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I got started on Duolingo back when it was still a "Help translate the world" app. I've always liked it for getting to dip my toes in a language and learn some basics whilst exploring the language myself through other methods, and I've shown my support of it by paying for Duolingo Super or whatever they're calling it for years on end whilst hopping on and off my language tracks.

But it's just so horrible now, constant gamification, attempts to pull me in with streaks and freezes and notifications and "did you know you can have us nag you even more"-breaks between the lessons I'm actually there for. It's gotten to the point where I'm just done because I've already paid for the service and i just want to be left alone to do the exercises, but they never let me get from one exercise to the next without having to go through at least two or three of those annoying "gamification and engagement" attempts.

Some (but not most or all) of Duolingo's social and gamification features/social nags/upsells/"reminders" default on but can be turned off in the settings. But yes it's out of control and a strong reaason to disable Auto-update on the Duolingo app to not constantly the ever-more-AI-driven-nags/upsells. DL is becoming its own antipattern in the quest for revenue $$$ growth at all costs, e.g. reducing the actual amount of language being learned, beyond a certain plateau. I've been saying that here for a couple of years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783

When I returned to Duolingo recently -- I used to use it heavily but set it aside for 2 years -- I counted 14 gamification popups in a row after my first lesson in a new language.

14! The damned popups lasted longer than the lesson had!

I switched over to Busuu, which has blatantly copied some of Duolingo's mechanics but at least uses them with a modicum of restraint.

This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams and I really wish it wasn’t. I still use Facebook quite a bit and I’m consistently frustrated by how degenerate the concept of a “notification” has become. Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta, I know it’s not a technical problem, I think it’s an organizational problem. For example…

Team A ships feature X and sets their KPI to some arbitrary measure of engagement. They miss, obviously, but instead of regrouping and hitting the drawing board, A doubles down and pressures Team B to point towards X in feature Y. A sees some marginal level of gain in engagement for X, obviously, so the intervention is deemed a success. 6mos later, Team A is asked to return the favor and add a modal pointing to new feature Z, per the request of Team B.

I don’t really know what the solution is except outside of careful org-wide watchdogging to ensure this sort of user-hostile engagement infighting gets nipped in the bud.

> Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta,

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher

> This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams

That makes me think about how everyone defining an operational alert/warning thinks theirs is very important, leading to so many that users time them all out and everyone loses.

It’s especially frustrating when DoorDash will happily use notifications for both order status/issues and spam various deal/promotion notifications. There’s simply no way to turn them completely off so you only get order status notifications on iOS.

I ended up disabling notifications completely (and eventually just deleting it)

You can get order status via SMS. That way you can disable all notifs

For the team that worked on a feature for month it's the whole world at the time of release. Being mindful that is not the end-users whole world, but just a tiny insignificant fraction is something easily lost in denial.

It makes you wonder whether they use the app themselves...

Yes, the popups/gamification/forced ads/social nags are hugely annoying and eat up the useful time in a (say) 15min learning session . Not excusing them, but you can turn off some but not all of the popups/gamification/forced ads/social nags, as an opt-out. But still an awful antipattern as defaults.

I disabled all possible notifications hoping I would only have the streak reminder, but no - it still abuses them with random crap. I then set an iPhone reminder for the streak, and completely disabled duolingo's notifications from the phone settings. Peace.

It still spams you after every lesson, but I often just kill the app when it does. Quite a few ads also fail to load due to Lockdown mode or my pihole (also when away from home, due to the vpn I always keep).

I may just be their worst customer, having never given them a cent or even clicked an ad (and often not even impressions). On the other hand a bunch of people use it because of me and follow me due to having a long streak, so maybe I'm still worth keeping around.

Yeah the first thing I translated on DuoLingo was the Wikipedia article for Ubuntu.

I finished the Spanish course many years ago (is finishing still possible?)

Thanks for reminding me it had page translations, I did a few of those and enjoyed it! Shame it went.

Yeah it really helped me at the time as I didn’t know any Spanish but did know a lot about Ubuntu.

Learning a new language to any degree of proficiency requires motivation. It's easy to start and hard to continue if you're not willing to put in the effort.

There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app.

In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their motivations don't appear to be good.

So I agree they go over the top with it, _but_ I reached fluency in Spanish in about 2.5 years and Duolingo was an indispensable part of it.

