If you’re into the world of video games, streaming, or online content, you might have heard about Manifold Markets, a website where you can buy, sell, and create stocks for streamers and online creators among other things. That might sound a little strange (and a little fun, too), so in this article, we’re here to explain Manifold Markets and how people are buying and selling streamer stocks.
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What Is Manifold Markets and How Does It Work?
Manifold Markets is a virtual stock market that relies on predictive betting. Essentially, you use virtual currency (that you can refill with real money if you’d like) to ‘invest’ in ‘stocks’ where the stocks are either questions or are tied to streamers, content creators, etcetera.
To break it down, if you have a yes/no stock like “Will Trump win the election in 2024?” you can choose to buy a number of yes or no shares, and once that question resolves, depending on how much you invested and if you’re right, you’ll make or lose your virtual currency.
With variable stocks, like a stock for the popular streamer XQC, folks can also choose to buy yes/no stocks. Depending on how many people invest ‘yes’ and how many invest ‘no’ the stock will go up or down. So, if you buy a bunch of ‘yes’ XQC shares when XQC’s stock is at 50%, and then lots of other people buy yes shares in XQC and his stock rises to 60%, you’ll make virtual money if you sell your shares and vice versa.
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Variable stocks can resolve at a certain time, or they can be permanent and track the overall popularity of an idea, streamer, etcetera. Not only can you buy your own yes/no stocks, you can also sell those stocks as well, and you’ll be able to track all your bets and your larger portfolio, too. Within a stock, there’s also a comment section as well as a graph and information about the stock, including various data.
The basic idea is that Manifold Markets is a functioning virtual stock market. Of course, that means it’s fundamentally a bit silly and about having fun, but there is lots of evidence out there that proves that predictive markets and models like these can actually predict real-world events. Essentially, if enough people are investing, either yes or no, eventually the market will settle at the real probability of an event happening. That’s the hope, at least.
How Are People Using Manifold Markets?
Manifold Markets is not, really, intended to be used as a serious predictive model of any kind. It’s entertainment. Right now, the likely biggest driver of traffic to Manifold Markets comes down to streamers on the internet, particularly those in the Destiny (or DGG) community.
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Destiny and his community have a ton of different stocks, integration of Destiny’s DGG chat directly on the site, and the idea, or plan at least, is to integrate the Manifold Markets system more into Destiny’s streams and community so there’s a fun representation of how the community feels about different topics and content creators in real-time.
So, if a particular content creator comes on Destiny’s stream that, for example, makes a bunch of wild, unpopular statements, you might see chat full up with “SELL! SELL! SELL!” messages, and if someone the community likes comes on and says something the stream likes or finds entertaining, you’ll get a slew of “BUY! BUY! BUY!” messages. Accordingly, you can watch the relevant stocks on Manifold go up and down during this.
There’s even been talk in the Destiny community of incorporating stocks more formally into Destiny’s streams where, for example, folks with only a high enough stock price might be able to come on, or, at least, a certain person’s stock price (or topic) might influence how long Destiny platforms a particular idea or person.
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However, this whole thing is still relatively new, and it’s still actively being figured out, so there aren’t any long-term, formal decisions just yet about Manifold’s relevance in any streamer’s content just yet, Destiny or otherwise.
Problems With Virtual Stocks Like Manifold Markets
While a fun, 21st-century thing to exist, virtual stocks do have some problems, especially in the world of online content creation.
First and foremost, the ever-present worry comes down to virtual stocks turning into a popularity contest. Essentially, however much the stocks are dressed up as predictive bets and the like, folks argue that they’re glorified like-to-dislike ratios that can easily be manipulated by uniformed, popular sentiment or simply be trolled.
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This worry compounds the more streamers take these stocks seriously or think about incorporating them more directly in their content. For example, perhaps a streamer goes through a controversy, and at the end of it, it’s revealed the streamer in question actually didn’t do anything wrong. Nonetheless, perhaps that streamer’s stock tanks because of all the drama.
If streamers are looking to these stocks as an indication as to whether or not a certain person should be platformed or will be popular on their stream, they might choose to not bring this person on, subtly deplatforming them over what were revealed to be false allegations.
Of course, this problem can present in a large variety of ways, but the primary way to combat all of this comes down to the virtual stocks of Manifold not being taken too seriously and used, primarily, as a fun little additional feature of a particular stream.
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