Right up my alley, thanks for sharing and all the references.
I was curious if you thought about a mostly market-based solution for dynamic pricing:
1) Start through a blind voting process, where the group settles on a point value per chore
2) Each person drafts into their hand a set of chores that roughly sum to the same total point value as everyone else
3) Every week, a person can choose to trade chores with other people. Perhaps they can sub-divide chores and put them into complex trades with others.
4) Over time, true "price discovery" emerges reflecting the preferences of the individuals in the group.
5) Certain chore cards can go out to third-party providers. Perhaps the whole group has a third-party budget divided equally between all individuals, who can choose to trade for a chore that they can choose to out-source with their own budget.
6) Over time, the system flexes as preferences change. For example, maybe in the summer, I just want to walk the dog 3 days per week, but not 7, etc. I would then be looking to trade out 4 dog walking days to others in the group.
Hi Ari, that's an interesting suggestion. I did not consider an approach quite like that, but I can share a few design goals we had and discuss your proposal through that lens.
First, it was important to us to try and limit the complexity of the basic interactions. Given that we were designing for an "unskilled" (at least technically) population with medium levels of turnover, it needed to be very easy for a new person to come onboard and begin participating. To that end, we tried to make the "core game loop" very easy -- looking up the current points values of chores, choosing a chore to perform, and claiming the points. A resident could go two years without every doing anything more complicated than that. In your scheme, the minimum complexity seems a bit higher -- blind voting on chore values, pre-meditated chore selection, and chore trading. To what extent does that raise the floor on who is able to participate in this chores system?
Second, I would say we do have a type of market system -- it is one where the "computer" is auctioning off chores via first-price english auction. Participants choose to exchange their labor for points such that the difficulty of the chore and its points-value represent fair exchanges of their time. There is also a mild competitive aspect -- residents who are more attentive throughout the course of the month will be better able to find "arbitrage opportunities" -- overvalued chores -- compared to those who wait until the very end.
Third, we fundamentally rejected the idea a chore has a fixed value. Rather, we modeled chores as increasing in difficulty over time, representing the natural increase in entropy in any physical system. Dishes are not "worth" 5 points in the abstract; rather, dishes are worth more the longer it has gone since someone has done them, reflecting the real increase in dishes over time.
I really like the third point about dynamic price discovery. I think the system I proposed was going for that through revealed preferences through whatever appears on the trading block. But yours elegantly solves for it in a higher volume way.
This makes a lot of sense to me! I think I was thinking more in the realm of a fixed family of four that doesn’t want to be engaged too much with the technology involved.
The initial hand is really only handed out once (and whenever new chores are created) and you’re never required to engage with the system after that. That’s good and bad. By just having your set hand (which you can create trades with) the system has to deal with the problem of boredom and shifting preferences, which is the reason for the trade mechanic.
Essentially, with this system you have far less volume going through the system and more ability to improve personal chore efficiency through specialization.
But I think yours as you have it may be a more practical, engaging system and the one I’d personally want to try out.
Thanks Ari! I am actively trying to expand the user base (this is an open-source project and I am the main contributor), so if you or anyone you know are interested in trying it, please get in touch! You can reach me at krono@zaratan.world.
Actually yes! A group of developers in the Netherlands have been using it to help them keep on top of their social media and other tasks which no single person owned and would often fall through the cracks. Seems like it’s been working well so far.
Thanks for the info. Their use case is even better than what I had in mind. Are there any options for the icons? The hearts wouldn’t be ideal in my intended setting…
Unfortunately the app icons aren't user-customizable. That said, we're overdue for a visual refresh so I'm happy to take some feedback on why you think the heart logo might not be the best choice. Want to email me at krono@zaratan.world?
What is the size range for communities who have effectively utilized this system? Would this work for an entire apartment complex? For a couple in an apartment with no kids?
Great question. So far we've had groups of between 2-9 use it successfully, and we're about to launch a pilot with a much larger online community.
I personally use with my partner in our apartment, and it helps a lot -- I almost always do the dishes, she does most of the food prep, and we take turns taking out the trash. We also added a "30 minutes movement" chore to encourage each other to stay active, which has been a cute little addition.
That's funny. It's something that has come up before, and I'd love to pursue if it I had more funding / stronger demand signals. Initially we went with Slack because of their more robust developer tools -- making it more feasible for a one-person development team (me) to build out fully-functional products.
But the underlying architecture was designed to be multi-platform, and I've had multiple people say they would use these tools if they were available on Discord. If you know of anyone who would be interested in helping put some together, I'm here to support!
