An incentive-based web application for writing

The thing that I find most interesting about economics is not the financial side of things (which I more or less care about only in the abstract, as I perpetually gripe about government incompetence). Instead, I am more interested in the incentive-based reasoning side of things, where someone comes up with an idea to motivate people to behave a certain way. While money is obviously a good way to do this sort of thing, there are others.

One interesting example I recently discovered is Write or Die, a web application that gives incentives to people to write quickly. After only a single experimental use, I find it motivating me to write quickly even now, as I write this blog post.

As it is applicable to the post topic, I include what I wrote as part of the post:

Hello. First time to use Write or Die, and it's a new experience. Gotta wonder exactly how the "word count" feature works, as I'm pretty sure I haven't written thirty-two words just yet. Is it the classic, original method of counting every five-letter block as a "word" (like they use in measuring words per minute) or is it just a random setting that I managed to glitch up almost immediately? Interesting to consider, anyway. So the next question is, what shall I write about? I mean, it's a clever application and a downright brilliant idea (tempered by the fact that a person has to voluntarily go to the web site and choose to type the stuff), but I don't have much to write about right now. Perhaps later. Further, I'm wondering if I should turn the sound on. I understand that some of the "penalties" attached to this program include evil sound effects, at least on this level. Being RickRolled is an evil thing to have to suffer. But I don't know if there is anything beyond that for me to worry about. Interestingly, the fact that I know that there will be "negative" consequences keeps me typing quickly; this in spite of the fact that I have yet to actually suffer any such consequences, as far as I know, and if the problems are just sound effects, there's nothing to worry about. Ooh, I waited a while during the last sentence, and the surroundings of the box turned pink. Excellent. Got me going right away. Makes me wonder, how exactly do things work on this web page, anyway? I mean, exactly what do they do to cleverly determine whether I'm actually typing. Can I hit the "backspace" key repeatedly and have it still count, even though the word count would be reduced as I type? It hasn't seemed to cause a problem thus far. Self-critical thinking, somewhat recursive: It has left me thinking about why the only thing I can think to write about is the program itself, and thinking about what I should write about. And as right now I'm writing about thinking about writing about thinking about what I should write about, I think this particular recursion has reached new heights. Or new depths, or something. One thing I've noticed: It is difficult for me to concentrate on anything except writing, and as quickly as possible at that. Hmm, not sure if that's a good thing. After all, if I'm using this to motivate me to write quickly, I'd hope that I would be writing quickly about something beyond my using this web-toy to write quickly. Perhaps next time - if the novelty doesn't wear off and there is a next time. I suspect that the novelty will wear off, and that I will remember the pressing motivation to keep writing stuff as quickly as possible and decide (after the fact) to be very annoyed with this program and myself. Ah, well. At least it keeps me going for a while. Ah, I just opened a word processor window, and it immediately started turning pink, then more red. Interesting. It tells me a little more about how it works. I also tried to get right back here, but it kept blinking over to my word processor window, so I couldn't type. No multitasking allowed on this one, it appears. Or at least it screws things up. Okay, I think I'm done now. I'll post it to my blog just for the abstract pleasure of doing so, and as an analytical piece about the incentives behind such a program. Generally, I approve, and I think I might even use this one again.

End result: It claims I wrote 632 words in 15 minutes. Word counts it as 614. Counting characters (the traditional word count technique) at 5 characters per word yields 676.4 characters, for an average of just over 45 words per minute. It also does not include hard carriage returns (or whatever you call that on a word processor), so all my nice paragraph divisions are not included in the resulting text. I leave it in blockquote tags as it came out, rather than how I intended it, as I'm really too lazy to deal with things in a more complete and thorough way.