Show HN: Kommit – Web app to help you follow through with NY's resolutions
kommit.toI am often trying to build new habits, however, I normally lose momentum after a few weeks.
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[0] is a similar app — one that I've been a happy user of for 5+ years[1].
(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 :)
Have you considered reframing this as positive reinforcement instead of negative? It may require more trust in the system, but one example would be to have the user set aside a larger amount of money (in "escrow") that is paid out over time after successful completions of the kommitment.
Here's our counterargument, or at least why Beeminder prefers punishment: https://blog.beeminder.com/contrapositive/
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.
Thanks for the suggestion! I have thought about using positive reinforcement, and I am still considering it as possible future feature. One of the reasons I chose to start with negative reinforcement is that I had read in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" that losses tended to be more motivating. I think there are arguments about whether that holds up or not, but I think it's true of my own experiences.
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.
I suppose using something like a smart contract could maybe help with the trust issue, although perhaps only with relatively tech savvy users for now.
I'm not sure if it ends up too in-the-weeds but we had a fun debate with one of our Beeminder-but-on-the-blockchain competitors recently: https://forum.beeminder.com/t/decentralization-debate-beemin...
Very short version: We don't think smart contracts add much. Your users trust you.
> losses tended to be more motivating
For some definition of "motivating", probably so, but I wouldn't want to take that extra stress to keep a self-motivated minor commitment.
Would you be more likely to use something like the escrow system described above? Or is there an alternative mechanism that you'd be more interested in?
I keep seeing hints of this strange model of the soul, I don't quite understand it, but it's like people are describing themselves as being multiple people.
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.
In psychology, different mental models exist that help to arrange your knowledge about yourself in a meaningful way. You may be interested in reading about Internal Family Systems[1], inner child therapy[2] and subpersonality[3] concept in general. These mental models are widely used in modern therapy.
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
> I don't quite understand it, but it's like people are describing themselves as being multiple people.
> 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.
Hmm I'm not sure that that model is completely without merit. Of course we are responsible for all of our actions, however, we often act against our better judgement.
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.
> Of course we are responsible for all of our actions, however, we often act against our better judgement.
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.
Acrasia. We severely discount things, positive or negative, that may happen a way off into the future. We struggle to make a "later problem" into a "now problem". The difficulty is that many of life's challenges require action over a period of time.
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.
My brain is dominated by one set of hormones and nervous impulses right now. Later today - perhaps when I’m more hungry, tired, horny, whatever - those hormones and nervous impulses will change.
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.
> My brain is dominated by one set of hormones and nervous impulses right now. Later today - perhaps when I’m more hungry, tired, horny, whatever - those hormones and nervous impulses will change.
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.
How I interpret your original comment is that you're saying "Jack is Jack is Jack, whether it's Monday morning and Jack is full of energy or Friday afternoon when Jack is tired and hungry. Thus, if Jack wants to lose weight on Monday morning, why would he need help to avoid binge-eating hamburgers on Friday afternoon?".
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.
I often respond to "you should do X" with "that's future Mats' problem, not me". Mostly in jest, as I with most big decisions are thinking longterm. But for those short term stuff, like emptying the dishwasher.. Meh, future me's problem.
OT:
> 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.
I call strange what is strange to me, as my experience is the only experience I have of the world.
> I call strange what is strange to me, as my experience is the only experience I have of the world.
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.
Kudos for the donation to charity!
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....
Thanks! It's a good question and I haven't given it too much thought yet. For now I am just handling all disputes myself, if they get overwhelming I'll have to automate some aspects of it. It'll be interesting finding the balance between making it easy to get a refund when it's necessary but not so easy that the users would want to dispute it on regular basis.
Happy to answer such questions! By disputes I believe @hackandtrip means customers disputing charges with their credit card company. Aka chargebacks.
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.
Very interesting, thanks for the clear answer!
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.
Seems broken - I'm seeing a 403 from a GET request to https://api.kommit.to/v1/user/instance-review and then api.ts blows up at line 333.
Tried to submit this in the app as a support ticket and also got a 403.
Sorry, about that! It's still working for me but it must be having some teething issues. I'll take a look into it now. In the mean time you can use callum@kommit.to for support.
As a native New Yorker, when I see "NY" I don't think "New Year" :)
I thought I missed an important announcement about a new set of statewide mandated goals for 2022.
Hah, I'm not even American and I thought exactly the same thing (HN is US-centric, after all)!
Now I think about it, here in the UK I don't think I've ever actually seen "NY" in reference to the "New Year".
Hoping your sentiment is sarcastic.
"Choose Commitment, Define Evidence, Set Punishment, Select Reviewer"
That does not differ much from my everyday life.
https://www.stickk.com/ The very same idea with more developed solution, already community and more features (Just for people who looked for such things like me ago)
Yeah I was a bit gutted when I found Stickk after spending a bunch of time building Kommit. It's super similar and I felt a bit silly for not doing the research beforehand.
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:
That being said, they do have some cool features such as donating to an "Anti-Charity" (a controversial charity that you don’t support) upon failure.- 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).Definitely don't be discouraged by the existence of StickK! They technically already have the referee feature (that being your key distinction from Beeminder, which has a much less powerful version of that feature) but everything else about StickK is... well, I think you've already surpassed them despite their decade+ head start. They seem to have sadly been in zombie mode for years, since the founders left. I guess they're still making money though, which should be encouraging for Kommit!
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!)
Thanks for the kind words! It means a lot coming from yourself. As I've said elsewhere, I think Beeminder is the best competing solution I've come across :)
Love your attitude towards competition and I'm excited to be considered a competitor!
Another similar site is beeminder - pretty cool concept! There is more than enough room for similar sites.
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 :)
Yeah Beeminder is cool, probably the best of the competing solutions that I found.
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.
> (Beeminder is primarily based on API integrations)
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).
My bad, I thought the primary selling point was that it would would hook into the services you already use for tracking your commitment (Strava, GitHub, etc.). I am aware that you can manually enter some data but I didn't think there was any way to validate the data that you enter and I didn't think it was their focus.
Anyway, sorry for the misrepresentation. I will update my comment above to be more accurate.
Thanks for the update, and you're absolutely right that Beeminder doesn't offer any way to validate the data you enter. They discuss why (in their view, of course) trusting user-entered data works in this blog post: https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating/