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homunq comments on Anti-akrasia tool: like stickK.com for data nerds - Less Wrong
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Comments (88)
Isn't it better if we blow the money on cocaine and hookers, to maximize the pain of giving it to us? :) (Seriously though, this is highly valuable feedback; really appreciate it!)
StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people's commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause, but here's why we think it could make more sense in our case:
The exponential fee schedule [http://beeminder.com/money] makes a big difference. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You're starting with a small amount at risk after you've already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries.)
I think we're fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data.
As for where the money is going, well, it's still on the early side to say much about that, as you can see from these dogfood graphs:
http://beeminder.com/meta/atrisk http://beeminder.com/meta/paid
We'd love to hear more thoughts on this, like are we in fantasyland with the above rationalizations for being the beneficiary?
As to the cocaine and hookers: I know you're joking, but when I used a personal beeminder-like anti-akrasia strategy, which was 100% charity, I worried about this issue, and found that it was not a problem in practice.
I think your rationalizations for being the main beneficiary are reasonable. I do not think that they justify you being the only beneficiary.
How about this: allow people to add a "charity tip percentage" on top of their BeeMinder money. For instance, if I chose 100%, and I was due to pay $5, you'd charge me $10 and give half to charity. That way, you get the same money (except for the extra deterrent of the higher total), and I get to choose what percentage goes to charity. You also get interesting data about how much people value the idea of some of their money going to charity.
You could start with limited options for the charities - a diverse menu of a dozen good charities would have something for anyone.
I suspect I'd set my percentage somewhere in the 100-200% range. That is, of the total, I would want 50-67% to go to charity.
Once you had data on what numbers people tended to choose, you could experiment with defaults.
I suspect that this would really help you grow. You'd really rather be saying "we've helped raise $XXXX for charity" than trying not to talk about it. And since you are in a market where price is not a problem, you can afford to be somewhat generous.
ps. the "paid" graph is plenty of info for me on how you spend your money :)
pps. I admit that the idea that I'd be willing to have the money be about 50/50 between you and charity may be strongly subject to anchoring effect. Having now looked at stickk.com, I feel a tendency to want to reduce your share. It is entirely possible that you'd make more money overall with a stickk.com-like model. Above all, you need data, and you can't get data unless you somehow provide options.
This is really smart. Thanks! I'd like to get this recorded on our uservoice page: http://uservoice.beeminder.com
If you want to copy it there, by all means, otherwise I'll do so in a couple days.
Thanks again!