We've had a Github issue open for it for a few months now:
Great read :) I could see a failure mode of the “chores gain value over time” approach to be a situation where everyone is doing few chores, very late, and the latency gets higher and higher as people are able to satisfy their budgets by doing less and less. I suppose that’s solved by dynamically allocating ppls chore budgets to increase along with the value of the chores.
That's a good point, but I don't think it's a big risk in practice: by trying to collude and "game the system" to avoid doing chores, the residents ultimately impose a cost on themselves of living in a messy house. The game is fundamentally a cooperative one: there is no "value" which can be extracted from the system which is not ultimately coming from the housemates themselves.
This hides the real issue of different genders valuing cleanness and implied chores differently - the express result of a point-based system is removing bargaining power from masculine residents to feminine residents, and forcing the interaction to be on feminine terms, unintentionally blurring the definition of chores until it inevitably ecompasses budgetary decisions and starts resembling prostitution.
That's an interesting comment. Would you care to elaborate further? It sounds like you're saying that feminine residents generally value cleaning more, and thus the lopsided labor distribution which emerges in unstructured settings actually represents a type of psychic equilibrium, where feminine residents work more because they care more. By adding a structured points system, the balance of power is shifted to the feminine residents, who are now able to compel the masculine residents to perform labor in excess of their underlying motivation. Is that a fair interpretation of your comment?
Your implication of "prostitution" is interesting and evocative. I'm not sure I follow the analogy, however. Are you implying that requiring masculine residents to contribute chores in excess of their underlying motivation is a type of prostitution, in that they are being compensated for labor they wouldn't otherwise perform, through the introduction market structures to the domestic sphere?
Ultimately, we followed Elinor Ostrom's line of thinking which was that those who benefit from a shared resource are obligated to help sustain that resource.
Budget contributions are usually imbalanced toward male residents, while sex towards female/feminine. Scope of "chores" gradually grows to encompass chores with both budgetary and sex ties (with or without explicit naming in the point trade system) creating a proxy payment system leading domestic relationship to resemble prostitution in all but name, and further enabling parties to consider "import/export" trade markets where their budget and sex can garner better value.
That's an interesting idea. Could be a good opportunity for some "protocol fiction" about a chore system gone awry, although it may be a bit risqué for the SoP community!
It's not just an idea - trade relationships are a symptom of deep damage, such pain-accounting is very difficult to go back from, seldom leading to happy thereafters.
Believing that relationship "ious" can be quantized into easily-tradeable points is a fallacy, some things are better left unquantized.
That's a valid point, but I think you're over-simplifying.
In an idealized environment of a group of people with very close personal bonds all making a long-term commitment to living together, then you could argue that a quantified system is a net-negative.
However, in a setting where there is ongoing turnover and new people need to be integrated across social distance, then the case for more system and structure becomes stronger.
I think it's also worth acknowledging that informal cultural systems can easily institutionalize prejudice, privilege, and bias. There are definitely downsides to systematizing -- something is always "left out" -- but those downsides need to be weighed against the costs of not systematizing.
Ultimately, it's a delicate balance -- at many points in our design process we had to ask ourselves whether the benefit of systematizing something was worth the loss of flexibility. Believe it or not, there were many things we thought about trying to incorporate into the system and decided not to.
Perhaps can write up in more detail later, after reading the linked essay.
For now, the counter/further argymebts are along these lines:
"Markets dont care" adage = the more utilitarian the chore task standardization, the less humane and friendly the relationship, especially with scope creep of money and sex related "chores", those become dehumanized.
Markets resist fast change = the ease of trade is addictive, modifying roles and task definitions becomes difficult or impossible with time, as new products have less liquidity and are more difficult to trade
"Rules for everyone's benefit" = forcing help on those who havent asked for it, projecting own values, mostly feminine "helpers" projecting "cleanliness" values on masculine "didn't ask for it"-ers
(Authors' sunk cost/income source/motive bias could hinders consideration, as the effects mentioned are still framed as if only theoretical)
Right up my alley, thanks for sharing and all the references.
I was curious if you thought about a mostly market-based solution for dynamic pricing:
1) Start through a blind voting process, where the group settles on a point value per chore
2) Each person drafts into their hand a set of chores that roughly sum to the same total point value as everyone else
3) Every week, a person can choose to trade chores with other people. Perhaps they can sub-divide chores and put them into complex trades with others.
