10 ms·
Facebook Prediction Market Launches in US and Canada
- cma 6y agoJust one incentivizing assassinations and terrorist attacks scandal away from being pulled.
- nl 6y agoNote to the downvoters: This is one of the reasons why betting on elections is illegal in the US: https://www.legalsportsreport.com/37949/2020-presidential-election-betting-us/ https://www.legalsportsreport.com/37949/2020-presidential-el... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=122622&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=122622&page=1
- cma 6y agoAnd why the DARPA-funded prediction markets were scrapped: https://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/terror.market/ https://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/terror.market/
- Kronopath 6y agoThey have rules against questions based on a specific person’s death/injury, and all questions are vetted by the team before going live.
- cma 6y agoSo they enforce requiring at least one level of indirection, or is it more sophisticated than that?
- almost_usual 6y agoWonder if NPE has ran an experiment where they deleted Facebook.
- 0_____0 6y agoIf this becomes a widely used or referenced tool, I wonder if it'll result in self-fulfilling prophecies.
- emerged 6y agoIt's a foot in the door for online voting. Mediated by a corporation. In case big tech wasn't distopian enough already.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AdieuToLogic 6y agoAs horrid as Facebook's intent typically is, and this offering certainly qualifies as such IMHO, "crowdsourced predictions and collective insights" has nothing to do with online voting.
- obilgic 6y agoWhat is in it for the FB here?
- jrpt 6y agoEventually they could make money by running the market. Also, it is a form of engagement for Facebook users, which is valuable in itself. It came from the New Product Experimentation team.
- astrea 6y agoThis is essentially an interactive survey. I'm sure they can use the insights to drive marketing initiatives for themselves and advertising clients
- threatofrain 6y agoWhat I find most interesting is the system for attributing online credibility to both experts and non-experts by history of prediction performance. Prediction markets also typically use money to incentive people not to make garbage bets, but by having web credibility be the stakes, the conversation of bad incentives for bad events is a little more distant.
- chillacy 6y agoThis is what I find most exciting, ever since I ran across the story of Superforecasters, who supposedly develop techniques to narrow down the probabilities of specific future events within very accurate bounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_Science_of_Prediction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_... A lot of work has to be done on overcoming cognitive biases and accounting for black swan events in order to attain high level performance.
- hogFeast 6y agoThe point of black swan events is that you can't account for them. Prediction is irrelevant because you cannot compute the probability of an event that has never occurred before. That is why you care about robustness, prediction is inherently fragile.
- chillacy 6y agoI have read most of Taleb's books and I'm aware of his objections (and public beef with Tetlock). Nonetheless, empirically some people are better than others at the task of assigning probabilities to events (as insanely hard as it is!) at a level above random, and it's a learnable skill that gets better with more people. https://commoncog.com/blog/forecasting-under-uncertainty/ https://commoncog.com/blog/forecasting-under-uncertainty/
- hogFeast 6y agoYep, I worked in finance for years (investing capital) and I have bet on sports profitably for years. My point was actually nothing to do with superforecasting but superforecasting is obvious bullshit. Probabilities aren't computable in any consistent way, and the nature of these events mean that it is often very difficult to work out if someone's track record is actually real (example: the sample size you need for events that occur infrequently is, in practice, much larger than the sample size you need for events that occur more frequently). In the real world, all that matters is information. The idea that there is a group of some super-smart genius forecasters is a rather common mistake of academics...in the real world, the issue is not having information (i.e. the outcome of a vote is not a random event, that is why investment banks/hedge funds pay politicians for information). Btw, I think philosophers in the late 18th century understood this...suggesting that you can sit in your ivory tower and just reason through all these things should seem ludicrous. Also, you cannot predict black swans. If you think you can, you don't understand what black swan is. The point of a black swan is that it is unpredictable because it has never occurred before.
- grawprog 6y agoSo this is fortune teller gambling? Like people are trading and betting on people's predictions? Facebook's version of betting on horseraces and other sporting events? Am I wrong? I'm not sure exactly what this is other than you're trading in people's predictions. Which pretty much sounds like when you go down to a bar and place bets on a boxing match or something....except with everything and it's run by facebook. Like this sounds like a marketplace for people to put odds on everything then other people come place bets and it's all run by facebook. Did I miss something here or interpret this wrong?? This seems ridiculous...it should be called gambling on global affairs by facebook..
- tantalor 6y agoPrediction markets are nothing new. A popular one is PredictIt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PredictIt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PredictIt
- grawprog 6y agoYeah I know...I gave examples of some in my comment...I know what a prediction market is... But in the end...call it what you want...it's gambling..
- tantalor 6y agoSure it's gambling but more like poker than roulette. A skilled player can make tons of money by exploiting mispriced contracts.
