Nigel Eccles's dashboard

Hi Derek,

For example on this page: http://www.hottweeters.com/springtime...

I click on the vote button and it registers the vote. However I had assumed that it would then take me on to the next picture (or at least offer me a button which would take me to the next picture). That is how HotorNot used to work. I means you can quickly cycle through lots of pictures.

Nigel

I am currently redesigning the question creation process and will try to make it clearer in that process when questions should suspend.

We actually ran a survey about 3 months ago and got about 500 responses. Three lucky people also won T-shirts. I had always intended to get around to publishing a summary of the results. If there is still interest I will.

Unfortunately you can't at the moment. I guess a quick fix we could do for this is to make the line color clear whenever you are ordering the outcomes?

That's a nice idea. Obviously question creators are restricted for the first 12 hours.

In general question creators don't get called on to make a call on a question unless there is a dispute.

However, I like this. We are really packed on feature development but I will add this to my good ideas list.

One challenge for us we only have a three person development team so we can't do everything we would like to. However what things are you looking for? – Nigel Eccles, on August 08, 2008 22:28

We are reviewing question creation in the next couple of weeks and this is something we are considering. – Nigel Eccles, on August 08, 2008 15:34

Up until quite recently I was all in favor of having some form of 'hold and vote' system for new question creation so that no trading occurs until it receives a sufficient number of votes. Now I am not so sure as I am concerned it might present a barrier to question creation which is the life-blood of the site. (However you could potentially make a counter argument and say that if I knew I would get feedback on my question before it went live then maybe I would be more likely to make a question). Still not sure on the right answer so I think we should make some small 'no regrets moves':
1. Introduce a forum where question creators can discuss new questions
2. Change the terminology from voiding of new questions to unpublishing of new questions
3. Streamline the question creation process

After that we should re-visit this question.

On the second question of low activity questions we are working out the details of a new automated market maker. The problem with the current market maker is that the prices aren't volatile enough on new markets (if all the early money goes on one outcome then that should significantly move the price) but they are too volatile for established markets (Obama's price shouldn't really move more than 1-2% per day). The new market maker should resolve that plus what it will mean is that new questions could start at roughly the right price without too much being handed to the first predictors. e.g. I could start it at 50% but it would only take H$200 to move it to 70%.

I like infernalmachine's idea for max market holding. Let's revisit that after we change the market maker.

Interesting and useful discussion.

Further on lemewinplees ideas. We have actually thought quite a lot about the first two questions. For the first question one feature we have talked about a lot was having a 'question sweeper'. Any question that didn't achieve a minimum level of interest within 24 hours would be unpublished (note also we are hoping to change the terminology from voided to unpublished as it is with less prejudice). We still this is a good one but we haven't got to it yet.

The second idea (having a question holding area) has a more interesting history. We actually designed something like this prior to launch (it worked a bit like www.thestandard.com) however we never had time to implement it. Since launch I've actually started to think it would become a barrier to new users becoming question creators. I've been reading a lot about Wikipedia recently. I've always been fascinated that they kept the ability for any reader to edit any page even without logging in. The reason they kept that is that they have found that is the way they first get new editors. Putting up barriers would reduce spam and vandalism but at the expense of growing the community. One thing I think we could improve is the ability for question creators to converse before creating questions. To help that we are hoping to put in message boards on the site within the next couple of weeks (which would also replace Get Satisfaction).

That is an interesting idea but might be tricky to implement. One thing we have done is linked to everyone's profile from the About Us page. That way is should be easier to keep track of all of us.

Yes, category editors can make predictions on their category provided all their predictions are public. In hiring category editors wanted to bring on the most enthusiastic users in that category. Having someone passionate about the category I believe is best for everyone.

Also, as all cat editor predictions are public all their actions can be scrutinised. We also have a clear escalation path should it be felt the rules have been broken.

Nigel

Hi Atrane,

That is our mistake, we should have responded to the flag. I'll ask Donal, who is the sports category editor, to look into it and get back to you.

Nigel

An alternative that we have been kicking around is to score questions based on the number of people who have placed predictions on them rather than the amount traded. That would reward creating interesting popular questions. These could be summed up for some sort of leaderboard.

To date our decision on whether to allow in-running questions has depended on two things (1) liquidity of the market and (2) availability of admin staff to monitor them. We closed down the non-US indice questions primarily for the second reason however it was clear they weren't nearly as liquid as the US indices.

Liquidity matters as if the market is liquid it is difficult to make quick risk-free profits. We are constantly monitoring this but at the moment there is no plans to cease indice questions. In fact we are trialling in-running sports questions. In my view both of these are very exciting.

The primary problem here is how people are rewarded for different activity (i.e. a long term prediction versus trading the Dow). Both are challenging but it does feel that the current system overly rewards short term trading. We don't want to penalise that but it would be good to have a system that recognises both more equally. Any thoughts on that?

I guess there is speculation about whether I got thrown out re the wedding anniversary question.

For the record, I didn't forget. Lesley is Scottish and therefore appreciates frugalness... :-)

We had been playing around with the idea of having a weekly competition for the best question however I just haven't had the bandwidth to think through how it should best work. We also thought about having a leaderboard of H$ wagered on questions by creator. Tom is pondering how to upgrade users profiles and that might be something we include there.

Tom is compiling these ideas at the moment as we are planning on building out profiles more in the next month. This looks like it could be a great addition.