time for a rant about... Gympact

for those of you who haven't heard of it, it's an app in which you make a pact regarding how many times you will work out in the coming week, and how much you'll pay for every workout missed. so, say you decide you'll work out three times in the week, and will pay $10 for each missed workout, at the end of the week if you've only worked out once, then you pay $20 into a giant global kitty, and that money is shared out amongst the people who did meet their goal. your workouts are verified by a checkin at your gym (and it checks back on your GPS position at random intervals to make sure you haven't just pulled into the carpark, checked in, then driven off to KFC for a 3 piece feed), or via runkeeper.

sounds sweet, right?

well, mostly it is. i joined about 5 weeks ago, and started out with a $10/3 workout pact. i met my goal, and got $1.98 in rewards. the next week i was a bit slack and only worked out twice, so had to pay out $10. i decided then that if i thought a night on the couch was worth $10, i needed to up the ante, so the following week i upped my pact to $30/3 workouts, and fulfilled my goal (clearly everybody has a price!). However, my reward that week was a measly $0.98, which i thought was odd.
this week just gone, i again fulfilled my goal, and again my rewards were measly, so i started wondering why.

then i remembered, there was an update to the app a couple of weeks back, as people who work out at home were complaining that they couldn't take advantage of this very motivating app, and they added a third workout option - 'workout anywhere'. to use this option, you start your workout, stick your phone in an armband, and it verifies you're working out using the phone's gyrometer (it senses your jiggles, basically).

great for those who want to work out at home, but unfortunately the option that allows people to count their at home workout towards their pact also allows people to count sitting on the couch eating cheetos and shaking their phone through an episode of friends towards their pact.

so now i'm sad. they had a system that was moderately tricky to cheat, and it worked great, but now it's easy to cheat, and everybody loses. i'm not motivated to use it anymore, because really, what am i going to do with 98 cents?