This time, I deleted my superbetter account. Superbetter is perfectly fine, if what you need are people to cheer you on (and you have active allies) and ways to see what to do for issues, because you have no idea.
My allies were great — while it lasted. I wish some of them would get ahold of me! But, it had stopped being useful some time ago. I hadn’t logged in since 4/2019, to give you some idea of how uninvolved I was.
There was another, dailychallenge.com, it was useful for a while too.
The problem with both of them was that after you’d done it for a while, it was static. Superbetter only got to level 25, then you repeated yourself. There was nothing else to do after that except more of the same — the same way. Daily challenge gave you “stamps” and again, it was doing x or y or z small task to get you into the habit and moving in a particular direction.
Both were interesting for a while, but for those of us who persisted, who kept doing it, there was no payoff, except whatever behaviors we’d acquired or modified. That’s not meaningless, but if you’re counting on a game or site to motivate you to do something and keep doing it, to have that motivation just fizzle out was discouraging. You’d ACHIEVE A GOAL (or many) and then:
nada? Or, rinse, lather, repeat, endlessly!
It was sort of an anti-motivation.
I’ve been on other websites which fell short in much the same way, despite having vital community and active members: 43things.com and popclogs.com were the main ones.
No one has figured out the making money/activity/keeping people engaged piece of motivational/self-help/build community sites, yet. The $ folk want to make it make $$$ in more traditional ways I think. The end users want community, to feel safe, to learn something, and be motivated. Frequently the money people want to do things like link posts to facebook which make the users whose words they’re selling feel violated. Selling branded “stuff” doesn’t work. Selling “badges” doesn’t work.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t sell the “super users” a super user version of the site? I didn’t pay for any of those sites. I would have, to be able to post things privately. To form communities which weren’t part of the “anyone can find it” space. I would have paid to be given access to a more intense, involved, higher echelon version of the site.
But more of the same? No.
And, apparently, I’m not alone!