author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK, so, this week's post is kind of a bummer. Also a bit of a reprise, since I posted about it Monday over on Patreon.

Here's the thing: I'm leaving Habitica.

I know! I've boosted it so many times over the years! It's helped me organize my life in so many really useful ways! The camaraderie, the accountability, the joy of clicking a thing and saying "I did it!" and getting imaginary gold and experience points for it--these have all been good things! (Mostly good things, anyway. About that, more in a moment.) So what happened that suddenly I'm canceling my subscription and deleting my account?

Well... this.

That link goes to a Reddit thread that describes, in some detail, the abominable treatment that Habitica's volunteer community moderators have received from Habitica's paid staff team. And because I rarely ventured outside my various Guilds' social spaces, I had no idea anything was going until sometime last week, when a Mastodon acquaintance, who turned out to be one of Habitica former moderators, mentioned it. Anyway, if you want the full story, follow both links; and, on the Reddit thread, scroll down for comments by former moderators.

A brief and thus very imperfect summary of what transpired might look like this: A longstanding company culture of treating the mods with very little care, respect, or gratitude for their unpaid labor of love for the Habitica community culminated in the staff firing all the volunteer moderators in early December 2022, then declaring any discussion of the situation in Habitica's public spaces off-limits and against the Terms of Service. The inciting incident for the first firing was this: After a heroic after-hours effort by the mod team to deal with a fast-moving crisis in the message boards, one of the mods suggested that maybe the staff might say "thank you" once in a while.

Again, this is a summary, not the complete story. I have left out the steps between "How about a thank you?" and "We are taking moderation in-house." And there are some pretty horrific codas. Basically, click through the links above and you'll know as much as I do. If the length of the Reddit page is daunting, I can specifically recommend these comments by former moderators MaybeSteveRodgers and ALittleYellowSpider (Alys). But I think the whole thread is worth your time.

Anyway, I was appalled. I immediately decided I could not support the app anymore. I put myself "in the Inn" indefinitely (i.e. paused damage so I could ignore the app without my character or those of my party being punished for it), exported my user data so as not to lose track of my task lists, and began the process of letting my various communities know why I'm leaving. This blog post is part of that.

This blog post is also me realizing that maybe I'm better off without Habitica after all.

Not long ago, author Elizabeth Bear wrote an article about how "Gamification might be bad, actually?" and it got me thinking. Well, to be fair, it got me resisting. I've been using Habitica so long, it's been such an integral part of my day--how dare you suggest it might be bad for me? But since pausing damage and thus freeing myself from the obligation to check in, check the boxes, complete my task lists OR ELSE, I've been thinking about Bear's article a lot.

Every time I catch myself thinking, "I didn't water the plants today - but if I do it first thing tomorrow, I can justify checking the 'Water the plants' Daily." Every time I felt bad because I didn't "Feel good about your writing - and yourself!" and thus couldn't honestly check off that task. Every time I thought, "OK, posting the Monday Muse is blogging, so it's OK if I check 'actually writing blog' today even though I didn't post to the actually writing blog." Every time I regretted failing to do my daily physical therapy or was too tired to brush my teeth, regretted not because skipping those routines isn't good for my physical well-being but purely because it meant I'd leave a daily task incomplete--

Every time, in fact, that I thought of the things I want to or need to do every day in terms of whether I got to check a box, it brought home all over again that maybe, just maybe, task list gamification might be bad for me.

I think I still need some sort of task list manager--it could be an app, it could just be me writing a list of "What do I need to do today?" in my Morning Pages--because without lists I lose track of the day's wants and needs and, like I've said before, I just drift. (I've done a lot of useless drifting this past week, despite my best intentions.) But what I don't need is any further excuse to punish myself for failing to complete a task. I do that enough just in my own head--I don't need an app telling me how many hit points each party member lost because of my failure. And I need to retain a sense of doing the thing for the sake of doing the thing, not for the sake of checking a box.

OK, but no, I'm not leaving 4thewords any time soon. For one thing, it's not nearly as useful a tool for punishing my failures. If I don't make my 444 words for the day, I have oh so many stempos stockpiled for repairing my streak. For another, it's fun. It's got great community and lots of new content regularly and actively maintained software and a culture of listening to and respecting each other and please don't disillusion me on this point I could not take it

Anyway, that's where things stand for now.