4) Over time, true "price discovery" emerges reflecting the preferences of the individuals in the group.
5) Certain chore cards can go out to third-party providers. Perhaps the whole group has a third-party budget divided equally between all individuals, who can choose to trade for a chore that they can choose to out-source with their own budget.
6) Over time, the system flexes as preferences change. For example, maybe in the summer, I just want to walk the dog 3 days per week, but not 7, etc. I would then be looking to trade out 4 dog walking days to others in the group.
Hi Ari, that's an interesting suggestion. I did not consider an approach quite like that, but I can share a few design goals we had and discuss your proposal through that lens.
First, it was important to us to try and limit the complexity of the basic interactions. Given that we were designing for an "unskilled" (at least technically) population with medium levels of turnover, it needed to be very easy for a new person to come onboard and begin participating. To that end, we tried to make the "core game loop" very easy -- looking up the current points values of chores, choosing a chore to perform, and claiming the points. A resident could go two years without every doing anything more complicated than that. In your scheme, the minimum complexity seems a bit higher -- blind voting on chore values, pre-meditated chore selection, and chore trading. To what extent does that raise the floor on who is able to participate in this chores system?
Second, I would say we do have a type of market system -- it is one where the "computer" is auctioning off chores via first-price english auction. Participants choose to exchange their labor for points such that the difficulty of the chore and its points-value represent fair exchanges of their time. There is also a mild competitive aspect -- residents who are more attentive throughout the course of the month will be better able to find "arbitrage opportunities" -- overvalued chores -- compared to those who wait until the very end.
Third, we fundamentally rejected the idea a chore has a fixed value. Rather, we modeled chores as increasing in difficulty over time, representing the natural increase in entropy in any physical system. Dishes are not "worth" 5 points in the abstract; rather, dishes are worth more the longer it has gone since someone has done them, reflecting the real increase in dishes over time.
You can read more about our initial design goals in the project whitepaper here: http://kronosapiens.github.io/papers/mirror.pdf
I really like the third point about dynamic price discovery. I think the system I proposed was going for that through revealed preferences through whatever appears on the trading block. But yours elegantly solves for it in a higher volume way.
This makes a lot of sense to me! I think I was thinking more in the realm of a fixed family of four that doesn’t want to be engaged too much with the technology involved.
The initial hand is really only handed out once (and whenever new chores are created) and you’re never required to engage with the system after that. That’s good and bad. By just having your set hand (which you can create trades with) the system has to deal with the problem of boredom and shifting preferences, which is the reason for the trade mechanic.
Essentially, with this system you have far less volume going through the system and more ability to improve personal chore efficiency through specialization.
But I think yours as you have it may be a more practical, engaging system and the one I’d personally want to try out.
Thanks Ari! I am actively trying to expand the user base (this is an open-source project and I am the main contributor), so if you or anyone you know are interested in trying it, please get in touch! You can reach me at krono@zaratan.world.
It feels like the app resolve many issues creating leaderless…
Has the app ever been used in a work setting?
Actually yes! A group of developers in the Netherlands have been using it to help them keep on top of their social media and other tasks which no single person owned and would often fall through the cracks. Seems like it’s been working well so far.
Thanks for the info. Their use case is even better than what I had in mind. Are there any options for the icons? The hearts wouldn’t be ideal in my intended setting…
Unfortunately the app icons aren't user-customizable. That said, we're overdue for a visual refresh so I'm happy to take some feedback on why you think the heart logo might not be the best choice. Want to email me at krono@zaratan.world?
What is the size range for communities who have effectively utilized this system? Would this work for an entire apartment complex? For a couple in an apartment with no kids?
Great question. So far we've had groups of between 2-9 use it successfully, and we're about to launch a pilot with a much larger online community.
I personally use with my partner in our apartment, and it helps a lot -- I almost always do the dishes, she does most of the food prep, and we take turns taking out the trash. We also added a "30 minutes movement" chore to encourage each other to stay active, which has been a cute little addition.
Really enjoyed this, thank you. Excited to explore Chores.
I wrote a playful piece on tidying up both IRL and online, after observing "the work that no one wants to do" https://dayvan.substack.com/p/tidy-up-the-network-and-yourself
Has anyone built a Discord integration? When I suggested Chores app to my college aged kids a couple of years ago, they were like, what's Slack?
That's funny. It's something that has come up before, and I'd love to pursue if it I had more funding / stronger demand signals. Initially we went with Slack because of their more robust developer tools -- making it more feasible for a one-person development team (me) to build out fully-functional products.
