If this sounds appealing, but you want a nice UI to go along with it, check out https://www.beeminder.com/home. Not affiliated with them, just a happy customer for several years.
Note that Beeminder allows manual entry of data — I use this to track “work out 3x / week” type goals, but also has plenty of integrations (e.g. Apple Health data) for goals like “walk 10k steps / day”
The latter makes it much tougher to cheat yourself
I have been a customer of theirs since 2014. The few times I have had to interact with support they have always helped me (and to be clear I only remember having to contact support when I had a legitimate reason not to complete some work for a given day).
I'm glad it works for other people, but the glaring conflict of interest makes it a hard no for me.
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!)
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.
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.
It's true that any company can turn greedy, and many do. But a problem here for me is that the structure is more dangerous when it does. If HBO turns evil, my downside risk is the $15/month I pay them. But with a habit incentive system like this, the downside risk is larger and unknown. And given that the whole point is to build habits that people stick with, "you'd cry foul and quit" is in question. Look at the way the various online games milk vast sums milk from their "whale" players for example. When behaviors are correctly engineered, plenty of people don't quit.
For me yes, doing it with friends is different, because the metagame (or in Carse's term, the infinite game) is about the friendship. That too acts as a downside risk limit. But if your company were taken over tomorrow by invading aliens or private equity MBAs, all they'd want is the money.
And again, very important to me is value-for-value exchange. E.g., I'm a Newsblur subscriber. I was on their $36/year subscription. They just added a new $99 tier. I signed up immediately not because I need the features, but because I value it higher than $36/year and want to help make sure they're well funded.
So if you had a similar service where I paid you a subscription fee and then money went to, say, my brother, that would be a different deal. My downside risk is limited, the metagame keeps things safer, my cognitive load about systemic effects is manageable, and it adds a social component that means more to me than cash incentives anyhow.
I hope that helps!
Failing intermittently in the short term - and losing money for it - will cause any rational actor motivated by the financial argument - as you clearly are - to try and work out why and fail less, hence proving their service is working for you.
In the long run, there are no scams, no dubious businesses, no casinos, no ponzis. In the long run, we're all dead. But in the short term, people lose money all the time on stuff that doesn't work for them. Is this one of them? Apparently not for some people. On the other hand, MLMs have plenty of people who talk them up while losing money, so it's hard to say from the outside.
I'd like something like this that pays into my retirement, a long-term investment or donates to charity, with maybe 1-20% going to Beeminder or whatever.