As I said in an update to the blog post, I’m finding this whole discussion pretty eye-opening. A lot of it seems to contradict my thesis here. I’m not sure it does as much as it seems to but it has convinced me that this is just a part of the picture and Beeminder’s power and flexibility continue to amaze me. People improve their lives in a lot of different ways with Beeminder!
I also added this (now edited a bit) in a beemail as a characterization of the debate so far:
My original thesis was that revenue was a good metric for user success. People have pointed out various ways in which it won’t be and I concede those. But I’m as convinced as ever that obvious metrics like “reached supposed goal date without derailing” are worse. Except when they’re not. So really what Beeminder needs is to learn to distinguish. Like by making open-ended goals the default so that hitting a goal end date means that the user actually meant for the goal to end. And providing guidance on dialing in the rate of the Yellow Brick Road to eliminate the common case of setting a laughably easy slope initially – often for lack of data, which Beeminder is about to provide in spades – and never getting around to changing it.