[dreeves]

Hi! Beeminder cofounder here! I'm pretty excited to see all the positive comments but of course I've homed in on this negative one first. I think Beeminder is incentivized to make you fail at your goals the same way eBay sellers are incentivized to not actually send you your stuff after you pay them.

Anyway, we have a whole elaborate essay on why there's very much the opposite of a conflict of interest: https://blog.beeminder.com/defail/ (about how Beeminder revenue is proportional to induced user awesomeness)

There's a key faulty assumption that may make it seem like our incentives are more perverse than they are. Namely, it's not the case that Beeminder goals are binary things that you either succeed or fail at. They're things you make long-term graphs of, like averaging 10k steps per day or working 40 hours per week. You pay Beeminder because your overall progress is much greater with Beeminder than without it, even though the specific moments you pay are kicks in the pants when you've deviated from your commitment.

I'm definitely interested to hear if any of this is persuasive. We hear the perverse incentives thing a lot so we need to figure out how to convey our apologia much more concisely in our intro material! (And thank you for voicing it!)

[wpietri]

Again, I am perfectly willing to believe that you are the rare kind of people who can ignore the perverse incentives. But people change. Companies change. Companies get sold, sometimes to people who are only in it for maximal short term revenue. Who then run the companies right into the ground either in the usual way or the private equity way.

As somebody who's spent decades supporting the Long Now, I believe that a lot of what's wrong in our society is people incorrectly understanding their long-term incentives and focusing on the short term. And I'm happy to believe here that Beeminder's long-term incentives really do work out to be mutually beneficial when handled by you.

But there's just no way I need the mental overhead of wondering all the time whether me paying you when I fail in a given instance really conforms to the ultra-long-term, 12-dimensional-chess understanding of conflict of interest. And then if/when it does, whether I'm failing enough to give you sufficient money so that there's a balanced exchange of value. That is way too much overhead, especially for a tool I'll be using in areas where I'll be hitting my cognitive limits on the regular.

I totally believe this works for some people, maybe most of them, but for me it's a non-starter.

[dreeves]

Ah, this continues to be good feedback. Thanks for continuing to hash it out with me! I see I made it sound like there were a lot of moving parts in my argument for why our incentives aren't so perverse. I don't think that's the case! In particular, I don't think my argument relies on what kind of people we are. I mean, it relies on us not turning totally evil and myopic, but that's true of any company. If we started effectively wrongly charging you, you'd cry foul and quit.

I'm worried I'm not really grokking your underlying argument though. Maybe it just feels gross to have this kind of setup with a third party as opposed to doing it with friends. That's the kind of thing I can't argue with so if it's something like that we can leave it at that. Thanks again for helping me think through how to convey our pitch for the general non-perverseness of it in any case.