Thanks for linking that! As a self-professed Beeminder newbie who is not a super data nerd, I have been somewhat put off by some of the jargon that’s communicated to users in the daily emails. I think I’m finding that the daily emails may not be for me!
That being said, I’m still finding Beeminder very much useful and engaging and helping me stay on track with many goals. I’m thinking of writing something up like a “Beeminder for Dummies” to help my wife and others (who are even less data-nerdy) get started with Beeminder in the simplest of terms.
That sounds amazing! Could we bribe you with premium credit to complete that writeup? Also definitely ask about any weird jargon you don’t recognize. In the case of beemails, you can just hit reply on the email itself and ask! We’re pretty serious about focusing on nerds but we don’t want to go so far as to be off-putting to non-nerds. And like I say, sooo many ways we can have more of the best of both worlds. Like deconfusing things that currently confuse nerds and non-nerds alike.
There’s something in here that looks like spreadsheets vs programming languages: both are fully general (in a Turing-complete sense), but spreadsheets make doing the “obvious” things much easier - and, in truth, some less obvious things much harder.
I hope we can steer a path to allow obvious things to be easy, whilst still allowing all (or most) things to be possible. Even the target demographic will appreciate it - not everything in life should be like solving a Rubik’s Cube! Kinda like custom goals right now, I suppose: if you want all the handrails and training wheels off, you can have it, but caveat emptor…