If you don’t want to make a pledge to do something, you should just track it in a spreadsheet or something to see your trend.
The point you raise about $5 being a big deal for you, is valid… beeminder should be able to work for those who have low finances as well as millionaires. (I imagine billionaires might need to devise different systems ! ha)
Maybe the challenge here is finding the sweet spot between a minimum pledge stakes that gives users small enough starting point, and still fits into beeminder’s profit-maximization ?
There is a big difference between a $0 and $1 pledge. An infinite amount of difference…
Question: do you think a $1 pledge level would give you what you need ? or would that still be too big amount of money ? what about 10 cents ?
Thanks so much – especially to @shanaqui – for hashing all this out. Beautifully said! And thanks so much to @tierrabluebird for voicing frustrations and then helping us think through everything. And for being so open-minded!
I’ll just add a few reactions as I catch up on everything here:
To be fair, signup might be the hardest time to convince someone to spring for premium. It’s possible that premium-focus could work if done differently, but, as we explain in the blog post, we really needed to pick one or the other, and, for all the reasons explained there and more reasons in the meantime that Nicky’s explained above, we picked pledge-focus.
In retrospect it makes a ton of sense that that was the crux for the seeming badness of replacing $0 goals with feet-wetting mode.
We used to think this! But our thinking has evolved. I’m working on a new blog post about this, which is part of a whole series of blog posts charting this evolution in our thinking. I’m calling it the “derailing is good-actually” series.
Blurbs for each of the posts in the series so far
"Bee Nice To Yourself"
(2014)
planted the seed for the rest of this list.
It's our cofounder, Bee, pointing out that treating oneself to a derailment now and then is ok.
It even helps clarify the value you have for various behaviors.
Bee asks herself, for example, "how much do I want to not go for a run right now?"
If it's less than $10, she'll run.
If it's more, she'll pay.
And if she gets up to $90 at stake and still does't want to go running, she'll re-evaluate why she's trying to get herself to run in the first place.
"Derailing Is Not Failing"
(2019)
argues that Beeminder revenue is proportiional to user-awesomeness -- that pushing yourself hard enough that you sometimes derail is great for us and great for you. You don’t know how much more you could be accomplishing unless you sometimes find your limits!
"Paying Is Not Punishment"
(2022)
is a prelude to the subsequent announcement of No-Excuses Mode and advocates for a generally less excuse-making and more results-oriented mentality with Bee
minder.
"Beeminder As Your Personal Pigouvian Tax"
(2024)
argues for a reframing from a punitive to a taxing mindset, where you treat Beeminder's stings as a behavior-shaping tax and accept that some derailments are inevitable.
You can view that tax as the cost of the service Beeminder provides: nudges or rumble strips keeping you on track.
The short version is that Beeminder’s and users’ incentives are quite aligned in the common case. If you’re not the common case, like wanting to jump straight to higher pledges or keep a pledge at $0 – you can get those in the Beemium plan.
So it’s definitely not the case that ideally we’d start people at a super high pledge so they never ever derail and it’s only for money-making reasons that we make you start lower. That would be a disaster first and foremost for users (with rare exceptions).
I know you’re mostly arguing the opposite perspective but for anyone just tuning in, paying is not punishment is our counterpoint. And, yeah, we have older posts like how Beeminder is a glutton for punishment and actually don’t dispute that the punishment framing works for some people.
Amen to this. This could also be a great argument for at least making feet-wetting mode last 30 days instead of just 7.
Sorry to only pick this tiny piece to argue with for now (and thanks for the other pushback and business strategy thoughts!) but here’s our counterargument (from the early days when StickK was the big name in commitment devices) to anti-charities: Socially Efficient Commitment Devices.
This part is really well said and I agree completely. Though maybe we should say “ultra rational about their irrationality”.
I agree that paying is not punishment. The real punishment is the feeling of not living to the standards you’ve set for yourself.
Beeminders pledges just uniquely keep that feeling in focus for me, due to the clear financial cost… which for some reason my monkey brain pays serious attention to !
It’s like saying bleeding is not punishment when you have a wound… Bleeding is certainly not punishment, it’s just something that happens when you have a wound and I believe evolutionarily we see the color red as a warning sign due to this. Derailing is more of a warning sign that you might be moving away from your standards. Side note: I’d rather bleed than do that
I must admit beeminder has been a great help for me to accept mini-failures instead of escaping and avoiding them with denial and perfectionism fantasies. Still working on growing into a more realist, high achieving mindset (and less perfectionist, yet perfect on things that dont really matter mindset, as Mark Forster says “becoming more efficient as processing trivia”) !