> if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app

Learning a language to fluency requires real commitment, and I’d say an app could never possibly do it on its own. One of the most key things Duolingo gave me was consistency and a lack of an excuse to constantly practice and learn. But you also have to (and I did) use the language daily, watch content in the target language, travel and speak with locals in the language, etc. I’m not sure where Duolingo ever claimed that it alone was enough to actually reach proficiency or fluency.

Duolingo’s gamification and streaks and leaderboards gave me a reason to put a lot of effort into learning the language, and I don’t know where I’d be without it. There’s a lot of things about Duolingo I don’t love but I’m incredibly grateful that it exists.

Yeah but the thing is people would stop use that if they already proficient on such language so duolingo give you a little incentive to make you as fast as possible to master language

Agreed. Duolingo started out on the right foot: they had gamification, but not too much of it, and they clearly cared about helping you learn. For a long time it was the most highly recommended app for learning new languages and that wasn't just naivete, it actually did work.

That's changed gradually over the last few years as they switched from using gamification in pursuit of learning to using a veneer of learning as a pitch to get people to try their game.

I sort of wonder whether they realized gamification works for certain kinds of tasks, but not for others, and then decided to design their language learning app for gamification, rather than designing a gamification system to support language learning. In other words, I don't think Duolingo's system can really make you fluent in a language, but what it seems to excel in is making you use Duolingo every day. In other other words, you always hear people talking about how long their streak is ("500 days!") rather than how well they speak the language.

It requires habit more than motivation. I was bored during covid and started Japanese and four years later im still keeping it going. I lost my motivation multiple times during those years (because good god what an ridiculous language coming from a European one), but my habit kept me going until i found my motivation again.

Exactly. For projects taking multiple years, eventually motivation will run dry. Good habits is what compels you to do the thing when you don't feel like doing the thing.

internal motivation means that someones acts without external stimuli, their drive comes from within, its internal. External motivation means that an external stimuli is used to make someone act. I.e. a monetary reward, or validation etc. When someone is internally motivated, they can have a stable state. When external motivation is introduced, it can replace the internal motivation and will. Now what happens when you then lose the external motivation, the external stimuli again? The internal motivation is gone and this means all motivation is gone, the act stops.

On top of this, some people say motivation is cheap, discipline is what matters.

In the case of language learning, the external motivation provided by gamification is supplanted by the external motivation of having access to conversations, music, movies and literature that you previously didn't have access to, or required third party interpretation to appreciate. Being able to converse directly is a massive boon in the right situations, such as when travelling where you need to know the language to get around, or when your coworkers natively speak that language but not your own.

Discipline is well and good, and if you're willing to put in the effort to become better disciplined to push through difficult things, I agree that you're probably better off. I do not agree that someone who already has that level of discipline would be hurt by a gamified system, though. The rewards of gamification on their own are fairly minimal, as they merely provide a (possibly false) sense of progress independent of their own assessment of how they are doing.

Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards cheapens the activity and makes it less enjoyable. Awarding me badges for brushing my teeth and taking out the trash is a great way to help me do boring tasks. Awarding me badges for having deep, meaningful conversations with my partner . . . not so helpful. Alfie Kohn has collected decades of studies and written about that in his book Punished by Rewards. It's one of the books I try to give away to friends and coworkers who are interested in the subject. The pro-gamification folks seem to want to pretend that they're doing something totally different this time and they can ignore all the previous data.

https://www.alfiekohn.org/topics/motivation-inside/

I disagree with this in principle. Gamification is something we should be very wary of because it is inherently bad. It reduces what you care about in an activity to points and a progress bar.

Instead of sticking with language learning because you have some intrinsic reason to want to learn it (or even a external one such as wanting a new job) you're substituting that with whatever Duolingo puts for their gamification. To the degree you engage with and are motivated by the gamification you are substituting your own metrics of success and progress for points and streaks.

And soon enough we end up here, where Duolingo has gamified their internal numbers and in doing so gamified your "learning".

Why do people prefer games over hard work while learning? Because this is how we used to naturally learn.

Kids having fun playing hide and seek? Wrestling and throwing stones? They are learning hunting/survival skills.

Today with more abstract knowledge needed it is harder, but the concept of making abstract learning a game again, is a very smart one in general. It of course fails, if engagement becomes the metric and not gaining knowledge.

