Announcement: You can now jump down as many pledge steps as you like without waiting a week between jumps. And pledges and pledge caps don’t have to be changed separately — the right things just happen, like if you push the pledge cap below the current pledge, that starts a one-week timer for both of them to change together.
(Review: Your pledge on a Beeminder goal is how much you have at stake: the amount we charge you each time your datapoints deviate from the bright red line on your graph representing what you committed to maintaining. Beeminder has a core concept of an akrasia horizon, meaning you can change your mind about any aspect of your goal — including how much money is at stake, or ending the goal entirely — but any such change takes a week to take effect. So you can change your mind for a thought-out reason but never impetuously or out of laziness. Never akratically.)
Until now (actually a couple weeks ago, when this went live) the only option for lowering your pledge was to drop it one level, starting the akrasia horizon countdown. A week later, you could repeat that process to drop another level. And changing your pledge cap was a completely separate thing you had to remember to do after waiting for the pledge to drop. If you wanted to drop your pledge from, say, $270 to the minimum of $5 and make sure it stayed there, that was literally a month-long operation ($270 → $90 → $30 → $10 → $5).
But now the long national nightmare is over.
We do have at least one user who liked the previous status quo. Beeminder is all about tools against temptation and so the friction of reaffirming each pledge drop could be viewed as a feature. This particular user likes to reward themself with a pledge drop whenever they hit a long enough streak. So they can still do that but will need a bit of self-discipline — sticking to one pledge drop at a time — that previously Beeminder gave them for free. Since this user is wildly outnumbered by those who hated the tedium of changing pledge levels, we’re not including an option for spacebar heating. But since this isn’t strictly a Pareto improvement, we were duty-bound to blog about it.
Conceptually, the new coupled sliders for pledge and pledge cap work like this:
Skeuomorphism! The little cowcatcher that sticks down from the yellow pledge knob means that if you physically slide the pledge value higher, it brings the pledge cap with it. The cap can’t ever be lower than the pledge. Conversely, if you slide the cap lower it pushes the pledge along, for the same reason, maintaining the pledge ≤ cap invariant.
In reality, it’s like this:
We think it’s more obvious when you interact with it yourself, so we made a little mockup version. Try sliding the sliders back and forth and see what they do:
Simple, right?
Wait, One Wee Weirdness
This is mostly too niche to care about, but for completeness, if you, ill-advisedly, have a Beemium plan then something weird happens if you slide the pledge all the way to $0 (as only Beemium people are allowed to do). Namely, in that special case, the pledge cap will also snap itself to $0. The reason is a little arcane. Remember the feet-wetting feature? When you first create a goal you can choose to have the pledge be at $0 just for the first week, while you get your feet wet, after which it automatically bumps itself to $5. It turns out that that doesn’t quite play nicely with the Beemium perk of allowing goals to be at $0 indefinitely. Not the way we implemented it anyway. This is a big part of the reason for deprecating the Beemium plan — all the confusing special cases and hard-to-anticipate interactions with other features like feet-wetting.
The point being, if a Beemium user sets their pledge to $0, the feet-wetting will make it bump itself up to $5 a week later. The workaround is to set your pledge cap to $0 to force it not to do that. And since we don’t want a Beemium user to have their pledge go up from $0 when they weren’t expecting it to, we have this dumb special case to make the pledge cap also go to $0 by default. You can then bump it back up if you want. Just keep in mind that without a $0 pledge cap the pledge will always bump itself back to $5 after a week.