- grawprog 6y agoNothing wrong with gambling per se...something seems wrong with facebook running what is essentially a global gambling system to me though... >skilled player can make tons of money by exploiting mispriced contracts Except, unlike in most poker hands, those have far reaching global consequences
- 6y ago
- tantalor 6y agoThis doesn't use real money? Just worthless "points"? If it doesn't use real money the predictions will be garbage. "Why do you have to use real money?" Prediction markets work best when players have some stake, however small, in the outcome. With play money, many players take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take or don’t attend to their holdings as carefully. Such markets may therefore have less research value than real money ones. Besides, we think real money is fun too. https://www.predictit.org/support/faq https://www.predictit.org/support/faq
- chillacy 6y agoIt seems to use reputation instead, which might do decently with those who take it seriously. For example, the Good Judgement Project forecasting competition uses points and scores to incentivize: https://www.gjopen.com/faq https://www.gjopen.com/faq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project > Predictions are scored using Brier scores.[6] The top forecasters in GJP are "reportedly 30% better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information
- nl 6y agoThis is true, but GJP explicitly isn't a prediction market. Instead it's a specific way to make predictions. You can't bet more of your points in GJP if you are really sure about an answer, hence it isn't a prediction market.
- chillacy 6y agoYea it’s a forecasting competition but it does seem related in the way that if you were to take things seriously, step one would be to estimate the odds, step two is to buy the position that’s underpriced.
- gpm 6y agoPresuming that you have to invest points and can't go too far in debt, it means people with a better track record at predicting have more weight to their predictions. Long term it seems like this selects for participants who are correctly attempting to weigh the options, and are good at it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jameslk 6y agoThis seems like a strange thing for Facebook to build. I'm sure I'm missing some grand idea of why Facebook would make this. I just don't see how they get much out of this and how it fits into their mission. Edit: I missed that this was coming out of NPE (New Product Experiments). Still I'm not sure why this would make sense for FB to run, but it's less odd knowing that it's an experiment.
- brundolf 6y agoThe same reason Facebook marketplace makes sense: sheer force of how many users they already have available.
- dannyw 6y agoI was talking to my team recently and we realised there's 2 reasons why we use facebook these days: marketplace and events.
- j-walker 6y agoDrive engagement?
- clusterfish 6y agoPrediction markets could eventually be a lucrative industry comparable to stock exchanges. Why wouldn't a giant tech company try that out?
- ChefboyOG 6y agoI think it actually makes sense, potentially, as a way for FB to try and circumvent the publisher vs. platform debate. If they can credential experts based on some metric that isn't based on their editorial discretion, they have more grounds to call themselves a "platform." Not saying I agree, but makes sense given their position.
- currymj 6y agoeconomics and mechanism design is in the DNA of both Facebook and Google — core business of both is running auctions. that background tends to go with thinking prediction markets are cool.
- dmode 6y agoWhy do we need this exactly?
- rboyd 6y agoI would love it if a private Facebook Group could use reputation score as a gate.
- mhuffman 6y agoAll this would do is incentivize people to have multiple accounts ... one clean.
- person_of_color 6y agoThis company is pure cancer.
- taylorhughes 6y agoHi HN, I helped build Forecast. We're a small team within Facebook's New Product Experimentation group. We think prediction markets have the potential to create structured conversation spaces, to drive constructive discussion about what might happen in the world in a time when that's pretty hard to find. Please give the product a try and let us know if you have feedback!
- data_ders 6y agoIs it SOP for the NPE Team to publish to the App Store as "NPE Team", and not Facebook?
- taylorhughes 6y agoYes, separate developer account (lots of benefits, eg. no shared credentials) but our apps are all transparent about being created by Facebook Inc.
- interestica 6y agoI see nothing on the App Store page that mentions Facebook. Why the decision to launch for iOS only?
- nl 6y agoInteresting. I ran a project in this area for a few years, and saw significant issues. For example, for high-stakes predictions (eg elections) we saw significant gaming because people see it as an opportunity to move the media narrative. We've seen this in the current US Presidential Elections, with big swings in betting markets for the presidential outcome itself, without the same swings in related outcomes (eg, you see a swing in the price for "the winning president is X" without the price for "X gets above 270 electoral votes changing at all") Obviously this creates arbitrage opportunities, but the media narrative is the real issue. Have you considered this problem at all? Edit: Here's an account of manipulation of betting markets during the Obama/Romney election: https://rajivsethi.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-romney-whale.html https://rajivsethi.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-romney-whale.htm...
- jerkstate 6y agomanufacturing consensus, nice.
- nl 6y agoThis doesn't appear to be a prediction market at all. There's no price signal or equivalent constrained property (and no - reputation isn't the same: You can't "stake $X of my reputation on this precise prediction"). It seems to be more like a clone of the Good Judgement Project. Edit: Apparently there are shares. I can't tell because I'm not in the US/Canada and they don't appear mentioned anywhere.
- ianhorn 6y ago“Prediction market” is such a nice euphemism for gambling.