But in your analogy, the base Duolingo app without its gamification is the gamification of learning a language.

The streaks and points and everything else is a gamification of gamification of learning.

That doesn't make any sense. Gamifying gamification sounds like giving your eng teams streaks for CLs that improve gamification, not just... gamifying more.

I have to say I think this is a to each their own type of thing. If the goal is to learn a language there’s no extra credit for your motivations or drive. There’s no uber mensch superiority between a person who leveraged gamification to practice or someone who steeled themselves with a few pages of Nietzsche before settling into a determined five hour rote study session.

I personally find the gamification of Duolingo over the top but I can’t argue it works with people it works with. My 11yo loves it and is top of their class in Spanish from bottom as a result. They’ve taught themselves a decent amount of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean along the way. I know they couldn’t have done it through sheer willpower and authenticity no matter what Kant would think of them - they’re 11 for gods sake. What parent wouldn’t be thrilled their child is becoming fluent in a language and picking up two others? Does it bother me they care about being in diamond league or not? Not in the least. If they were up selling or cross selling maybe. And I use this as a chance to talk about how insidious gamification could be if it were - or if it were in service of sucking their attention for profit ala social media and advertising.

That said, again: I get it this turns off many people. I suspect they’re totally aware of that. But for many people I’m 100% certain it helps keep their engagement over time in the skill they’re hoping to learn even if it somehow makes their success impure in the eyes of others. But for learning a language the success is in the language skill, not the process by which you acquired it.

I think it's more that the process of actually learning a language is much more time consuming than people expect. There's a sort of idea if you haven't done it before that you learn all the grammar rules, learn translations of each word, and then you're good.

But once you get into it you realise that doing this literally is both a massive task and also Sisyphean. Learning it like an algorithm you run through in your mind is way too slow. You have to just listen and interact with it enough that some other strange alien part of your mind can remember and understand it implicitly. It's a weird process to experience, when things "sound right" without knowing why etc.

Duolingo with it's single sentences, and especially how it tries to have 1-1 translations for everything is good, but not sufficient. It's best used as just a part of study, something to get vocab and a sense of basic grammar rules.

Why is it bad? Because their approach hits a plateau. The gamification at that point goes from good to bad. It's why people switch languages and learn like four at a time in Duolingo (bad for the alien brain bits that are trying to develop the one language) rather than stick with the one (because beyond a point it's more of the same level rather than moving up at a good pace)

It also kinda takes you away from going outside Duolingo and seeking out other things because if the gamification works you're doing that plus Duolingo rather than doing what's actually appropriate for your level

If the gamification is fully disclosed, I don't see the problem. People should be able to agree to game themselves, if it helps them complete a task they otherwise wouldn't finish.

But consent is key. Maybe we need regulation that compels companies to disclose these manipulative techniques in digital services. Give people the chance to opt in or out.

People should be allowed to game themselves. But this isn't language learners setting up little games for themselves to learn more. This is 1 version of gamification pushed on all of it's users, whether or not it would work for them (or at all).

Seems we need to define what is meant by "gamification" in this context.

If we're just talking about tracking and making visible streaks, vocab words learned, tenses mastered, etc. that seems fine; little different than in fitness training where one tracks workouts, miles run, pace improved, weights lifted, etc.. Adding in a few goals and milestones met can be helpful

OTOH, if we're talking about skewing the content to maximize psychological manipulation at the cost of actual learning, that is toxic gamification, and certainly against the user's goals.

Haven't used DuoLingo, so I'm not sure which one we have here?

I caught a random podcast with an early Duolingo employee who said all the same things: Much bragging about how they gamified their app to juice user engagement and growth, not even a feigned mention of optimizing for learning.

By now my friends who use Duolingo all know it’s a game, not a real learning experience. I think they got lucky and filled a void in the market for things people think they want (learning a new language) while avoiding the parts they dislike (the effort of learning).

It got recommended by default for years when people asked for an easy way to learn a language, but they leaned hard into the path of gamification instead of trying to improve the learning experience for those who wanted to learn.

(disclosure: I am no longer at Coursera)

When Duolingo added that viral post on Growth hacking, it caused quite a stir about the push-notifications and gamification tactics they use. Ultimately, we decided it wasn't worth it for Coursera to veer into edu-tainment.

