Derailing Is Not Failing; or, Beeminder Revenue Proportional To User Awesomeness

[zedmango]

What a great post! I agree completely, and that’s a great list of use cases. I want to go through that and make goals for each of those.

@narthur

I just want something that will encourage me to put in the activation energy of starting, but will leave me free to do as much or as little as I want beyond that

This in particular is a great one. I have a few goals in this category, and they’re super awesome for me because they’re so easy to meet. All I have to do is get started, and so I virtually never derail.

One example is my goal to do stretches for physical therapy. Yesterday I had to hurry to a presentation in the morning and I was exhausted in the evening, so I probably stretched for about 10 seconds each, which was sufficient to keep me from derailing.

If I had to do more than that, I probably wouldn’t have done anything and derailed. More revenue for beeminder, but less awesomeness.

And this brings up an important point - it’s the user who chooses the pledge and the rate (and the goal requirement), and the user should choose those to maximize awesomeness. Beeminder should help the user choose those settings to maximize awesomeness, rather than to maximize revenue.

(Example: this suggestion to automatically lower pledges after not derailing for a while - forcing this or making it a default would in my view lower pledges below motivation point, thus increasing revenue and decreasing awesomeness.)

Thoughts and experiences with big(ger) pledge Amounts?

I sometimes think that the one-way system of pledge escalation is unhelpful. If we’re trying to maximise awesomeness, or whatever, then an overly-high pledge creates some combination of stress and conservativeness of ambition. Wouldn’t it be great if my reward for staying on track for a substantial period of time was that my pledge automatically drops to the next level down?

So thinking more about this, my algebra was kind of misleading, because the only values that matter are the user’s choices for pledge and rate. There will always be values of pledge and rate for which awesomeness is low. If the user chooses poorly, then beeminder might end up getting more revenue even with low awesomeness.

@narthur

I think the thing to remember here is that your definition of awesomeness (the user pushes themselves to the point where it’s almost not sustainable), while perhaps sometimes correct, is a very isolated definition. Imposing it disregards your users’ real-life context

This exactly. My suggestion for defining awesomeness is how close are you to doing the task at the rate that’s best for your life, minus the amount you pay beeminder.

I see derailing more than once in a while as a sign that the user’s settings are not optimized for this awesomeness.