If you don't know Actifit, it is an activity counter that rewards you in STEEM votes and AFITs (their own token) if you make at least 5000 daily movements. The maximum daily reward is reached at 10000 movements and every 1000 movements in between increases your reward.
I noticed a tendency in how I use Actifi. If by the end of the day, I am just below 10000 Activity Counts (AC) (or another whole number), I will see if I can get in some extra movements to get over the threshold. I wondered if I was alone and decided to investigate this empirically.
So what better way to do that than to look over a few thousands of Activity Reports. I managed to get 4507 before my browser crashed :)
Without visually looking at the data, I saw that the median AC was 10136 - conveniently just over the highest reward. The lowest AC was 1004 (1000 is the threshold for uploading) and some crazy actifitter made it to 85964. 50 % of the logs were between 6373 and 12678 AC, though and 97% had made less than 25000 AC. If we naively simulated data to fit these parameters, it should look roughly as follows:
This is how it would look if people just coincidentally happened to make around 10000 steps daily with a lot of individual variation. The bars represent the number of observations and the red line represents a smoothed distribution. As you can see the curve is roughly normally distributed with almost even variation to both sides of the mean.
However, if the incentives influence how people behave, there should be some bumps on the red line. I expected a bump to be at around 10000 with way fever observations just below 10000. Let's look at the data:
Wow, that was even more pronounced than I had expected. We see that there are 2 peaks: One at 5000 and one at 10000. It seems that most people either push themselves above 5000 Activities or do not bother to post their activity if they will not get a reward.
If we zoom in further, you can even see a boost at each thousand between 5 and 10k. It seems that if people have made, say, 7743 steps, they are likely to push it above 8000 before uploading their report.
So the incentives that Actifit is offering surely seem to influence the users' behaviour (I was not so special after all). An optimist would say that they are good in pushing people above 10k and a pessimist would maybe point out that most people seem to get much lazier after that. Maybe they could consider some incentives such as an extra chance to win a super upvote for each additional thousand steps logged?
In any case, this was a fun little example on how a question can be answered relatively quick if one knows the scientific method and is willing to put in a little work. It was also a relatively rare case in which no statistics were needed - the results are apparant to the naked eye.
I hope it was interesting to read for you too. If you have any comments or questions, I will be happy to hear them. Please check out @actifit at actifit.io if you haven't already, it has a very friendly community.
I only tend to do Actifit posts on my alternate account when reaching 10000 steps. Many of the days I'm just short and do a bit of extra walking just to reach it. I guess for many it's the same. The main thing I dislike about Actifit is the many quick 'shitposts' that tend to creep into my feed that all have the same cover image.
great analysis post!
Thank you very much. Yes that is of course also an explanation: some people don't bother to post under 10k and seemingly 5k. I agree with you that it is annoying with a ton of low effort posts, though I am in no way perfect in posting interesting photos every day myself.
This reminds me of the test called "matura" that we have to take in Poland when we finish high school. I believe in English it could be called "secondary school certificate" or "high-school certificate" and you need to pass it if you want to educate further (go to college/university). When it comes to math, the results look like this:
But when it comes to humanities, the results are weird:
Why? Because teachers that were verifying tests were able to cheat a little and help students that "almost" passed and bump their score by a few points, so they will be above the point required to pass the test :) You can not do that with math tests where it is clear that you're either right or wrong, but in humanities where you have to write some kind of essay or things like that it is more subjective.
Source (in polish)
Yes that is a cool example too. I wonder what other ones we can find...
As I read this, I kept thinking, "Yep, that's exactly what I do." I always make sure to get in those few extra steps when I am just shy of 10,000. I didn't know that every 1000 in between acted as a milestone, or I probably would have done the same thing.
Very insightful post!
Nice one, so how did you crawl all the data? Beautiful souped it? Or is it somewhere available in a nice format?
Thank you. I went to https://actifit.io/activity and ran actiona to click the "load more" button and scrolling down. Then from time to time i marked all and copied. I then had a custom python script doing regular expressions on that. Probably not the most elegant way, but it solved the job :) My script only saved the time (minutes ago), movements and rewards, though. If it something you are interested in, I see no harm in sharing it :)
Would be great if you could put it on github :) I think that going through the voting history of actifit would lead to a more robust script. I will think a bit about it and write up a script.
It is interesting to think about how to develop predictive models on the data for actifit. Of course because it is fun but I guess it also has influence on actifit's economic model.
Posted using Partiko Android
It is interesting, thank you very much for your effort.
Do you think that people really aim for the reward bumps or simply like to achieve the next round number?
Personally, I aim to reach over 10K because I take it as a challenge. Another milestone /challenge is to reach 100K weekly.
Thanks again and happy actifing.
Posted using Partiko Android
That is actually a very good point and one that I currently cannot answer. It could easily be a mix of the incentives and people's preference for whole numbers (just like it felt MUCH more impressive when BTC hit 10K than 9.99K or even 12K). I guess it would be interesting to see the logs of any similar apps that do not reward users directly (ideally both one that requires people to post daily and one the does not).
An interesting experiment could be to set the actifit rewards at for instance 5128, 6128, 7128... 10128 and see if that would change people's behaviors. That is sadly outside of my power, though :)
Thanks for you post and happy actifing to you too.
(To others reading this, I am seeing your interesting comments too, but my Resource Credits/Mana is too low to answer right now :( I even had to power up to make this comment. I will get to you as soon as possible.)
Thanks a lot for your answer and the effort you've made to publish it.
A full upvote is in order. 👍😀
Posted using Partiko Android
I always try for at least 10k. I gained 11k this afternoon, and I wanted more, but it was easier to sit on my ass knowing that I had already gained over 10k.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Seems like you are not alone - thanks for stopping by.
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