However, it is interesting to watch how much gamification works in adding and retaining users. In 2023, Duolingo's marketcap was 5x of Coursera. Now at similar revenue it is 20x of Coursera.

As a user, I think Duolingo is over-gamified (stopped using it) but Coursera is severely on the other spectrum where it comes off as too bland/boring to keep up the motivation. I am sure there's a happy medium to be found between reminding users to engage in something hard while doing right by learners.

> In 2023, Duolingo's marketcap was 5x of Coursera

Maybe this is because Coursera requires a lot more effort? My pessimistic view is that most people do not like learning, let alone learning in their leisure time with their own bucks. On the other hand, Duolingo gives more people the false impression that it's easy to learn a new language. And check out their math and chess program. They are really really easy, like pre-school level easy. Naturally, more people would be using Duolingo.

> My pessimistic view is that most people do not like learning, let alone learning in their leisure time with their own bucks.

Sadly, I have come to the same conclusion.

I have been training and giving seminars for ages. I don’t think that I’m the world’s best teacher, but I’m not that bad.

Geeks can be fun to teach, because they actually enjoy learning. It’s really a fundamental requirement for our industry.

Non-geeks; not so much. I often try to teach non-geeks how to do some small thing (usually around using tech). They almost always basically tell me that they don’t want to learn. Instead, they want me to do it for them.

There are definitely geeks that have leveraged this, to become fairly wealthy, but I find it kind of depressing.

> Geeks can be fun to teach, because they actually enjoy learning... Non-geeks; not so much.

I think it's nowhere near as simple or binary as that... there's a whole individual(/group) psychology of useful gamification, it's not all dark patterns. I found this out before and during Covid when me and five people I know were trying to gamify our motivation for exercise/weight loss/daily steps/cardio/toning; then 2020 and Covid set fire to the entire field. Exercise/weight loss are obviously different to learning CS, but here's what I learned:

- some people like to set a private individual goal and measure their individual progess towards it, even(/especially) if outsiders can't see what it is ("X has 45% progress toward their weight-loss goal and 56% toward their cardio goal.")

- ...or just directly quote times for e.g. 1 mile run, 4 mile walk etc.

- some people love the social-media/blogging aspect of sharing within a defined group photos or daily diary of their activity. MyFitnessPal's social features

- some people like taking the drudgery or loneliness out of solo exercise, such as listening to audiobooks/podcasts, or apps like 'Zombies, Run!' or 'The Outbreak' which turn your walks into a survival adventure.

- some people like the leaderboard or group dynamic of smack-talk or one-upping their friends (e.g. Stridekick app, but it's $ beyond the free intro period, and it has terrible power consumption)

- some people like setting food/drink reward goals: walk/run/row/ski X miles to earn a beer/burger/donut/etc.

- apps like Strava are for hardcore athletes in a single sport, not suited to the general public, you can't say "This week I want to burn Y,000 calories" then achieve that that multimodally across walking, workout, fitness class, dance, running/cycling, swimming, carrying shopping home etc.

- some people really like a shared goal e.g. "this week our group will walk 25,000 steps"

- some people like the daily nag/reminder/motivator to (configurable) do their walk after lunch, evening workout etc. (smartphone/bracelet/watch knows when you've done them), or not break a streak

- some people like to motivate by donating (or wagering) for a good cause if they do/don't meet your goals/beat their partner

- I forget the name of the app that each week partnered you up with a different stranger and you had to try to beat them (Challenges/Strive/?)

- Fooducate is good for gaming nutrition and shopping, and has freemium add-ons for specific diet/exercise plans

- some people (esp. the smartwatch brigade) like measuring how exercise and diet affect/improve sleep quality

- and so on.

The leverage from revenue to market cap can mean a few different things. Duolingo may be overvalued, coursera undervalued, or both. In any case, the impact of gamification on revenue would be a better indicator of its direct efficiency. The rest is just creative charts on a slide.

Duolingo is really only useful at the A1/A2 levels anyway. Once you reach B1, you're pretty much past the point where the vocab and grammar basics from Duolingo is useful and you need to move on to other activities (watching TV in your target language, having conversations with native speakers, reading books in your target language, etc).

