What if pledges were like little hot air balloons, whose level rose and fell within set limits, according to some simple algorithms, to improve your likelihood of keeping your commitments? Is this a good idea? What might those algorithms look like?
I was having that conversation in Support with a user, and with their permission here are a couple of exceprts, to get your thinking/arguing responses (and credit goes to @dreev to an earlier discussion about some of this stuff):
I started with:
as well as the existing pledge cap, have a “pledge ledge”. If your pledge ledge were, say, $10, then even if you start a goal at $0, over time (perhaps once a month) it would tick up to the next level, until it was sitting on the ledge. Similarly, if your goal had hit your goal cap of say $90, then - assuming no derails - over time it would decay back down to the ledge. So you would set the ledge at the “paying to break a commitment” level, whilst putting the cap a step or two above that, to provide a sharper incentive not to use the “pay to break” ability too often.
To which they said:
I have definitely wanted something like the pledge ledge, though I don’t really see why it’s necessary to have the pledge go up to an equilibrium point. Some kind of exponential payment schedule for breaches, but maybe the penalty decreases by $1/d until it settles back on $30 or so? Taking the “derailing it is nailing it” framing, you want a goal that’s hard enough and that you care about enough, so that you get stung occasionally but you’re generally succeeding, and the penalties get really stiff when you have sustained breaches.
What do you think - is this a good idea, or a terrible idea, and if it’s good, what might work best?