But the underlying architecture was designed to be multi-platform, and I've had multiple people say they would use these tools if they were available on Discord. If you know of anyone who would be interested in helping put some together, I'm here to support!
We've had a Github issue open for it for a few months now:
https://github.com/zaratanDotWorld/choreWheel/issues/230
Great read :) I could see a failure mode of the “chores gain value over time” approach to be a situation where everyone is doing few chores, very late, and the latency gets higher and higher as people are able to satisfy their budgets by doing less and less. I suppose that’s solved by dynamically allocating ppls chore budgets to increase along with the value of the chores.
That's a good point, but I don't think it's a big risk in practice: by trying to collude and "game the system" to avoid doing chores, the residents ultimately impose a cost on themselves of living in a messy house. The game is fundamentally a cooperative one: there is no "value" which can be extracted from the system which is not ultimately coming from the housemates themselves.
This hides the real issue of different genders valuing cleanness and implied chores differently - the express result of a point-based system is removing bargaining power from masculine residents to feminine residents, and forcing the interaction to be on feminine terms, unintentionally blurring the definition of chores until it inevitably ecompasses budgetary decisions and starts resembling prostitution.
That's an interesting comment. Would you care to elaborate further? It sounds like you're saying that feminine residents generally value cleaning more, and thus the lopsided labor distribution which emerges in unstructured settings actually represents a type of psychic equilibrium, where feminine residents work more because they care more. By adding a structured points system, the balance of power is shifted to the feminine residents, who are now able to compel the masculine residents to perform labor in excess of their underlying motivation. Is that a fair interpretation of your comment?
Your implication of "prostitution" is interesting and evocative. I'm not sure I follow the analogy, however. Are you implying that requiring masculine residents to contribute chores in excess of their underlying motivation is a type of prostitution, in that they are being compensated for labor they wouldn't otherwise perform, through the introduction market structures to the domestic sphere?
Ultimately, we followed Elinor Ostrom's line of thinking which was that those who benefit from a shared resource are obligated to help sustain that resource.
First paragraph - yes.
Budget contributions are usually imbalanced toward male residents, while sex towards female/feminine. Scope of "chores" gradually grows to encompass chores with both budgetary and sex ties (with or without explicit naming in the point trade system) creating a proxy payment system leading domestic relationship to resemble prostitution in all but name, and further enabling parties to consider "import/export" trade markets where their budget and sex can garner better value.
That's an interesting idea. Could be a good opportunity for some "protocol fiction" about a chore system gone awry, although it may be a bit risqué for the SoP community!
It's not just an idea - trade relationships are a symptom of deep damage, such pain-accounting is very difficult to go back from, seldom leading to happy thereafters.
Believing that relationship "ious" can be quantized into easily-tradeable points is a fallacy, some things are better left unquantized.
That's a valid point, but I think you're over-simplifying.
In an idealized environment of a group of people with very close personal bonds all making a long-term commitment to living together, then you could argue that a quantified system is a net-negative.
However, in a setting where there is ongoing turnover and new people need to be integrated across social distance, then the case for more system and structure becomes stronger.
I think it's also worth acknowledging that informal cultural systems can easily institutionalize prejudice, privilege, and bias. There are definitely downsides to systematizing -- something is always "left out" -- but those downsides need to be weighed against the costs of not systematizing.
Ultimately, it's a delicate balance -- at many points in our design process we had to ask ourselves whether the benefit of systematizing something was worth the loss of flexibility. Believe it or not, there were many things we thought about trying to incorporate into the system and decided not to.
I think you'd be interested in this essay on the subject of kicking people out of coliving spaces. It gets at some of these ideas but from a slightly different angle: https://blog.zaratan.world/p/the-boundaries-of-belonging
Perhaps can write up in more detail later, after reading the linked essay.
For now, the counter/further argymebts are along these lines:
"Markets dont care" adage = the more utilitarian the chore task standardization, the less humane and friendly the relationship, especially with scope creep of money and sex related "chores", those become dehumanized.
Markets resist fast change = the ease of trade is addictive, modifying roles and task definitions becomes difficult or impossible with time, as new products have less liquidity and are more difficult to trade
"Rules for everyone's benefit" = forcing help on those who havent asked for it, projecting own values, mostly feminine "helpers" projecting "cleanliness" values on masculine "didn't ask for it"-ers
(Authors' sunk cost/income source/motive bias could hinders consideration, as the effects mentioned are still framed as if only theoretical)