Early on, the Duolingo stated goals was to teach language to the point where it's learners could ultimately start translating documents. They were going to sell cheap mechanical turk style translation services. (Think captcha style translation)

Unfortunately as they got popular automated translation services got good enough that nobody was going to pay for a slightly better and slower translation enmass.

Once that happened, that's when it seemed like they dumped their goals of teaching language and instead focused on dark pattern money extraction.

I started using DL in 2019 and it was then still very much a respectable language-learning app for semi-casual users up to CEFR A1/A2/B1/B2 standard, with good user-contributed community forums (they killed those 3/2022, so they could milk them with AI to resell as an add-on - for me that act was the jump-the-shark telltale). Don't know about the goal of translating documents but that's something they'd want to pivot away from to get beyond a tiny niche audience. Some gamification and user evangeliation is good and necessary (users should be able to turn it off). If nothing else, DL's antipattern whenever they eventually crash will show limits on how far it can be pushed in the name of $$$ growth hacking. Meanwhile, bona-fide langage learners are jumping ship off DL. (Analogously, what is the point when Zynga/FB games Candy Crush/FarmVille/MafiaWars stopped being cool? or Pokemon Go? Ingress?) How much of the stickiness is from the thing being inherently hooked, vs the social competition agaonst your friends?

Even at those levels there doesn't seem to be any reason why you wouldn't be better off putting your time into Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ or Muzzy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzy_in_Gondoland , just to name some famously approachable beginner material.

To be a bit cynical about it: the typical DuoLingo player has probably been misled to some extent about its effectiveness, yes, but also many of them don't particularly want to learn a new language. I suspect that they're happy to be able to play a popular mobile game that everyone else is also playing without the stigma of being a "Candy Crush addict" and "timewaster". "I'm learning a language!" is the welcome figleaf. https://youtu.be/F3SzNuEGmwQ?t=243

I disagree. In Spanish, learning the subjunctive is essential and that’s part of B2, and I think Duolingo did a good job of teaching it. If you can’t understand “Que te vaya bien” even completing a purchase at a store would be a bit difficult.

> Once you reach B1, you're pretty much past the point where the vocab and grammar basics from Duolingo is useful

It drives me nuts that Duolingo's Japanese course does not explain grammar nor does it introduce new grammars fast enough. It's super boring to see です and ます most of the time, with occasional new grammar points thrown in. It's also strange that Duolingo introduces honorifics without context. This is super confusing. Who in the world would decipher a long string of characters out of a few really bland sentences?

Which would be perfectly fine. A1/A2 require plenty of time to master. I know the internet is filled with people going “i learned A2 in one week” but that doesnt mean that its really internalized.

It seems like with sufficient funds, Khan Academy could offer this experience (language learning) without the enshittification Duolingo demonstrated. Think how Evernote faded away, but for different reasons.

My girlfriend has been "learning" a language on Duolingo for about 5-6 years now, but rarely engages with her target language outside of Duolingo and some of her music library. She's been at roughly beginner level the entire time when, with proper language immersion and practice, she should realistically have a large vocab and be able to engage in casual conversation without looking up stuff. This is not the case.

I've just accepted for some time, to her chagrin, that she's effectively playing a game that just so happens to be language themed.

That's a feature, though. If she's too disinterested in making other moves like reading books or the news, then at least she still has that base Duolingo momentum that might make the move possible in the future.

People always assume the alternative to Duolingo is that everyone will start a habit of reading BBC Mundo in Spanish or something, and it's obviously not true for many if not most people. And that's fine, some people are only going to scoot by with a dilettante level of interest until they take a real plunge.

So trading daily time and effort for six years for an option on learning a language in the future?

5 minutes per day for a year or two is about equivalent to ~2-3 weeks of traveling to your country of choice and just trying to talk with people on purpose. It’s probably easier to do in Italy than in Finland, but ultimately nothing beats just being there. Duolingo might just be enough to give you an okish on-ramp to that experience.

I've got a 3 year streak and gamification was obvious to me on day 2. Some of their feature flag experiments are very in your face, too.

Still, 3 minutes per day is just about my tempo. I don't care about literally anything in there except the learning part and consistently doing only one lesson per day makes them very nice and polite most of the time - I feel like I'm in the 'beg-these-for-money' instead of 'milk-them-dry' cohort. (Or maybe I'm in the permanent 'lets-be-nice-for-them' long running experiment?)

