calmdown13

When applying for jobs via LinkedIn it’s very important to use a PDF. A huge number of people submit Word documents, however, LinkedIn doesn’t render them in the browser. Given that most roles get hundreds of applications, unless someone’s previous roles really catch my eye, I am probably not going to download anything.

This rang so true for me. I’m constantly rediscovering things that I already understood well at my previous job. Once you get acclimatised to the current system, so many previously obvious learnings fall by the wayside.

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 [email protected] for support.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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:

  - 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).

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.

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.