Apologies for taking this thread way off in the weeds and away from $0 pledges, but because it’s interesting …
Basically taken together this is saying:
anti-charities (or shredding money) derailments are bad
derailments that go charity are also bad
so the goldilocks zone/best outcome is all the derailments go to Beeminder
also derailing a lot is good (nailing it)/derailments should be viewed as pigovian taxes
I mean this in the friendliest way possible, but this seems incredibly self serving, to the point bordering on delusion. Misc thoughts:
if derailments really are pigovian taxes (which I think might make sense), then point is the punishment
who gets the money collected by pigovian taxes is an open and interesting question. To me it seems like it should go broadly (and with minimal strings attached) to the worst off people in the world, e.g. probably give directly. The view isn’t that this is your main charitable contribution, but that you have to do something with the money, and it makes more sense to go here vs anywhere else. The argument that BM should keep it is sort of like the IRS arguing they should keep real life pigovian taxes.
Since I want to make sure I’m not delusional, let me step through your points:
Technically shredding money is fine (see footnote 3 of the post) but the bigger point is just the obvious one that we don’t want to destroy value in the world, like by funding the KKK or something.
The only question then might be whether anti-charities are so motivating that they’re worth it…
Here we’re starting from the observation that for a given dollar at risk, the motivation it provides varies widely depending on who you’ll pay it to. Now flip it around and hold constant a unit of motivation. You can get that M.U. for pennies by using an anti-charity. At the other extreme you might need thousands of dollars at stake for the same M.U., if the money’s going to a cause you want to support anyway. In between is anything (like Beeminder) for which paying to it would neither feel physically painful nor give you a warm glow.
What’s the best place to be on that spectrum? Does it matter? If you were just trying to minimize cost – the world be damned – you’d go with anti-charities. If you were maximizing good in the world – money no object – you’d go with charities. But we do care about both money and the world so maybe we don’t like either of those extremes. I normally do like extremes and maybe one of those extremes is in fact compelling for you and that’s fine.
But the middle of the spectrum isn’t crazy either, right?
Here’s the post where we contrast punishment vs tax:
(I’m pretty proud of that post!)
In the case of Beeminder, this is pure pragmatics. Would it feel better to say that Beeminder takes a fraction of the derailment revenue to pay employees and keep the servers up, etc, and donates the rest to charity? Because that’s already technically true.
I think this is maybe misunderstanding what is going on here?
I think of it like this: I’ve seen a bunch of people older than me who are very unfit, to the extent that it really significantly impacts their life. If I turned into that in 10 years time, how much would I pay for a magic bean that would return me to a decent level of fitness? Let’s say it’s $10,000.
But there is no magic bean! So instead, I have to do the work now to not end up like that. Which I’m disinclined to do, because, frankly, it’s somewhere between uncomfortable and very hard (else I’m not working out hard enough).
This means I am prepared to pay someone - Beeminder in this case - to make sure I do the Hard Things. Personally, I don’t like derailing either, so it’s almost certainly going to cost me a lot less than $10K in derailments to keep these workouts going for 10 years - wild guess, it might cost me $3,000 for 10 derailments a year at $30 each. Maybe I think of derailments as punishments on my annoyed days, maybe I manage to think of them as helping me nailing it on better days. Doesn’t matter, what matters is I did the workouts because of them.
And in 10 years time, I’ve won bigly! All thanks to the Pigouvian tax imposed by Beeminder, in bringing forward the future externality of my disinclination to work out.
As Danny says, maybe I would have been prepared to take a few more derailments if the money was going to charity - maybe it would have cost me $6000. And conversely, maybe a bunch fewer if it were going to someone who says things like “win bigly!” - maybe only $600. Beeminder is in the middle there, but it’s a perfectly valid middle, with a bunch of extra features that I can’t get anywhere else.
Yeah I get pigovian taxes. I have a pigovian tax-like goal myself, where – in order to limit my phone use – I have it set up so that if I open gmail/chrome/whatsapp a combined >= 2 times on my phone, I get charged $10. Normally this is enough that I stay under the limit. Sometimes (most recently when I was on the go doing a fun thing and wanted to keep some friends updated about it via whatsapp) I happily pay the $10 for the day.
What I was trying to say is that the working mechanism behind these taxes is the cost (“punishment”). Losing the $10 is what’s getting me to the optimal amount, and I’m better off because of it, and would be even if I burned the money. Carbon taxes work by making social cost = private cost, they don’t depend on how the government spends the money they collect.
