Manifold Love is back

But it's leaving Manifold

I am bringing back manifold.love

If you don’t know, manifold.love was an attempt to build a dating site that used prediction markets to matchmake. It gained a niche userbase, and a few people were able to find love, but the markets did not work that well. It was a material attempt to solve a spiritual problem. The incentive landscape in dating is complicated and emotional, and we did not find a working mechanism to model it correctly. Ultimately, Manifold didn’t see the user growth necessary to continue prioritizing manifold.love. The dating markets were removed and the project was put on hiatus about a year ago.

I am happy to say it the hiatus is now over. I’ve fixed it up, and moved everything to new infra separate from Manifold. The users, dm’s, questions and answers, everything. It works.

I am doing this under a new company I own, polylove LLC. Manifold has agreed to hand over ownership of manifold.love in exchange for 1000 sweepcash and 10% of this new company — a better deal than owning 100% of an unmaintained side project. They are entrusting their former employee Sinclair (me) with the responsibility of maintaining the site, and with the mandate to carry out a new creative vision for what a dating site could be.

Why I’m doing this

I’m gonna be honest upfront. I’m doing this partly to satisfy my own sexual and romantic needs. As a polyamorous libertarian trans-woman, I have found existing dating apps both too politically hostile and also not good at queer, poly matchmaking. I mean, it's not like the swipe-based paradigm has been a great success for straight vanilla people either. There's a lot of room for improvement. I want to create better tools to track existing exes, friends, and partners; and add space for casual, warm, platonic social interactions. kinda like church.

A more noble reason I took this on was out of a sense of responsibility to the rationalist community. I buy TracingWoodgrains' argument that Copenhagen Ethics is basically correct - when you tell people "I'm here to help" you are also saying "and I should have the power to do it". When Manifold took on the dating-network-effect of this crowd it assumed a natural monopoly. It sucks the air out of other attempts - reciprocity.io, dating bounties, centralized in-person matchmaking. None of these were widely successful, and I definitely think manifold.love was better than what came before. But I feel at least a bit of an obligation to do a great job. If we had just let manifold love be in a half-broken state forever, that definitely would not have sat well with me. For similar reasons, I want to make sure people are not locked into the manifold love ecosystem. I’d like to reinvigorate open source contributions, make it easy people to export their data, and perhaps integrate with open standards like matrix protocol or bluesky. I want to keep the codebase very lean and forkable.

Finally, there’s a strategic reason I’m doing this. It's a long story. As you may know, I left Manifold Markets in January to work on a secret new startup. I was going to build AI girlfriends. Sadly, after two weeks I decided to part ways with my cofounder. We weren't working well together. She wanted to be stealth, I wanted to build in public. She wanted to build something really good, but I wanted to build something really fast. But the tech is still a bit too early to build someone I would actually want to date, at least not anytime soon. There are lots of great AI services that solve a narrow part of companionship — confidant, therapist, assistant, erotic roleplayer — but none yet that put the pieces together.

But what about simpler ways of solving the loneliness problem? What about human-human dating. Have I ever really tried to make it work well? Has anyone? I actually hadn’t gotten the chance to work on manifold.love very much during it’s heyday — perhaps it’s time to take the wheel.

AI will change everything. In the near term, AI code makes it is easier to build a product than to get an audience. I actually think it’s ripe time for me to zoom off and build literally any software that rat/tpot/manifold community needs, at a rapid release schedule. Anyone can roll a great looking website now. It’s the connections between us that are valuable. And they will only get more valuable as the material world gets evermore solved. The end state of humanity, if we are to keep up, might look something like a hivemind core. and a periphery of amish-ish holdouts that hang out and raise their kids the old-fashioned way. I want to do my part to bring people closer together, so that one day we may get there.

Go to manifold.love today and make a profile. or join the discord to discuss the site, and especially to report any issues you run into!

goodbye, manifold