Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2012. It describes the Aherk! Facebook app as it worked in 2012; the service may no longer exist, and Facebook’s rules for apps have changed a lot since then.
Many young people succeed in their studies even without being good students, and yet, once we reach adulthood, we tend to fail at many of our personal goals, whether that means saving a certain amount of money or finishing a business project.
The explanation could be “public pressure”. Being in the spotlight of public opinion makes a student work much harder, because they want to avoid being laughed at by their classmates, or their parents keeping their promise: “If you don’t pass, there’ll be no holiday this summer.”
In other words, we have a goal that we didn’t set ourselves, and if we don’t meet it, other people will impose consequences on us. That makes us try harder, and that’s exactly what the creators of Aherk! had in mind.
Aherk! is an app that supposedly helps us push ourselves to meet a goal through self-blackmail: we set ourselves a goal and a consequence if we don’t achieve it, and once again we put ourselves in the eye of public opinion, in this case our Facebook friends.
How does Aherk! work?
It’s simple:
- Install the Aherk! app on Facebook.
- Upload a photo you wouldn’t want anyone to see, one that would embarrass you enormously. Mind you, it shouldn’t be a photo that could seriously compromise you, cost you a divorce or land you in jail.
- Enter the goal you want to reach, the objective you want to achieve and the deadline. Your Facebook friends will know about this goal and, once the deadline has passed, the app will poll them. They’ll answer whether they think you’ve met the objective or not.
- If they say you haven’t, the app will automatically publish that dreaded photo. There’s no going back.
My opinion of this app
It clearly looks like kids’ stuff, although the truth is that, for some kinds of people, having extra motivation can give them a big push towards achieving their goals.
Before using this app, you should be able to trust your friends. In other words, they should be friends not just on Facebook but people you actually know, who can vouch in all honesty for whether you’ve met the goal or not. Otherwise, you might meet the goal and still have them say you didn’t, just so they can see the photo.
What kind of photo?
It should be a photo that makes you look like an idiot or ridiculous, but that won’t get you into trouble. On this blog you can see two kinds of photos that have already been used in the app; the embarrassment seems to rest on a face full of pimples in the man’s case and messy hair in the woman’s.
The entrepreneurs who developed the app say it works because, according to them, every time they made a bet they worked hard not to lose it, and the same would happen with this app. Not so much because of the photo, but because when the deadline arrives it’s human nature to take enormous pleasure in letting your friends know you’ve done it. And besides, it’s fun… I think.
Featured image: freestocks.org, CC0 1.0, via Flickr.
