[adapted from a daily beemail a few months ago] We’ve argued before that Beeminder’s incentives are not at all as perverse as they seem. If Beeminder didn’t help you succeed at your goals then you’d stop using it. We’d have to be very myopic (and certainly wouldn’t have survived 7 (!) years) to want to make people more likely to fail. Still, it would seem too convenient to be true if maximizing Beeminder revenue and maximizing user awesomeness were always entirely identical. Well,...| Beeminder Forum
People often complain about Beeminder’s perverse incentives. We started to address that at the end of our recent blog post comparing ourselves to GymPact: It seems that from the perspective of those paying us, Beeminder is providing a ton of value and a ton of motivation and the occasional cost of derailment...| blog.beeminder.com
One of the main things we’re working on right now is making Beeminder more comprehensible to newbees. We’ve even hired a web designer, Josh Pitzalis, to help us with a big redesign. Writing blog posts explaining (sometimes obscure) things about Beeminder is very much not furthering that objective. But...| blog.beeminder.com