We were wrong to delete streaks. The dopamine of an unbroken run is the product — that part was never the problem. The problem is the single second where it's taken away from you. So: keep every ounce of the pleasure, remove only the confiscation. Press the buttons and watch the same month get scored two different ways.
Not "tasteful." Photographed without being asked. If a customer never shows it to anyone, the design failed, no matter how correct it looks. Every surface has to earn a screenshot.
This lives entirely in the moment of marking: the weight of the fill, the spring, the tick, the resistance. It has nothing to do with metrics. If filling a dot doesn't feel good in the hand, no philosophy saves it.
Something happens that the person didn't design and couldn't predict: a pattern named back to them, a number they'd forgotten, a page that knew. Wonder is what turns a tool into a story.
We killed the streak because streaks punish. But a streak does two separate jobs, and we only had a quarrel with one of them. Job one is the pleasure — the tension of a run, the pull of not wanting to be the person who breaks it, the dots filling in. Job two is the confiscation — the instant it hits zero and a year of your life stops being displayed anywhere. We threw out the pleasure to escape the punishment, and what we were left with was virtuous and slightly boring: a savings account with no stakes.
The market already voted, and it voted for a merger, not either extreme. GitHub's wall is beloved because the whole year stays visible — the gaps never erase the greens. Duolingo had to invent streak freezes because the pure version churned people faster than it hooked them. Even the canon of streaks bolted mercy on. Nobody has yet built the version that starts there.
So the correction is one line on the page, and the whole doctrine survives it: current run and best run, side by side, both permanent. The run is exactly as tense as anyone else's while you're inside it. When it ends, nothing is confiscated — it's banked, and the all-time number keeps climbing. Same dopamine. No cliff.