This was my beemail response:
For #1 - I don’t think it’s knee-jerk dismissal, just fear and lack of confidence.
The biggest hurdle for me was “5 - how do I get this thing to work? How do I set it up? It’s so confusing and unclear and poorly documented.”
I still feel that way - the interface is counterintuitive and it has a steep learning curve, and the documentation is incomplete and out-of-date, but I perservered and figured it out for the most part. Still, there’s a lot of room for improvement there, and I wish that were a bigger focus of Beeminder UVIs, rather than adding new features.
I’m a firm believer that no UVI should count as a UVI unless 1) there are no longer any references to the old behavior in the doc or blogs, and 2) the new behavior is thoroughly documented and explained.
Re. positive reinforcement, the main issue is that there’s no funding source! It’d be really effective if you got a grant to pay you $5 every time you brushed your teeth (sort of like that article I posted on the forum about paying addicts to stay sober).
But I think Beeminder could in theory be slightly altered to make use of positive reinforcement, while keeping the benefits of loss aversion - just charge the user every week, and pay the user back every day the goal is met. That’d be even more effective.