Couple of tabs

[undyingking]

Yay, I finally got some money from Predictify. This is the site where you make wisdom-of-crowds type predictions, and if they turn out to be correct, you get a share in the money put up by whoever it was wanted to know the answer. I've so far shared in about 35 payouts, the biggest being $12.86 for predicting Clinton's % share of the vote in the Iowa caucus, and I've made a total of $41.42 (over a period of about 6 months). Which puts me 125th in the rankings -- the most successful predictor has made over $200.
I must admit that I'm highly doubtful about the business model¹, and I was wondering whether they were ever going to be able to afford to actually pay out. But they had a venture capital round to raise the money to do so. Click here if you'd like to give it a go!

In sadder news, one of my favourite webcomics, Rice Boy, has finished. I've probably talked about this before, but if you missed that, it's a fabulously strange and beautiful thing. The Wikipedia entry seems rather baffled but gives a little idea. Anyway, read it, it's great.

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1 Partly beause the "game" aspect of it is somewhat broken, and when players realize this, they stop behaving in a business-helpful way. I can go into more detail about this, if anyone's interested (don't all rush at once though).

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

The non-payoff questions aren't on average easier (I don't think), but there are so many more of them that it's simple to find plenty that are easier.

But this means I only answer a tiny proportion of the non-payoffs, and ignore many that I might think "fun". So although motivation certainly does remain, it's very narrowly targeted, and the large majority of non-payoff questions¹ will be ignored by experienced users. Maybe they have a way of spinning that to their customers.

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1 One thing I haven't mentioned is that a lot of these questions are framed in ways that make it unlikely even a skilled contestant will have much chance of getting the right answer, so I avoid them automatically. Presumably they were hoping that the standard of framing (in the sense of people framing questions of the sorts that they themselves would like to answer) would rise as users became more experienced, but this doesn't seem to be happening.