So I came up with a basic idea for implementing a betting system in beeminder and I was wondering what you guys thought of such a system. How do you think it can be improved? What kind of features do you think could be useful with such a system? Is this even a good idea to add at all? Is it an amazing idea? Why?
Basic idea: Construct a system of betting on goal completion with modification to fit the
needs of Beeminder users.
Further Description: Beeminder in its current form is excellent for mantaining long-term habits and for planned long-term goals. What itâs lacking (imo) is a way to handle things that must be done quickly and more or less spontaneously arise. You could make a goal that has a deadline for tomorrow, but this only allows for negative reinforcement. (Compare this to the positive and negative reinforcement beeminder gives for long-term goals: you get positive reinforcement from seeing your graphs and negative reinforcment from the money penalties.) Making a short-term goal provides no such positive reinforcement since the graph will only be a few data points large which (at least for me) isnât very satisfying. I think a system of betting fixes this problem, although we have to be careful in itâs design to avoid the problems it might create. These problems are mainly selection bias and cheating. I think that if we can overcome these two issues than we can come up with a system of betting which fits the needs of Beeminder userâs well.
The First Idea for the Design: Calendar based stochastic betting system with verification and limited
betting frequency.
Definition- Certificate: The picture/document/whatever that verifies that a user has completed their goal. (Like the certificate for showing a language is in NP. âI donât know how you got that done, but I can check that you actually did it!â)
Term by term unpacking of the design:
Calendar based system: Maybe a simple calendar UI that users can select a date, list the goal, and list their certificate for that cell.
Verification: A system of checking that a user actually completed their goal. Maybe three to five other users must verify the certificate a person provides at the end of the goal. If the majority report that the goal was not completed than the beeminder staff investigates the user. If the user is found to be cheating then they get banned. (IP address saved and banned)
Limited betting frequency: This is to encourage people to think of the betting system as a resource. If we only allow a few bets each month (say 2-5) then users will not try and just make money off bets. Hopefully this prevents attracting a bunch of people who donât really need it and are just using it to get a bit of extra money.
Definition -Betting Pool: The current pool of money collected from users who have failed their goal.
Stochastic: Introduce a bit of randomness into rewards by making the reward for completing a task proportional to the current âbetting poolâ. Supposedly, random positive rewards are more motivating than deterministic ones.