odds on everything then other people come place bets and it's all run by facebook.<p>Did I miss something here or interpret this wrong??<p>This seems ridiculous...it should be called gambling on global affairs by facebook..
Very cool! A startup I founded made the same product last year with real money, but we gave up because gambling is super illegal.<p><a href="https://hunches.app/posts/2020-dem-nominee" rel="nofollow">https://hunches.app/posts/2020-dem-nominee</a>
I suspect this is as much about profiling users (who will normally predict the outcome they subconsciously favour) than it is about effective predictions.
For a primer on prediction markets, I did a blog post a few months back [0]<p>[0]: <a href="https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/06/the-wisdom-of-rationals/" rel="nofollow">https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/06/the-wisdom-of-rationa...</a>
How does this compare to Smarkets? [0] or PredictIt?<p>[0] <a href="https://smarkets.com" rel="nofollow">https://smarkets.com</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.predictit.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.predictit.org/</a>
An exciting day to launch a new prediction market, when Trump announces he's caught Covid and Betfair has to suspend their presidential election odds market....