Such fascinating discussion about the auto-decaying pledges idea. I took a straw poll in a weekly beemail and put it like this:
The proposal would be that whenever you go 30 days without derailing, your pledge automatically drops a level. (For now, assume no ability to opt out of this, other than to be Beemium and be able to manually bump the pledge back up.)
CON: It seems a bit mercenary on our part to be like: “Oh, you reached your Motivation Point? Well we can’t have that, let’s put you back at the level where you’re actually willing to derail and pay us!”
PRO: First, it’s a reward for staying on track that most users will appreciate. More importantly, when the pledge is scary high it makes you less ambitious in your goal-setting or even weaselly. Scary high pledges are, empirically, not actually awesomeness-maximizing.
Here are the results of that:
- 20 people said “fine by me”
- 28 people said “that would definitely help me”
- 19 people said “I have mixed feelings but overall it would probably help me”
- 11 people said “I have mixed feelings but overall it would not help me”
- 3 people said “i count on scary high pledges”
And a couple people pointed out the bias in the poll, like omitting an option for “that would definitely not help me, for reasons other than counting on scary high pledges”.
But overall I was surprised by how much demand there is for this! The arguments against it though are really good, so I don’t think we’d do this without at least making it very easy to opt out of.
Let me try one more poll here:
- definitely add an auto-decaying pledges option! it’s worth the added complexity of making the user make that choice.
- ok, it’s not that big of a deal to do this manually or just stick with low pledge caps.