This summer, Instead of working on my will power or my habits, I decided to build something to punish me when I fail to follow through with my commitments.
Kommit is a free to use web app where you can create commitments and when you fail to stick to them, you are forced to donate to charity.
Like a true programmer, I started building Kommit without doing any research and I’ve since found out that similar apps already exist. However, in several ways I think Kommit is already nicer to use and more flexible.
Kommit has helped me reach a 112 day streak studying Korean on Duolingo, and it’s helped my partner keep a daily diary for the last 6 weeks. Hopefully it can help some HNers with their 2022 New Year’s resolutions!
PS If you don’t have anyone who can review your commitment, feel free to email me at callum@kommit.to and I’ll be happy to help :)
(Beeminder was also mentioned in a subthread reply by darrenf[2])
[0]: https://www.beeminder.com
[1]: https://www.beeminder.com/codesections/gallery
[2]: That reply read:
> Beeminder[0] is another. I particularly like that they keep a list of competitors in this space[1] - active, up and coming, dormant or dead. OP, perhaps you could think about asking Beeminder to add you to their list :)
Relevant bit:
This sounds good but we’re not into it. I mean, first, we do have plenty of positive reinforcement in the form of pretty graphs and the satisfaction of adding datapoints. You can even spin the pledges as positive — they help you quantify the value of your goals. That can be powerful information for us rationality nerds.
But why not reframe Beeminder to focus on rewards? Well, paying money up front and getting it back unless you derail is a trick — it’s equivalent to getting stung. At least for me personally, the equivalency would always be at the back of my mind and bother me.
And there are more pragmatic problems. I like having scary high pledges on some of my goals. It would feel especially unreasonable to pay up front on those. Even more pragmatically, most goals are open-ended: get 10k steps (or work 40 hours, or practice piano for half an hour or whatever) per day forever. There’s typically no particular point when it makes sense to get your money back. It would be totally inefficient to have money always flowing back and forth and would really muddy the mental accounting in terms of how much you’re paying Beeminder for the motivation it’s giving you.
Not to mention the laws and accounting involved. We’d be kind of a bank and have revenue that wouldn’t count as revenue. I assume this part would be perfectly overcomeable if we were convinced the psychology / behavioral economics were right. But, again, we are not.
Setting money aside in escrow is definitely an interesting idea, but as you say, requires quite a lot of trust. I did toy with idea of rewarding people with the punishment money from other failed commitments but it'd be quite tricky to make the rewards worthwhile, while making sure the system doesn't get gamed.
For some definition of "motivating", probably so, but I wouldn't want to take that extra stress to keep a self-motivated minor commitment.
There's the them that wants things, and the them that does things, as separate entities. The "wanter" is only briefly able to wrest control over what the "doer" does, mostly the "doer" has its own will which is not what the "wanter" wants, but something else.
Surely we're just one person. If someone wants something, it's they that want it, if someone does something, it's they that do it; but having this model of being multiple people allows them to completely disown their actions as the actions of someone else, as stuff that just happens to them, which in turn reinforces the narrative of not being in control.
I wonder how the other for-profit in this space keep their business running, considering the amount of disputes that must come from users.
For example, I know that Stripe is very strict on the disputes percent[1]...
1 - https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/measuring#:~:text=Dispute%2....
Beeminder gets zero credit card disputes because we give people a chance to contest their derailments and cancel the charge before it goes through. They have to talk to a human workerbee but we make it as easy as possible. If that doesn't happen in time and the charge goes through but the user still doesn't think it was legit for whatever reason, we refund it. No need for it to ever get disputed with the credit card company.
Tried to submit this in the app as a support ticket and also got a 403.
I thought I missed an important announcement about a new set of statewide mandated goals for 2022.
That does not differ much from my everyday life.
At least some of these models are grounded in the way your brain is structured (e.g. limbic system vs prefrontal cortex), and research into the way child’s brain develops over the years. Others provide handy frameworks to structure therapy sessions. What you choose to do with that knowledge (e.g. disowning your actions, or becoming more responsible for them) seems to be of little relevance to the models themselves.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_child 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpersonality
> Surely we're just one person.
Maybe your interpretation of people having conflicting behaviors as "describing themeselves as being multiple people" is wrong.
You jump from unchallenged absolute positions to another to basically conclude or imply that people are not being honest.
For most the self is a very moving concept and the inner dialogue and tensions add layers of definitions. We are not single thought and logical and permanently coherent creatures.
In Jeff Hawkins' Thousand Brains Theory he describes that the neocortex is responsible for most of our cognition, but that it has to kind of bargain with the more instinctual "old brain" to get us to perform actions.
It's quite possible he's wrong, it's still just a theory, but it kind of lines up with that model you describe.
Isn't this just a matter of confusion about what is in our best interest?
When we act against our best interest, it's often because we fail to accurately gauge the outcome of our actions. We may postpone going to the dentist because it seems like a bad idea, or have a bunch of cake because it seems like a good idea; but with the clarity of looking at these things in the past, it's evident that we got it wrong. We should have gone to the dentist and ignored the siren call of cake.
For whatever reason, it seems like a lot of people are just not doing this. They keep looking to the promises from the future, but completely ignore what they know from the past; so they keep repeating the same short sighted mistakes over and over and over again.
Another way of phrasing this. My computer is running a game smoothly, everything is good. Then I run off battery and open a Bitcoin miner in the background. Nothing about the game or computer hardware changed, but the performance of the game tanked.
This may be true, but it's about as useful as saying our behaviors and moods are controlled by the alignment of the stars. Neurochemistry just isn't something we experience directly, and as a model of phenomenology it isn't particularly informative, this is essentially a corollary of the hard problem of consciousness.
> I keep seeing hints of this strange model of the soul
> I keep seeing hints of this strange
Strange to you.
I wish this way of framing questions would stop.
However, considering Stickk has existed for something like 14 years, it doesn't feel particularly mature. I don’t want to be too disparaging (and I’m obviously biased) but I found their website quite clunky and the apps don’t receive great reviews (1.8 on IOS and 3.0 on Android).
A few aspects that I believe are better in Kommit:
- More control over deadline schedules (you can set it to repeat on multiple specified days of the week).
- More control over punishment rules (you can choose how many consecutive failures are allowed before you're punished).
- You can give yourself skip days (useful if you know you’re likely to need a vacation).
- You can update commitments (there is a mechanism to allow updates while preventing you from dodging punishments).
Btw, here's our argument against the anti-charity feature: https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/
(I'm a cofounder of Beeminder, if that wasn't obvious. Also I just added Kommit to https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/ -- very excited to have you as a competitor!)
One way I hope Kommit can add value, is that it doesn't require your commitment to be digital and there doesn't need to be an API integration (Beeminder is primarily based on API integrations). If you can prove your commitment with an image, video or text, your good to go. The downside is that nothing is automatic.
Update: You can manually enter data into Beeminder, therefore it can also handle non-digital commitments. However, as far as I am aware, the manually entered data is not verified (e.g. by having it checked by a reviewer) hence I didn't feel like it was their focus.
Very short version: We don't think smart contracts add much. Your users trust you.
My answer to that is that Jack's brain is not in the same configuration on Monday morning as on Friday afternoon. Thus, Jack's Monday-morning brain makes a decision to lose weight, and guesses that Friday-afternoon Jack will likely ignore Monday-morning Jack's decision. So Monday-morning Jack also puts in place safeguards to prevent Friday-afternoon Jack deciding to ignore Monday-morning Jack.
Some people do have more willpower, and don't need that help. I'm not one of them, and it sounds like the OP is not either. History is full of self-help advice on this very topic - from Socrates, the Stoics, and Confucius to Jordan Peterson, David Allen, and our very own Paul Graham. So it does seem to be a very real problem.
Love your attitude towards competition and I'm excited to be considered a competitor!
I also think, speaking from personal experience, our minds have an amazing ability to avoid thinking about things that are difficult or unpleasant. This can mean that we neglect to do things we should be doing (or do the things that cause us harm) not because those things are infact actually okay behaviours, but because we're not even thinking properly about the consequences. We're just doing.
There's a difference between "I keep seeing hints of this strange model of the soul" and "I keep seeing hints of this model I find strange". The first one heavily implies the model is strange and it's a fact, the conversation start with that premise and it puts people who do not find this model strange on the defensive. The second one clearly establishes this is a personal opinion.
Love the fact that you make it easier for the customer to get a refund through your process, than through the refund one; I do not work in this space and offering free refunds for my product could be very destructive, but it makes 100% sense here.
This strikes me as a significant mischaracterization of Beeminder. I've used Beeminder for 5+ years[0] and I've never used an API integration — Beeminder supports manually entering data for any goal. (And basically none of my goals have been digital; I'm not sure where you got the impression that Beeminder exclusively targets digital goals).
Anyway, sorry for the misrepresentation. I will update my comment above to be more accurate.