[dreeves]

OMG yes, that article is from before we actually launched. We've made, let's see, 1789 user-visible improvements since then -- http://beeminder.com/meta/uvi

It's still confusing and nerd-centric and we're working on making it more intelligible to newbees. Would especially love to hear your thoughts, having looked it years ago and now coming back to it.

As for beeminding things like time spent on your phone, you'd be surprised what's possible if you're willing to nerd out a bit. For iPhone I think Apple makes this impossible but on Android you can connect RescueTime and Tasker to Beeminder to automatically measure and report time spent. Or you could just have Tasker count the number of times you turn on your phone's display and beemind that. I'd love the excuse to better document such things so email me, [e-mail], if that sounds intriguing.

Akrasia and childhood: I don't know of research other than the Stanford Marshmallow experiment which I used to cite as supportive of Beeminder's philosophy (kids who employed tricks to distract themselves from the temptation did better) but later research makes it much less clear what's really going on there (maybe kids from unstable homes just don't trust the researcher to keep their promise which makes it rational, in expectation, to grab the marshmallow while the grabbing's good).

I do, personally, view the holy grail of Beeminder to be a nannybot that tells you minute by minute what the optimal thing for you to be doing is. Actually we just made a Beeminder Slack bot -- http://slackminder.com -- that may point us in that direction, though still very primitive now.