Show HN: I built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites

linkdaq.net

184 pointsthehodge85 comments

This actually would have a lot of value, if it were executed slightly differently.

Online trading markets are excellent at exposing 'insider information', but the prices have to be informed by (a) availability of stock and (b) the ability for traders to negotiate prices between themselves.

In this instance, the valuation is based on:

"...a simple formula to give each domain a daily price."

So, what does this achieve? It rewards the user(s) who can best approximate the formula, gather the requisite information and act on it. In other words, the best performers are those that can best emulate the workings of the site.

Ok, it is called "LinkDAQ" for a reason - but there is an opportunity here to build something linked to real value.

It would be better to seed initial stock values from such a formula, but then leave users to trade between them. Stocks "cash out" during [real] funding rounds, dividend payouts or difference in actual stock valuations. If you can refine the market sufficiently, you should have a reasonably informative prediction engine.

I've been a long time user of the iPredict prediction market in NZ (ipredict.co.nz) - but that's small biscuits next to InTrade, for example.

Do you think it would make sense to issue X shares for each site, and then split the shares at Y value?

And in real stock exchanges, companies issue shares of the company, so they have real value. InTrade links its share value to the likelihood of something happening - but the goals of websites/startups vary greatly, so it's difficult to set a fixed standard that way.

You might also be able to set up a market in which shares only have value because of scarcity, but I think it would be difficult to convince people to buy them in the first place, which is why starting with funny money might actually be a good move in trying to establish this sort of market.

And should sites be allowed to apply for the exchange? Do you think you could allow the companies that own these sites to sell actual shares to accredited investors using a Funders Club model?

Could do. The biggest problem with the whole thing is, you really need to link the stock price to cash, and that makes it a futures market, with all the regulation it comes with.

If it were bitcoin based tho....

If you want another way to attack the price problem, you can always emulate real markets. In this position you are the market but you are also the IPO underwriter for each stock. You should pick a certain level of stock, it can all be equal, say 1,000,000 shares for every company and use a limited supply strategy to sell stock in all 50k companies over a certain period of time, say 30 days. This would seed your market.

The in-demand stocks will rise quickly with the limited supply strategy and lesser demanded stocks will drop to be penny stocks. It'll probably be 80/20 where 80% are worth pennies.

Once you have offloaded your entire inventory now you just allow others to trade between themselves and you are done. The market will correct your approximations in short order.

If you are looking for a pricing engine to handle the limited supply strategy, send me an email. Given that this is all funny money I'll just let you use our REST API for the pricing.

Maybe the simple formula takes into account the buyers/sellers on LinkDAQ?

Hey HN, this weekend I built a stock market game based on a dataset of the top million sites (ordered by the amount of links pointing towards them)

It needs quite a bit of tweaking but that will come as I get more data, reaction so far as been great but I'd love some comments from HN :)

The base price will update once a day (on average) but I'm hoping to build something based on facebook likes and twitter tweets that affects it and we can check that a few times a day without doing affecting the endpoint servers

I think you're thinking about this a bit backwards.

In the study of e.g. prediction markets, the idea is that if the price is too low, lots of people will try to buy it. Then the price gets raised up to compensate. If the price is too high, lots of people will try to sell it, and the price gets lowered to compensate.

What all this means is that the traders don't learn info from you, you learn info from them. You shouldn't have to put any information into the prices. If you have a supply/demand matching algorithm, then the prices will give you the information.

I should've added, the prices have to be tied to some value.

So for example, what you could do is give everyone 10,000 play dollars at the start, and they can buy/sell whatever "sites" they want at the going prices. But every day (week?), there's a payout -- if you own one share of site X, and site X is #n in the rankings, you get a dividend of say 50,000 - n cents.

Then if I think that site X will be in 1000th place, I should be willing to pay up to $490.00 for a share, because that's how much I expect it to pay off for me. Something like that.

No vanilla registration? I don't really want this linked to my Facebook or Twitter account. I also didn't see what the prize for "winning" is.

I'm happy to add that but this is the first request :) the prize is a mystery prize (but I also own a sweet shop so you could take a guess ;) )

Mystery prizes are good, too! Maybe adding "mystery" in the copy somewhere would help clarify that. Or change "prize" to "surprise." In any case, it seems like a neat idea and it's well-executed for a 1-day project.

Consider this a second request ;) I don't have neither accounts, but would really like to register; it seems very interesting.

I'll make the third request in a comment since you can't see the upvotes.

And a fourth

Fourth request. Seems like a cool idea, but not cool enough for me to have to create an account on either of those two services.

In for vanilla registration. I don't have either of the two services you allow.

+1 for independent registration

I just ended up on your sweet website and now I'm purchasing too much candy. What have you done? :-( This interactive pick n mixer is way too much fun.

I would like regular registration too. I signed up with a test Facebook account I use at work - not preferable.

One benefit of not having vanilla registration is that you're more or less going to have all unique users. One could imagine gaming the system using multiple accounts.

Assuming people don't have multiple Twitter accounts.

or they login via twitter then refer the facebook account.. not that I've seen that happen already.

Having 2 or 3 twitter accounts is not a big deal for his site. Creating 10000 vanilla accounts would be. Adding that kind of anti-spam methods is a lot of work and not easy to get right.

IP throtterling. now if they create the accounts on unique IP's then you have somebody who is overly dedicated. It is when the reward is less than the effort to cheat that you have a workable system of protection. Beyond that there is no golden solution without costly verification process's.

Precisely. I'm not entirely sure how deep your site goes, but assuming it's like the actual stock market, one could potentially game the system by creating two separate accounts and making a series of investments with one, and by shorting those exact same investments on the other; One of the accounts is guaranteed to go up.

but the other goes down by the same amount... right?

