Social Markets Could Create a Business for the Person Asking the Question

Being good at questions is a different skill

In 2024, Manifold ran into a problem while designing its creator partner programme. It had assumed its most active market creators would also have plenty of its play-money currency available to fund new markets.

Some of those creators had their balances tied up in the markets they were already maintaining. Being prolific at creating questions also did not necessarily make them good traders, as David Chee explained in his account of the programme.

That distinction is worth spending some time on.

Knowing whether a company will deliver its next product on schedule is one skill. Recognising that the delivery date is the question everyone in a particular community cares about, and turning it into a market people can actually use, is another.

The first requires an edge in the answer. The second requires judgment about the question, the audience and the moment.

I think the second deserves much more attention. It gives someone a reason to create a market even when they have no intention of trading in it themselves.

What are you actually creating?

Take a hypothetical example from AI.

A lab has announced a model, and a developer community is arguing about whether it will really be open. You could turn that discussion into a market asking whether the lab will release an open-source model by the end of the month.

But what exactly would settle that question?

Does open mean downloadable weights and inference code, or does it also require permission for commercial use, modification and redistribution? And what happens if the release is announced before the deadline but the files only become available the following morning?

You can see how quickly an apparently simple question becomes several different questions. Two people can agree on everything the lab has done and still disagree about which outcome should pay.

As a creator, you have to decide what the community is actually trying to find out. You might narrow the question to whether the model weights become publicly downloadable before a specified time, or choose a specific licensing condition and state exactly how it will be checked.

These would answer different things. Choosing between them is part of the work.

This is why I think of a market question as a small specification. The title has to make sense to someone scrolling past, while the underlying rules have to remain understandable when two people have money on opposite outcomes. Polymarket's resolution guidance makes the practical distinction explicit: the rules define how the market resolves, including the source, deadline and edge cases.

Then there is timing. In this example, publishing after the weights are available would miss the uncertainty entirely; publishing months before anyone cares could leave the market without participants.

So the creator's job includes recognising the window in which the question is both unresolved and worth someone's attention.

The economics need to follow the work

There are already attempts to pay for this role. In June 2026, Limitless announced user-generated asset-price markets where creators receive a share of the trading fees their markets generate. The initial scope was specific; broader event categories were described as future expansion in the announcement.

The mechanism is straightforward. If people trade in a market with creator fee sharing, some of the fees go to the person who created it.

That is separate from taking a position and being right about the outcome. It is also separate from supplying liquidity, even if a particular platform asks the same person to do both.

Keeping those roles separate matters when we compare this with launching a memecoin. Token creators can earn trading fees too, including before a token graduates from Pump's bonding curve, according to its fee documentation. Pretending that one model pays for activity while the other only pays if the price rises would be a bad comparison.

What interests me is the kind of activity you are trying to attract.

With an event market, you can organise participation around a question with a defined ending. Once it resolves, the market has done its job. The creator can move on to another question without needing the previous one to remain interesting indefinitely.

That makes a series of markets an interesting possibility for someone who already follows a subject closely. A developer community might care about release dates, benchmark results and adoption milestones at different points in the year. The continuity could come from the creator's judgment and reputation across those questions.

The commercial test is whether enough people find that work useful to participate repeatedly.

A question can travel further than its creator

Recommendation feeds give this idea another dimension. On X, a post can be shown to people who do not follow its author, based on several interest, interaction and network signals. That is how X describes its recommendation system.

So a creator's existing audience does not have to be the limit of a question's reach.

But I would be careful about translating that into “the best question wins”. The algorithm does not owe your market distribution, and a person finding a question interesting does not mean they want to trade it.

Imagine the hypothetical model-release question reaches a large audience. Some people only want to read the replies. Others may want to participate but dislike the resolution rules, find the available price unattractive, or decide the effort of getting started is not worth it.

Each of those is a different problem. Rewriting the hook will not solve all of them.

This is also where an existing community can matter. My hypothesis is that a creator who consistently explains the rules, handles questions openly and follows through on resolution can build reasons for people to return. A recommendation might introduce the first market; the experience of participating has to earn the next one.

The Argument

The optimistic case is that market creation becomes a repeatable craft. You learn which questions your community cares about, when to publish them, how to specify them and how to bring participants back.

There is a less comfortable possibility: platforms pay for activity, creators optimise for whatever produces that activity, and the result is more financialised engagement farming.

This concern already exists inside token launch platforms. In January 2026, Alon Cohen said creator fees may have favoured low-risk coin creation over high-risk trading, as reported by The Block. The existence of a creator payment does not tell us whether the incentive improves the experience for participants.

Social markets have to answer that question too. If creating another market is rewarded more than maintaining a useful existing one, I would expect creators to respond to that incentive. If fees are the only measure of quality, a carefully resolved question and a confusing controversy can look similar in the revenue dashboard.

There is also a documented reason to take adoption seriously. In February 2025, Manifold announced the closure of its sweepstakes product, saying it had not met usage goals and was taking focus away from its core platform. An economic mechanism can make sense on paper and still fail to attract enough use.

I do not think we have the evidence to claim that creating social markets offers better typical earnings than launching tokens. To establish that, we would need comparable creator results, including launches that earned nothing, costs, subsidies and the time spent managing them.

What would make this a business?

The evidence I would want is fairly concrete: people returning to the same creator's markets, fees covering the work without permanent subsidies, and resolution that leaves participants willing to come back.

Those are the things I would want us to measure. A large volume number on one market would not answer them.

My interest in permissionless creation is that the next worthwhile question does not have to come from a central listing team. Someone close to a particular community can recognise an uncertainty that looks insignificant from the outside but matters enormously to the people involved.

They still have to turn it into something clear, tradable and worth returning to. That is substantial work, and whether it supports a business remains an open question.

But it is a different starting point for a creator: look at what your community is already trying to figure out, and ask whether you can build a market that helps them do it.