Lex Friedman, writing at Lex on Tech about streaks in apps and games:

A streak is a loss-aversion machine you carry in your pocket. Every day you extend it, it gets a little more painful to lose, which is exactly why day 500 is harder to skip than day five. Apps with streaks aren’t building habits. They’re building hostages.

As someone who’s addicted to checkmarks, I feel the pain of being bombarded by streaks acutely. They’re everywhere, and they’re alluring.

I play six short games as part of my daily morning routine (Wordle, the Apple News+ Mini Crossword, Good Sudoku, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and Family Feud), and each one of them has some kind of streak mechanic meant to keep you coming back every day. They’re built into social media (thanks, Snapchat), fitness apps, and habit trackers. At one point, even my banking app encouraged me to build a daily streak of checking my balance by literally paying me to do so. (Joke’s on them; I would do that anyway because I’m a budgeting maniac.)

I believe there are specific instances where streaks can be beneficial, such as when you’re just starting to build a new habit and need all the motivation you can get. But before long, the point of any streak becomes keeping the streak alive, not actually improving your life or having fun, and that’s when they become a problem.

This is yet another example of companies trying to hack our natural brain processes for financial gain. Using positive reinforcement, they shift our motivation away from the initial intent (such as learning a new language) to a goal that benefits them (opening the app every day to continue the streak, thus boosting usage metrics and company profits). On the surface, it seems like a fun mechanic, and maybe that really is the intention behind some who implement it, but the impact is detrimental to users in the long run.

It was a hard-fought battle, but I’ve gotten to a place where I actively choose not to care about streaks of any kind. (The one exception is my 2,300-day Snapchat streak with my spouse, which in my heart of hearts I wish would break so I could get out from under the weight of it.) I ignore them as much as I can, and if I ever notice that I’ve broken one, I just move on and let it go without even looking for a loophole to restore it. I’ve had to do this for my own mental health; otherwise, I’d spend my days obsessively extending streaks that do nothing to make my life better.

This dynamic has also led me to cut down on the tracking apps I use. Habit trackers are amazing for forming new habits from scratch, but after a certain amount of time, any good habit tracker should render itself obsolete. If an action is truly a habit, you don’t need any external signal to perform it. At that point, tracking becomes all about streaks, and that’s where I say, “Thank you, next.”

Streaks aren’t required to have a successful app or business. I’m grateful for developers like Rebecca Owen of Chronicling who purposefully exclude streaks so users don’t feel pressured or guilty when tracking events. And I also appreciate what Florian Grossmann has done with On This Day, where streaks are available but can be hidden completely with a single toggle. I turned streaks off the day I downloaded it and haven’t been bothered by them since.

The fewer streaks in my life, the better. May it be so for each of us.

My thanks to Lex for writing about this subject, which I obviously feel passionate about as well. If you haven’t yet, check out his new website, Lex on Tech, where he's doing some really interesting writing every day.