I've been chatting with @BTE about their plan to found a competitor to Manifold. The core plan is a little differerent from the direction Manifold has gone, and seems like it could go very well or completely fail. I've been asked not to share the details.
Resolves subjectivly based on whether it overall seems to have worked out. (Resolves N/A if it's not attempted.) I won't bet.
1,000@bens hey as one of the authors of SocialPredict I want to jump in here and say thanks for checking us out. We're still working on it. However I have lost touch with BTE.
I would say it's a bit unfair to say we were not successful by, "ANY" metric when we were indeed used by Kenyon College (and St. Lawrence University). I would say for a completely open source software project that I and a few others wrote completely on the side, with no funding, using free time, that is WELL beyond 99.9999% of all open source projects that have ever existed in history.
Also, as an aside, and I know you're not accusing me of this, but I felt it important to state that I never personally intended that SocialPredict was a competitor to Manifold per se. It's an infrastructure through which others can deploy prediction markets. Perhaps someone else could use SocialPredict as a back end to create a competitor to Manifold, but that's not really my purview.
Also, point of clarification, it's not, "hosted on Github," ... the code can be found at Github. In order to host it, you have to use some sort of VPS like Digital Ocean, for which there is copious documentation on how to do so within the README.md files.
https://github.com/openpredictionmarkets/socialpredict
Again, no hard feelings, thanks for checking it out.
Edit...actually, I should not have said, "zero funding," this is not true. Actually there was around $2000 raised via Manifund, thanks to all who donated. But the majority of the software had been written by the time that money came in and we haven't done a ton of updates since that point yet.
@PatrickDelaney perhaps I was overly harsh, thanks for your kind response!
I had clicked through to this website: https://brierfoxforecast.com/
And it gave me an error (which is why I said glitchy), but I see now that it looks like it's running on the kenyon website here: https://socialpredict.kenyon.edu/markets
I do appreciate people doing open source projects like this and think it's cool!
In any case, if BTE is no longer in touch with you, who is actually supporting the project currently, I don't think that qualifies as "BTE's Plan" anymore.
It also looks like most of the YES shares in this market are held by BTE, his alt account, or someone named "Data Chef" which might be ANOTHER one of his alts? (appears to be banned as well?)
@bens I'm one of the people supporting the project and there are a couple others. Took a break over the holidays but have been plugging away solidly on non GitHub shaped stuff
My understanding of the situation so far:
The "secret plan" was to found a competitor to Manifold.
BTE launched the project SocialPredict.
SocialPredict was used by one public organization in 2024 (though limited to class participants) and privately used by a second.
The public demonstration site (found here) is currently not working (error ERR_NGROK_3200) and may have been invite-only.
The SocialPredict repository has had one commit in the last three months.
SocialPredict did not qualify as a Manifold competitor in this market.
Description: "In order to qualify as a competitor, it has to allow anyone or almost anyone to create a market, and be aiming to fill a similar niche."
At this point I think the only unknowns are what the specifics of BTE's secret plan were, and if he thinks it succeeded.
The original plan was a specific business idea. I was told the specifics, but asked not to share. Briar Fox Forecasting (later named SocialPredict) was supposed to turn into this idea, but that has not happened. I believe that idea has been mostly abandoned, and BTE and Patrick are now working on a different idea which I've also been asked to keep confidential.
BTE is telling me that this market should resolve YES, but has provided no justification for this resolution that makes sense to me. I'm thinking it should either resolve NO or N/A, depending on whether it was more like "we tried but determined this wouldn't work" vs. "we didn't bother trying this at all".
I'm still talking to him, please don't take this as definitive.
@IsaacKing of course Brian thinks it should resolve yes! Very heavily discount his opinion on this specific question.
@wasabipesto Everything you said is correct as far as I know.
Here's the repo.
https://github.com/openpredictionmarkets/socialpredict
BrierFoxForecast is a domain that I own where I have used to host SocialPredict. I abandoned NGROK for Digital Ocean for the demo site long ago.
As far as updates to the software, it has not been updated on Github but I have still been working on it, but life gets in the way.
I have had no idea what the, "confidential plan," is since this market began. I would say that's between BTE and Isaac to determine. I do feel it's necessary to defend any actions I have taken and the software I have written. BTE has not communicated to me for a while so I have no idea and can't speak to whatever, "plan," is being referred to. There could be some completely separate prediction market that I have no idea about for all I know.
@NicoDelon I don't see how I can resolve it. If it's a secret plan, I don't know the secret. @IsaacKing should resolve it.
You can learn more here: https://manifold.markets/jack/will-socialpredict-be-run-by-two-pu
BTE got banned for abusing a mana-printing exploit.