It allows for wider selection of confidants. A roommate might be a trusted friend who’ve you known for a while, it might be a bland personality from craigslist. Further, an offline analog one is subject to conjoleing, conflicts of interests, and lawyering that an online digital system is not subject to. When failure is automatic if you don’t report progress and the money goes to a third party these relational complexities are removed with a scalpel rather than having to be dealt with like a bad itch. By having a person keep taps on you through typing in a URL rather than having to go through to trouble of getting a picture or text everyday you lower the barrier of entry and the amount of work it takes for the system to remain stable.
It’d be easier to make a beeminder account and just give someone the link to watch your graphs.
Easier, perhaps, but better? I don’t find the incentives from websites to be nearly as strong as the ones from people who live with me.
It allows for wider selection of confidants. A roommate might be a trusted friend who’ve you known for a while, it might be a bland personality from craigslist. Further, an offline analog one is subject to conjoleing, conflicts of interests, and lawyering that an online digital system is not subject to. When failure is automatic if you don’t report progress and the money goes to a third party these relational complexities are removed with a scalpel rather than having to be dealt with like a bad itch. By having a person keep taps on you through typing in a URL rather than having to go through to trouble of getting a picture or text everyday you lower the barrier of entry and the amount of work it takes for the system to remain stable.