I got 50ish replies to the monthly beemail and wanted to summarize the feedback and open it up for more discussion.
(Click to expand the full text of the beemail in case you missed it)
This is the monthly beemail – the default frequency if you never opted to get these less or more often. Which means a lot of you created an account years ago out of morbid curiosity and don’t remember what Beeminder is. Oof! So as a reminder: Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth where you keep all your datapoints on the right side of a bright red line on a graph or we literally take your money. So motivating!
But it garners four canonical dismissive reactions from those first hearing about it:
- “That’s [evil] genius, I would lose so much money lol”
- “Why wouldn’t you just lie?”
- “Beeminder’s incentives are perverse and they’ll end up sending you Twinkies to sabotage you!”
- “Isn’t positive reinforcement better?”
STRAW POLL! Let me ask you, monthly beemail subscriber who may have fallen off the Beeminder wagon, or never gotten on: Which of those was the biggest hurdle for you? Hit reply to this very email with a number, 1-4!
We figure #1 is knee-jerk dismissal because the concept is so bizarre at first blush. You probably wouldn’t have signed up if that one was you.
The second there’s tons of discussion on if you google “beeminder cheating”. My favorite answers are the inherent incentive to not ruin Beeminder’s efficacy, plus autodata. Beeminder has dozens of integrations with other apps and gadgets and we keep adding more.
The third has the simple counterargument that we couldn’t have survived a decade (!) without our incentives being aligned with the success of our users. Google “beeminder perverse” for lots more discussion of that objection.
Finally, our most recent blog post at blog.beeminder.com is about why we think positive reinforcement isn’t all that. Roughly: loss aversion is powerful and common ideas for a positive-reinforcement version of Beeminder don’t work when you’re ultimately in control of your own behavior, as Beeminder assumes.
In case your answer is that Beeminder seemed too confusing or overwhelming, we’re working on that! There have been ___ User-Visible Improvements to Beeminder since you (____) signed up, and ___ UVIs since you last beeminded. The full list is at beeminder.com/changelog
(You’re getting this because you signed up for daily Beeminder emails. Cry uncle here: Beeminder )
The meat of it was listing what we’ve identified as the four canonical dismissive reactions from those first hearing about Beeminder:
- “That’s [evil] genius, I would lose so much money lol”
- “Why wouldn’t you just lie?”
- “Beeminder’s incentives are perverse and they’ll end up sending you Twinkies to sabotage you!”
- “Isn’t positive reinforcement better?”
The question was which of those was the biggest hurdle for you.
If we extend the question from “first hearing about Beeminder” to “first trying or first reading more about Beeminder” then another common one is “it’s too confusing / overwhelming / has too many usability issues” which a few people gave as a write-in response to the poll.
Without further ado, here are the poll results so far:
- “Evil genius / I’d just lose money”: 1
- “Wouldn’t you just lie?”: 17
- “Perversion!”: 1
- “Prefer positive reinforcement”: 10
- “Confusion etc”: 5
So largely it’s fear-of-cheating. Interesting! Probably we want to get the things in our “Combatting Cheating” blog post more front and center. I could start by making it a Twitter thread… voila, done.
Finally, here are some paraphrased excerpts from your responses, with occasional commentary from me [in brackets]:
- “None of those reactions. When I stopped beeminding for a while, it was because I had zero money.”
- “Did you mean to send this to me? I’m an active user!” [Yes but I see now how that was confusing!]
- “I’ve never understand how the system works. I know the theory well, but how it is applied is a mystery to me! Also I think positive reinforcement helps more, especially for those with executive function skills such as estimating how long something takes.”
- “I’d do better with (substantive/monetary) positive reinforcement, but nobody is offering as good a tool for that!” [Exactly! See blog.bmndr.co/contrapositive for more on that.]
- “I stopped using Beeminder because I started actually following through on goals without needing the reinforcement. For me, the cash incentive was very powerful as I hate spending any money.”
- “This email convinced me to give Beeminder another serious go. My answers were 1, 2, and 4.”
- “For #1, I don’t think it’s knee-jerk dismissal, just fear and lack of confidence.” [Fair!]
- “My barrier to getting started is finding reasonable, quantitative metrics for evaluating goal progress. I am a software engineer and break down tasks for work, yet for some reason I struggle to do this for myself.”
- “I lost a lot of money at first because I didn’t get that I should’ve started with smaller goals. But I tried again with something small and over time shifted my focus to inputs I could control rather than outcomes I couldn’t.” [Great case in point for blog.bmndr.co/burnout!]
- “While I still use Beeminder, the main thing stopping me from making more goals is pure inertia. Adding a new goal is a big commitment!”
- “I never felt like I had anything important enough to beemind. Thanks for the reminder that you exist!”
- “I jumped on the Beeminder wagon a few times, but I have always ended up being lazy enough to prefer paying $10 or $20, or whatever it was, than actually doing what I had committed to do, and past a certain point I stopped because it simply became a money sink. Initially it may have been due to overcommitting, but the later times I tried doing Beeminder, this still ended up happening. I think this may be because I don’t value money enough, since I’m still a student and I haven’t had to work much for it yet.” [In theory this has the elegant solution of climbing the exponential pledge schedule until you hit your Motivation Point. We’re very interested in talking about cases where that may fail!]
- “I found Beeminder’s negative reinforcement was OK as long as I never derailed, but enormously demotivating after my first derailment. I now have a homegrown spreadsheet-based system that is all about positive reinforcement. It shows streak lengths and rates-per-day and uses color for ‘yay, you did some amount of the thing’.”
- “I am a chronic procrastinator so I haven’t gotten around to setting up Beeminder yet. I guess that’s my reason.” [Oof, yes, Beeminder’s Achilles heel!]
- “All my successes with Beeminder were through autodata, and I don’t trust self-reporting.”
- “I’m scared to really go all in. I’ve got two goals so far […] and I haven’t gotten fined once. Been a few hours away from it multiple times but, yeah, I ain’t paying $5 or, more to the point, explaining to my fabulously frugal spouse why there’s a $5 charge for Beeminder. Okay, one day I will quit being a cheap bastard and sign up for a subscription.”
- “Also fear of commitment, fear that all my money would be taken unreasonably, and fear that in an emergency situation when I could not work all my money would be taken!” [I guess anyone reading this deep in the forum knows that’s extremely not the case!]
- “I probably have spent most of my life believing positive reinforcement is better, but after 8 or so years on Beeminder I definitely know that’s bunk! Beeminder finally got me on track with several goals over the years. The things that are hardest really need more serious commitment and loss aversion helps fight that.”
- “Near the end of my usage of Beeminder, I knew that lying would completely destroy the efficacy of Beeminder, but I didn’t want to lose money, so I think I may have lied (it’s been like five years, I don’t remember the specifics) and then quit Beeminder. I still think it’s a cool system, but I don’t trust myself and I’d rather not fling money away when I fail every week or lie about it.” [Poignant cautionary tale! See also “Weasel Heart-To-Heart” for how to get back on the wagon despite that.]
- “Could you give an option where the person has to redeem themselves by doing extra? [details]” [Skeptical-face, but this would be great as a separate forum thread!]
- “What keeps me coming back is the wonderful graphing of datapoints, and the multiple lines showing how my weight is trending. It was really motivating in 2018 when I managed to lose 20 lbs.”
- “My first reaction was ‘Hmm great service but I’d rather send money to a charity than to a company’. After a bit of ‘getting to know you guys’ by reading some blogs and forum posts I decided it was ok to send you money for my failures
Keep up the good work!” [Glow!] - “For me the most valuable part of Beeminder was the habit coach I found through one of the beemails. Beeminder itself stressed me out too much.”
- “I fear I will throw money away out of laziness or rebelliousness. Like, I cannot, will not, be forced to do something if I don’t feel like it at that moment. Crazy, I know.”
- “I’m a student and I can’t afford the high pledges, but the low ones don’t seem to motivate me enough.” [Is there no sweet spot? On the verge of unaffordably high and thus plenty motivating?]
- “For me personally, Beeminder only really works for small things that I can easily do; for everything else it’s just not motivating enough and I simply end up failing AND feeling guilty over it. But for those small things that I can do pretty easily it’s been incredibly helpful. For positive reinforcement I use other services like Habitica.”