By = before

That is a common use. It's not the only one. If you told me you wanted to shop at the supermarket at two tomorrow afternoon, and I told you that the supermarket would be closed by then—meaning that it would be closed overnight, with no implication of not being reopened afterwards—you would, I think, have reasonable grounds to object to this phrasing, even though it would in fact be true by the usage you're advocating here.

@Tulip Yeah, it's called a conversational implicature. Technically the store did close by then, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/Q9gAikNpu5

Really funny seeing certain people (edit: really just one person...) try to mental gymnastics their way into making "by" mean "on."

@Mana The creator already clarified that he is using it to mean "before" anyway... as that's what "by" means, especially on a betting market. Nobody creates betting markets with "by" language when they mean "on" unless they don't understand English very well.

@Mana The creator hasn't actually clarified that. The AI summarizer got confused. If you follow the source link, you'll see that the comment it cites as a clarification to that effect actually is about opening the comments section to debate on whether that's how it should be interpreted.

@Tulip Will take the L on that point, you're right that he didn't directly clarify. Seems like he wanted to though, but wanted to let the No side present arguments against resolution first.

@traders anyone object to resolving this market to Yes? I’ll open up the floor for traders to debate

1. Whether TikTok has been banned

2. Whether “by the end of 2025” means banned for any amount of time before the end of 2025

@AmmonLam oh come on it’s not banned what the market is called makes it sound different don’t switch up

@AmmonLam I would make it not resolved tbh. The clarification yesterday is completely different than the title

@RichardKnoche exactly

@AmmonLam It's obviously yes LMAO

@AmmonLam I just searched for tiktok in the google play store (in the US), and it told me it is unavailable due to legal requirements. So it is banned right now, and right now is before the end of 2025, the resolution criteria have been met. There is no ambiguity here. You must resolve it as yes.

@RiverBellamy Tiktok is still not available on the Apple App store either

@SaiVazquez Yes side seems to have more public support given the upvote/downvote count

@AmmonLam I mean, come on. The law went into effect at midnight. The servers shut down, even if they're back up now. App stores still have it banned. Trump might do something to unban it later, but that hasn't happened yet. It was banned both in theory and practice. There's no argument for no here. Similar chaos happened on Polymarket and they clarified it was obviously going yes.

@AmmonLam to me it was banned which means it “will be banned by the end of 2025” similar to how “will bitcoin reach $100k by end of 2025” does not mean on Dec 31, 2025. I hold “Yes,” but I traded purely on news, because it seemed like a “Yes” resolution was imminent.

@benmanns It was objectively banned. The same real-money market on Polymarket has already gone yes: https://polymarket.com/event/tiktok-banned-in-2025

At 10:07am EST Jan 20, 2025:

Edit for clarification: This is the Google Play Store.

Not the same title in polymarket. Another market seems to have a completely different understanding of the resolution even though it has the same title. https://manifold.markets/predyx_markets/will-tiktok-be-banned-in-the-united-w44umidk8q

@RichardKnoche That looks like an absentee market creator, not a different understanding.

Okay, after discussing it with o1 I am willing to take the L https://chatgpt.com/share/678e6be1-d4f4-8001-9936-2bb097e3e646

@AmmonLam I'm going to take the side of "it doesn't necessarily mean that", here.

Consider a phone-conversation, taking place at nine in the morning. "Can I come in for an appointment at eight this evening?" "No, I'm afraid our office will be closed by then." "Yeah, I remember you close for lunch breaks from twelve to one. But why should that rule out an appointment at eight?"

The third line in the exchange is clearly a misunderstanding of the second. 'by' doesn't reliably mean 'before'; sometimes it means 'at'. The claim being made in the second line isn't that the office will be closed before eight (with room for then reopening)—which would be trivially true due to the lunch break, and irrelevant to this appointment-booking—but rather than it will be closed at eight.

So the market-title-question is ambiguous; but that ambiguity is distinct from what other people have argued for, of definitely resolving in the YES direction. It could go either way.

We're mostly betting on how the semantics of this market will be interpreted. I'll happily exit at 95% odds at this rate, but this will only get more debate-worthy as time goes on.