- crazygringo 6y agoI'll join the crowd and say, if this doesn't use real money, it's essentially worthless. Even if people value a "reputation" the way they want HN or Reddit karma... people's behavior is ultimately extremely different. They make wilder bets "just for fun", because the rewards are highly asymmetrical: everybody cares if you're top of the leaderboard, nobody cares if you're in the bottom 95%, so the rational strategy is to make wild improbable bets and hope you get lucky, because there's lots of upside if you win and zero downside if you don't. (Or create 1,000+ different accounts to cover every combination of outcomes, and only publicly claim ownership of the one that wins the most.) All of this necessarily "pollutes" predictions making them ultimately worthless. Prediction markets have to use real money people care about not losing. There is simply no way around that principle. Poker players are well aware of this: advice on learning poker stresses how important it is to play for money as opposed to "fake money", because you and the other players will all play differently. (Play money is only when you're learning/practicing the basic mechanics of the game.) Now of course, prediction markets have the unfortunate necessary side effect of people making money off of morally abhorrent events -- literally profiting off of a genocide or terrorist bombing -- when they successfully predict them. And a lot of people also see it as closer to gambling than investing. Which is why I can't ever imagine a large corporation like Facebook designing one -- it would be suicidal PR.
- carlosf 6y agoOnly trust those with skin in the game, definitely a principle to live by.
- basch 6y agoIt's an interesting way to observe who falls into what reality.
- dynamite-ready 6y agoThere's another discussion a similar kind above, but I think the Open Source community, Twitter, this place, Reddit, and even the likes of 4Chan, have proven that very able people will happily make exceptional contributions to various areas of knowledge, for a seemingly intangible incentive. What's more, with Facebook attached, this will probably be the most prominent predication market yet known... Tbh, it would have been more on brand for Twitter to do this, but it's still very cool. I think the volume and kudos associated with the scale the brand name will bring, will make this one of the more successful products of it's type, in terms of results.
- Nbox9 6y agoI have a small feature request after using this product. When showing how many points another user has, such as next to a comment they made, it would be better to show their entire net worth of points (if they sold everything how many points would they have) instead of their available to spend points. I’m interested in knowing how successful their previous predictions have been, not in how much liquid capital they have.
- taylorhughes 6y ago+1 thx
- activatedgeek 6y agoDid not see this mentioned in any of the comments, but Metaculus [1] has been around for a while. Do you directly compete with them? Nothing wrong in competing, I have a feeling that people are probably more _aggressive_ (in a positive sense) in their outlook when "Facebook profiles" are not on the line. Nevertheless, I think it is a great experiment. I do imagine that at some point, if this product goes mainstream, journalists would start referring to these statistics for topics which really require correcting for exposure bias. For instance, exit polls. In places where Facebook penetration (or even internet penetration) is not-so-great, this will blindside decisions. Of course, this by no means will be Facebook's fault but I am curious to see how Facebook is proactively adjusting for this adverse outcome. [1]: https://www.metaculus.com https://www.metaculus.com
- lacker 6y agoAn exciting day to launch a new prediction market, when Trump announces he's caught Covid and Betfair has to suspend their presidential election odds market....
- joosters 6y agoIt's odd, isn't it, many US posters here seem to think prediction markets are new and exciting, yet seem unaware of non-US sites like that Betfair, which has been hosting real-money betting markets on politics for well over a decade. Their 'next US president' market already has over £100 million matched. (And Mike Pence betting on a 999/1 -> 39/1 plunge, presumably an over-reaction to the COVID news prior to the market being suspended!)
- cryptica 6y agoI'm excited about this. It's great to see Facebook still innovating and engaging users. I can see huge potential here.
- rvz 6y agoHow does this compare to Smarkets? [0] or PredictIt? [0] https://smarkets.com https://smarkets.com [1] https://www.predictit.org/ https://www.predictit.org/
- mgraczyk 6y agoVery cool! A startup I founded made the same product last year with real money, but we gave up because gambling is super illegal. https://hunches.app/posts/2020-dem-nominee https://hunches.app/posts/2020-dem-nominee
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI have a question that I can't find the answer written anywhere. Can the data I give to this platform be used for advertisement/feed by fb?
- max_ 6y agoFor a primer on prediction markets, I did a blog post a few months back [0] [0]: https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/06/the-wisdom-of-rationals/ https://asindu.drileba.capital/2020/06/the-wisdom-of-rationa...
- tt433 6y agoAdd gambling addictions to your toolset, Mark, what could go wrong...
- bredren 6y agoNew products from Facebook are like the fruit from a tree in the yard of a witch’s house. Even if the fruit is ripe, it is cursed and you should not eat it. I am interested in prediction markets however I think that it lives in Facebook is a net negative. Facebook’s monetization of personal data and behavioral insights disrupts the potential value of even trying a new product.
- learnstats2 6y agoI suspect this is as much about profiling users (who will normally predict the outcome they subconsciously favour) than it is about effective predictions.