Yes, it's definitely convenient. I guess I am a bit frustrated with PB because I thought it had tremendous potential and was very excited about using it. After using it for a while now and making more than a hundred predictions with it, the problems have worn me down and there seems little chance that it'll be improved, since they've said they'll only improve it if it's used a lot (and it doesn't get very much use because of all the problems).
The issue with not having the judgments of public options be able to be different per user is that there are lots of public predictions that include indexicals and that multiple people vote on (I've done it myself before I realized what it leads to), and there will probably continue to be plenty of those kinds of predictions, since there is no suggestion from PB that public predictions should not include indexicals or that people should avoid providing estimates on public predictions that include indexicals.
What happens is that multiple people make predictions, and then the judgment swings back and forth between Right and Wrong as different people judge it Right or Wrong for them, many of them probably thinking that they're rendering judgment for themselves and not for everybody else as well. Now, I make everything private to avoid these kinds of problems, but a site like that with most content private is much less useful than it would be if things were more public, and people could get ideas about things to make predictions on from other people and could comment on each others' predictions.
Another problem is that if, every time I see a prediction with an indexical (of which there are many) that I would like to add an estimate for, I have to create a new prediction and copy/paste the text or type it out again, then it becomes too much of a hassle -- especially given how slow everything is. I don't care how it's implemented, but I should just have to add an estimate and click a button. Anything more than that is too much work when the exact wording for the prediction I want to make already exists and I'm looking at it. Perhaps they could add another button to allow making a private estimate for that prediction, and then allow a private judgment for it that is only visible to the user as well.
And no, I didn't vote in the feedback. Requiring your users to sign up for a different account in order to provide feedback is just obnoxious.
Dude, we're trying to help on many fronts. We host OB at no charge; we developed and host LW at no charge; we wrote PB and offer it at no charge. If you tried a little harder, do you think you could come up with an explanation for why we'd use an external feedback service other than that we're obnoxious?
ETA 08:39:51 UTC: Sorry - that was overly snarky. You obviously want to be a passionate user but are being let down by our lack of time to tune and improve the site. Watch for a top level post on PB and its future coming soon.
An excellent way to improve one's skill as a rationalist is to identify one's strengths and weaknesses, and then expend effort on the things that one can most effectively improve (which are often the areas where one is weakest). This seems especially useful if one is very specific about the parts of rationality, if one describes them in detail.
In order to facilitate improving my own and others' rationality, I am posting this list of 11 core rationalist skills, thanks almost entirely to Anna Salamon.