Hey Ruby, appreciate your feedback. We hear you on the slider. We were going for broader appeal with the website, which is why we went with words (e.g. ‘likely’, ‘definitely’) instead of probabilities, but this definitely sacrifices both precision and accuracy. The app has a more advanced buying flow which shows the probability and the number of shares your purchasing.
In term of how this relates to Facebook overall: prediction markets are indeed a niche interest. There is, however, much broader interest in asking questions about the future, making predictions, and debating what will happen. This is the interest that we hope Forecast can help serve. We think there will ultimately be a relatively small group of people who are highly motivated to make forecasts, write detailed analyses and moderate raw submissions into forecastable questions. But if we can help a larger audience find the work that the smaller group is doing at the right moment (for example, when they are searching for information on an uncertain event), we think that could be quite impactful.
As a micro-example: because users get points when other users support their analyses, there’s a strong incentive to break news with reasoned commentary into Forecast (being first to add an update makes you more likely to get the supports*). This is still a low-volume behavior, but as the community scales, we can imagine the this content forming a feed of news** that would be valuable to a much broader audience beyond the community working to make quality forecasts.
*there’s some obvious issues with this at scale, but right now no one’s exploiting this!
Hey Ruby, appreciate your feedback. We hear you on the slider. We were going for broader appeal with the website, which is why we went with words (e.g. ‘likely’, ‘definitely’) instead of probabilities, but this definitely sacrifices both precision and accuracy. The app has a more advanced buying flow which shows the probability and the number of shares your purchasing.
In term of how this relates to Facebook overall: prediction markets are indeed a niche interest. There is, however, much broader interest in asking questions about the future, making predictions, and debating what will happen. This is the interest that we hope Forecast can help serve. We think there will ultimately be a relatively small group of people who are highly motivated to make forecasts, write detailed analyses and moderate raw submissions into forecastable questions. But if we can help a larger audience find the work that the smaller group is doing at the right moment (for example, when they are searching for information on an uncertain event), we think that could be quite impactful.
As a micro-example: because users get points when other users support their analyses, there’s a strong incentive to break news with reasoned commentary into Forecast (being first to add an update makes you more likely to get the supports*). This is still a low-volume behavior, but as the community scales, we can imagine the this content forming a feed of news** that would be valuable to a much broader audience beyond the community working to make quality forecasts.
*there’s some obvious issues with this at scale, but right now no one’s exploiting this!
**possibly this could be called a newsfeed :)