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Facebook has announced the launch of Forecast, a pilot program for a prediction market system designed to take advantage of its community to understand the progress of a given event and what kind of result it could have.
The project is called Forecast and was developed by Facebook’s NPE (New Product Experimentation) team. It aims to create a system for predicting events proposed by the community and viewing their results.
For example, a user could create an event related to the upcoming elections and anyone could participate and see the results.
For the moment the project is in beta phase, allowing to test the various functions first and see how the platform operates.
While it could be interesting as a tool, it should be noted that in this case Facebook is once again exploiting its position by taking advantage of its users to test an application, without giving them anything in return.
With such a high user base, the results it would get would also be very reliable compared to normal predictions made with algorithms external to social networks.
In short, it is also a dangerous tool.
Decentralized prediction tools
Fortunately, it is worth pointing out that in this sector, the prediction market, there are various solutions based on blockchain and thus decentralized.
For example, Augur, which will soon launch its V2 upgrade.
Moreover, there is also the PredIQt tool from Everipedia that allows users to create their own event, bet on the result and obtain a prize in crypto as a reward for guessing.
In this way, we not only have a complete decentralization, but also a profit resulting from the participation, since in this case, those who participate have a higher incentive in case they think a certain condition will come true.
In contrast, Facebook is only preparing to obtain more data, probably to use them for advertising purposes and without rewarding users in any way.