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There'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 th

There'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.

crazygringo 6y ago
Oh I'm not disputing that people will contribute at all, in fact I'm positively sure they will. The issue is that people's contributions will be highly skewed, for the reasons I listed. Here's an analogy: imagine someone starts a separate stock market with play money, but asks everyone to invest "as if they would with real money". Do you really think that stock market will track the real stock market, even remotely? Of course not. It'll be full of wild swings, people will make decisions for entertainment, nobody will pay attention to market fundamentals, because nothing is tethering it to reality. A prediction market without real money suffers from the exact same problem. I don't think open source or internet forums are a valuable analogy here, unfortunately -- pull requests are accepted or rejected by a maintainer, Wikipedia has very strict rules on what is accepted, and misinformation on Twitter and Reddit is rampant. A prediction market attempts to provide actual objective predictions without anyone in charge, which makes it totally different.