I don’t really agree that Beeminder keeping all the taxes is the most middle of the road option. It’s subjective, but you could argue burning the money is more neutral, then it’s not charity or anti charity. If you’re against destroying social value (reasonable), transfer it to a random person or random active BM user or something.
Realistically, I’m not even really against BM keeping all the pledge money. I just (A) find the messaging around it (charity/anti charity is bad, giving it to BM is the sweet spot – also, derailing is good actually and you should do it more) heavy handed (and a bit disingenuous, since it’s obviously very useful for some people to use BM in other ways too).
And (B) am annoyed it seems to be impacting the core functionality of the product (specifically short circuiting and dropping $0 goals – though I don’t care about the latter). Unless
this evolution means we can now start at whatever pledge level we want?
This is another idea from economics, i.e. consumer surplus. I agree that your magic bean is very valuable. But it’s not true that the seller of this magic bean is going to be able to get anywhere close to the $10k it’s worth to you for it. Why? Competition and the supply part of the classic supply and demand graph
Let’s take another valuable item – I have a magic box that lets me play any song ever recorded – Mozart, the Beatles, the newest Taylor Swift album whatever (weirdly not Neil Young though). This is worth a lot to me, at least $100k. Except guess what, it’s Spotify and I only have to pay $12 a month. Why can’t Spotify charge me a lifetime membership for $99k? Because there’s also Tidal, Amazon Music, and Youtube Premium, all of which also charge $12 a month, and if Spotify ever substantially raised their price I’d probably go there.
Obviously commitment contracts are more niche than music, and the graveyard of previous competitors shows BM is doing something right, but the point is I reject the idea that just because BM provides a very valuable service means it’s naturally entitled to keep all your pledges in return (and charge you for the privilege).
I think this argument is getting super convoluted and I may not be following all of it. It seems there’s a general and a specific case that are getting a bit confused here.
In general a pigovian tax is something you pay to avoid doing something you don’t want to (or make yourself do something you really want to which is the same thing really) and the arguments about who gets the money to make it most motivating for you are valid.
But specifically if Beeminder is the thing holding you to the pledge then Beeminder is perfectly entitled to the money for the service they provide. If you want to use the framework created by Beeminder you pay them for providing it, just the same as you’d pay any other business for their services.
National pigovian taxes are a different thing in that we have little choice about complying with them and the ‘but it’s for a good cause’ thing makes them more palatable to a population, whereas using Beeminder is completely optional, and besides some of our national taxes certainly go towards the upkeep of the tax system.
Let’s be clear about the actual definition of the term “pigouvian tax”—pigouvian taxes are about internalizing externalities so as to achieve economic efficiency. By definition anything which affects only oneself doesn’t have externalities, but metaphorically, you could say that you-at-different-points-in-time are kind of like different people, and do an externalities analysis like that—this is what the original Beeminder-as-a-pigouvian-tax blog post was doing. In the ice cream example given there, you-in-the-present gain the benefit of eating ice cream, and you-in-the-future pays (part of) the cost. That doesn’t mean it’s never right to eat ice cream, but if you-in-the-present has to pay a monetary cost roughly equaling the (non-monetary) cost to your future self that you are ignoring, you’ll make better decisions about how much ice cream to eat.
Note that it doesn’t matter who gets the money: the point is to align your incentives to take into account costs that you wouldn’t otherwise take into account (because they affect others, or in this case your future self), by adding an equal-sized monetary cost for (present-)you.
In the original idea of pigouvian taxation, the government keeps the money. Ultimately this then (implicitly) partially replaces other forms of taxation, as for a fixed size-of-government, if they’re getting this stream of taxes it reduces the amount of other taxes that are needed.
In the (perhaps strained) analogy, we could say that Beeminder similarly can replace subscription income with pigouvian-tax-income.
(But note, by the way, that Coase won a Nobel prize for, among other things, showing that even a perfectly targeted pigouvian tax is neither necessary nor sufficient for dealing with externality problems! Even if we take the Beeminder-as-a-pigouvian-tax metaphor 100% seriously, it doesn’t take us all the way to the conclusions we want it to. But maybe that’s a discussion for a separate thread.)
Bleeding is certainly not punishment, it’s just something that happens when you have a wound and I believe evolutionarily we see the color red as a warning sign due to this. Derailing is more of a warning sign that you might be moving away from your standards. Side note: I’d rather bleed than do that