Correct, but the idea is that you'd just throw away the account that goes down.

Twitter and facebook accounts are about as unique as an email address, any gaming of the system is just as easy.

Here's a fifth

6th here

Looks similar to Urladex (http://www.urladex.com), which uses the Alexa API.

I used to have a lot of fun designing my own naive trading algorithms and terminal based dashboards, so I'd love to see an API!

I'd love to talk about how I can take the factors and make a decent stock price with someone who actually knows a bit about stocks!

As of 6:30ish p.m. EST, this (http://linkdaq.net/sites/247vicodindrugstore.com) is one of the top "movers and shakers"... Can that be where the prize comes from? ;)

if you play your cards right ;)

I noticed that in the url when searching there is a parameter "?utf8=✓". I just thought the use of ✓ was a little odd, and was wondering why this choice was made.

Because it can be—UTF-8 is enabled. It's kind of cute to use a character from the extended set to indicate that.

It's the default in rails

Related idea time!

So this is really great, and for a while I've been thinking about what a stock market game for pop culture would be like. It'd serve as a great discovery tool, like searching for that penny-stock that's going to blow up, and it'd be a great way for fans and haters of particular celebrities to duke it out in the market place (think of the 50 Cent / Kanye competition, or the rabid fans of Chris Brown and those who detest him). You could gather information from across a whole host of resources (imdb, movie ticket / record sales, tabloid sites, twitter, spotify plays) to come up with predicted performance forecasts for each celebrity. Something like that would make people feel they played a direct part in a particular success story. Early "investors" would be considered more loyal fans, you could incentivize using concert tickets and schwag, etc, etc - there are lots of ways to 'gamify' it.

Sounds a bit like Fat Dog Exchange. Does anyone know what happened to that site?

Also similar to Hollywood Stock Exchange: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stock_Exchange

Hollywood Stock Exchange also holds a patent for the core principles behind prediction market games like these (http://www.google.ca/patents?id=n2sXAAAAEBAJ).

And the BBC's now defunct CelebDAQ

I tried to find out what happened to that site. Doesn't seem to be much info out there.

I made this idea for viral videos, its here: http://vvx.io - The Viral Video eXchange

You can buy a negative number of shares, resulting in you gaining ludicrous amounts of money very quickly (although my fraudulent purchases seemed to be removed after a couple of minutes.)

Yep I was emailed and tweeted this a few minutes after the first one was spotted.. that's fixed and deployed now :)

I'll look for you in the database and reset your dollars

Nice, years ago I used to enjoy playing with Blogshares. I also started coding something similar to this years ago, while I was wondering how one could make money from it. I toyed with the idea of a virtual currency which would be a share in the total real money value market, adjusting upwards and downwards based on your share performance. I think the main issue against this is that it's not like trading on a market, it's making a bet and this could probably be considered a form of gambling.

Yeah to be honest I haven't thought like that at all, if it gets popular I thought of selling a sponsor slot on the shares.. or doing some sort of promotion within the daily stock update emails..

This is fantastic! I've been considering this idea for a while - it 1) could become a legitimate way to invest in tech startups, and 2) could inform smarter investment - the best startups can get spotted faster. Great job making it!

EDIT: it is fairly easy to game it, might want to carefully pick a set of sites (news/blogs/etc.) to scrape to impose some controls?

If you can't wish for unlimited wishes, wish for unlimited genies. Or in this case, unlimited Twitter accounts earning $10,000 of funny money per account.

ask for socials? square does it..

So I'm interested but I have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook account. What do I do?

Nice site. How did you manage to get the data? what are API used?

http://www.blogshares.com has been around for years. I used to play that regularly.

I think this would make a really neat mobile game! If you're interested in building it into one, drop me a line (ashu@makegameswith.us)

Just bought $10,000 worth of Hacker News shares!

And another $5,000

Very fun and good idea :) Prize can never be too lucrative though as it would be easy and fairly cheap to game it.

I run a hack day where the main prizes are from the pound shop.. I know how to do a cheap prize ;)

Interesting concept and nice site. But, built in 24 hours? If you did actually accomplish that, props.

I've got a video I'll be uploading onto youtube of the first 12 hours coding, I'll comment with a link tomorrow as its 2am now :)

You gotta trim the string upon searches. Very good design and idea, hope it gets to be a good game.

just patched that locally, will deploy it next :)

Good way to monetize DoS attacks ;-)

Japanese characters in username doesn't seem to work when connected from a twitter account.

thanks I'll add that to the list

I think this is the closest thing I've seen to valid use of the marquee tag.

I built the same concept for viral videos. Http://vvx.io - we should talk.

Very interesting idea. Do you mind sharing what language/db was used?

Sure It's Ruby / Rails + MySQL

How did you implement order matching?

I would like to second this question. Is the implementation based on a market where users buy and sell shares from each other, over some kind of exchange, or are we buying and selling shares from the site itself?

Great idea. Look forward to having a go.

(I ask because I am writing up an exchange as a side project just for fun :)

Requires facebook or twitter login -> nonstarter

especially unfortunate timing since i deleted both my twitter and facebook accounts this evening (SELL SELL SELL!). too bad, looks like a fun site.

give me a few days and I'll have registration online :)

Would be nice if you added the ability to short...

Neat idea, great implementation. Kudos

Thanks!

Another one was alexadex iirc

would love the ability to short some sites

Your not the first person to request that, looks like I have some research to do

What about buying and selling options?

Wow! Fun!

Any hope for an app?

if the site actually gets used I'd probably just create an API and let others play..

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