The first version of this site had a leaderboard. Most frames posted, longest streak, most-liked photo of the week. It seemed obvious. Every habit app has one. Every photo community has one.
We ran it internally for a week with about thirty people. By day four, three things had happened, and all of them were bad.
People started shooting for the board
Not for themselves. The prompt on day two was the worst light in your house — a deliberately unglamorous exercise about working with what you've got. What came back was a run of technically competent, well-lit photographs that had clearly not been taken in bad light at all. Somebody had gone and found good light, because good light scores.
The prompt was designed to make you shoot something ugly. The board made shooting something ugly expensive.
The people who needed it most stopped first
The members with the least experience posted on day one, saw where they landed relative to everyone else, and went quiet. Two of them told us afterward they'd still been shooting — they just weren't posting it. Which means the board took the one thing we actually wanted (frames taken) and hid it.
Meanwhile the four most experienced photographers were having a great time. Leaderboards work beautifully if you're already winning.
A streak is a debt
By day six, the people with a six-day streak weren't enjoying day seven. They were protecting something. One person posted a photo of their desk at 11:52pm with the caption "streak." That's not practice. That's a tax you pay to an app.
The thing about a streak is that it only has power because it can be broken, and the moment it breaks, the app has nothing left to offer you. You've failed at the one metric it showed you. Most people don't restart.
What we kept
The roll. Every prompt still has a page where everyone's frames sit together, in the order they were posted. No counts, no ranking, no sort-by-best. You scroll it and you see forty other people took a swing at the same idea, and about six of them found something you didn't think of.
That turns out to be the entire useful part. The comparison that helps is oh, you could read it that way too. The comparison that hurts is you are 34th.
So: no leaderboard. If you want a number to chase, the only one we'll give you is the count of frames you've taken, and we'll only show it to you.