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Re:Show HN: Dopamine API – Turn any app into a habit by gingerlime on Friday June 10, 2016 @03:51PM (#11879473)
Looks neat, and we might give you guys a try. I'm wondering about a couple of things that weren't super-obvious to me from the website and video alone:

* does it work with a web-app? I saw curl examples, so probably it does, but what about those reinforcements?

* speaking of which - apart from two simple popups on the video, is there a "library" of cool reinforcements to use?

* not trying to underestimate the science behind this, and just playing devil's advocate here - did you test the actual difference between your algorithm and a semi-random/ultra-basic reinforcement trigger? (something along the lines of `if reinforcements_today < 3 && rand() > 0.7 then reinforce()`)

Re:Show HN: Dopamine API – Turn any app into a habit by tdaltonc on Friday June 10, 2016 @04:34PM (#11879793)
On your final point: Totally reasonable question. It's one of the first ones we asked ourselves (no one wants to work on a random-number-generator-as-a-service). We've seen simple reinforcement schedules increase average engagement by 3-8%. Our optimized schedules get about 10x that and up to a 60% increase.
Re:Show HN: Dopamine API – Turn any app into a habit by RAB1138 on Friday June 10, 2016 @04:22PM (#11879702)
hey @gingerlime, I'm Ramsay, Founder @ Dopamine Thanks for the feedback!

1.) We're releasing our web sdks next week: A PHP version and a Python version, each with a JS frontend wrapper. If you email me at [email protected] I can poke you when it's shipped!

2.) We do! To get dev's off the ground we released a library of popups with different icon images like you saw. You can modify parameters like color, duration, copy.

AND you can arbitrarily call any UX-updating function from the code that handles the Dopamine API's response. This lets you map a response we give you to any function in your app. We're sprinting to deploy a way to do this more elegantly on the integration dashboard also.

3.) Yes, we did. TL;DR: We outperform alternatives that devs are resorting to right now. @tdaltonc: care to chime in?

Re:Show HN: Dopamine API – Turn any app into a habit by gingerlime on Friday June 10, 2016 @04:52PM (#11879926)
Thanks for answering all my questions. I'll ping you guys and see about testing this out. We created a learning platform for anatomy[0], and gamification and motivation is one of the things we know we can and should improve. Sounds like dopamine can be a good fit.

p.s. I really like the name!

[0] https://www.kenhub.com