Duolingo is just a mobile game where you role play learning a language.

Similar to how you role play being an emperor in Civ: you learn a thing or two but it's no where near what the real thing is.

That's fine as a game!

Woah. Comparing duolingo to civ is not fair to civ.

I have to say I very much agree with you. I think you learn a lot more about empires and resources with Civ than whatever Duolingo telling you it is for.

Sounds like they suffer from the same illness as dating apps: Being successful means users graduating and leaving the platform.

It doesn’t have to be that way; learning a language is a long process. I took about 3 years to reach real practical fluency, and I still have to say “what?” more often than I’d like and I still need to learn a ton of more advanced vocabulary. Duolingo unfortunately doesn’t offer any C1 content so I’m stuck using other methods.

Imagine the shareholders saying:

"Why settle for 3 years when you can milk people for a lifetime? If it takes 10,000 hours to master something," it doesn't but they'll likely use that meme, "and you plan to spread that learning over 72 years, they must not spend more than 22 minutes a day actually learning anything! The rest of the day should be adverts and retention."

I could see it as well. For me currently, I’ve completed 100% of the Spanish course, and I’d like to keep learning more, but there’s no more content. I think there’s a lot of more legitimate opportunities they could find, in the way of more content, to keep me coming back. Right now to be honest I just continue using it to maintain my streak, since I’m already fluent. But! I’ve recently started learning Italian, and maybe that way they can get a couple more years out of me.

I completed the Duolingo German course several times as they kept changing the course rendering the previous all-gold as more-to-learn. And the Esperanto course. Tried Arabic for a few years over the course of the pandemic.

I can hardly remember any of the Esperanto, I never even mastered the Arabic alphabet let alone basic phrases, and actually living in Germany rapidly revealed how mediocre it had been at teaching me German.

I stopped at a 2500 day streak, shortly after one of the big controversial UI changes.

Mindless optimization of basic "attention grab" metric is why the whole internet feels like a slots machine. Be it reddit, Facebook, YouTube, any google result

Thankfully this won't happen with LLMs, as compute is too expensive so execs can't just take an easy way out of optimizing for number of questions asked

A real question: did she actually learn a language? 6 years should be enough to be fluent at any language. My opinion is Duolingo just doesn’t work and never will. People are fooled by the gamification but it’s a time wasting app/game that gives an illusion of productivity. Like Minecraft with words.

Exactly, I did the free Language Transfer audio courses in Spanish and French and actually learnt some real useful basics of the language (they're very much introductory courses but very good).

Previously I'd spend far more time in Duolingo trying to learn and hadn't really learnt any useful language skills at all. I can see it being helpful for drilling some vocab if you were learning elsewhere, but it just doesn't work to actually learn a language.

> how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers

These two tactics per se are alright, right? If anything, I'd appreciate that Duolingo tries to keep me engaged. Besides, the more one spends time on learning language, the faster they learn.

The issue with Duolingo is not about gamification, but that translation is ineffective and boring, no matter how much gamification there is. Personally I find that the most effective way to learn a new language is starting with Comprehensible Input and then moving on with tons of output. Take Spanish for example, Easy Spanish, Dreaming in Spanish, Español Sí!, Extra, and Destinos offers lots of fun input for beginners. Paco Ardit's graded readers are great too.

Another problem with Duolingo is that it does not help listening comprehension at all. It turns out that we can only pick up sounds in context with tons of repetitions and combinations in consecutive sentences - a feature that is exactly what Duolingo misses. Yes, it has introduced listening and stories, but the amount of them is too little to be useful. Another lesson is that reading does not help improving listening much. When we read, we see individual words and phrases easily, while it's really hard to pick up individual words when listening. I didn't understand the difference and spent a lot more time reading than listening. As a result, my reading was at the level C1 yet I could only understand slow Spanish at the level of A2.

Right. Something that businesses don't appreciate enough is that while an unpopular decision may sound small enough that they shouldn't lose customers over it, not all of them were happy to start with.

The timing of when I finally quit Twitter was when they shut down third-party clients, but that was after I was already half checked out because it had been in decline for a few years already (predating the change in ownership.)

This is a theme for Duolingo... and they have been overt about it for a long time (first vid is a ted talk from a year ago!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FORpg0KVo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUsDbgGQmIM

(As an aside I hate that videos are now "source material" for a discussion... it feels somewhat lame).

> wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful.

I think this is a great bit of insight into what a lot of what the web has become! If they had been more manipulative and stepped up the quality and utility of the product would that have been acceptable to remain competitive vs something like tiktok?

> she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak

A friend of mine said the exact same thing. And then a YouTube creator I follow recently made a video where he said the exact same thing too about cancelling Duolingo because he had become more addicted to maintaining the streak than learning.

A streak where you actually learn every day makes sense to me. Missing a day and then paying money to maintain your streak doesn't. I know I missed a day, and if the streak isn't for me, then who is it for?

The thing is... when you're actually learning, the learning itself provides the dopamine hits generating a positive feedback loop to keep coming back and doing more learning.

Gamification of the streak itself means its wholly unnecessary for the app to facilitate learning to produce engagement.

Duolingo is the junk food of language learning. Always has been.

CPO from Zynga is quite a red flag.

Really seems like a lot of bad people came out of that company. It's surprisingly that they're widely accepted in the industry given how terrible that company's culture seems to have been.

This isn't my field, but I can imagine it is hard to optimize for learning only since the reward signal is clearly user engagement (meaning subscription revenue). Finding a reward signal that does both, help people learn -and- make money is hard. I am a Duolingo user and I definitely notice the gamification but I really don't know how it would be done better since that gets people engaged in an activity that is associated with learning. This is their whole job to find these signals, but honestly, what is it? What signal would you put in place that would keep users AND actually teach them something?

>… it is hard to optimize for learning only since the reward signal is clearly user engagement (meaning subscription revenue).

Schools can give reward signals for demonstrating subject mastery, or for tuition payment and attendance. It seems like Duolingo gamified the latter instead of the former.

Schools do have other resources Duolingo doesn't: Compulsory attendance (primary education) and certificates/degree programs that are required for jobs and other opportunities. I doubt Duoligno could easily create a meaningful degree/cert program but it could be an avenue to pursue. To drive home the point, would you consider going to a college that wasn't accredited and put in 4 years of effort + tuition? I'm not saying it can't be done but just learning as a goal is really hard to monetize.

Why education should be done for maximal profit? Oh the poor CEO, he just wants to bring more value to shareholders! Clearly folks are fed up with eventual inevitable result.

Things like education or healthcare shouldnt be privatized, since that always eventually ends up as profit-first game. The product suffers since milking is obvious, and quality of service is at best secondary concern.

Is is really that hard to see all this?

> My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak.

I found the same thing with one of the meditation apps. I was just maintaining the streak, but not getting anything from it, after about a year. I can't imagine doing that for 6 years, so hats off to your wife.

When you think about it, if Duolingo does a good job of teaching language, people will stop using it. It’s the same problem with Tinder: people who stay together delete the app.

My Duolingo streak is 37 days and I just jumped on to do a lesson and retain my position on the leaderboard. I feel like the app itself is right on the cusp of being a valuable learning tool compared to being a silly game. I am okay with the idea of paying for “just okay” teaching if it helps me stay motivated and interested in the content. That may change in the future, I guess we’ll see!

What you're missing is that it's right on the cusp of being a learning tool instead of a silly game because it has regressed below the cusp. It was a useful learning tool, and its trajectory has been strictly downward for years now.

If it's working for you, don't let the negativity get you down! A year of daily Duolingo got me far enough along that I can now generally follow YouTube videos, news articles, and Reddit threads in the language I've been learning, with the occasional dip into Google Translate for unfamiliar words or phrases. The feeling of being able to just listen or read, and not have to consciously translate, felt like a door opening up in the world - a powerful motivation to keep working at it. Duolingo may not work for everyone, but in my experience there really has been value in it.

I found that with other study options, I learn faster and get tired less quickly (since they are less “puzzle-y” and more just language learning plain).

This isn't a secret though, their CEO openly said on the Decoder podcast this is their strategy so I don't know how that passed her by

She doesn't read tech news like 99% of the population?

Oh sorry I read this as she quit working at the company

I read that it that way at first as well.

My daughter gave up because the mascot turned more and more scary (she’s not allowed to use the iPad that much). Any alternatives?

It's a little bare bones for someone young, but you could try Anki. It's a generic spaced-repetition app, so you would need to grab a deck of flashcards from the AnkiHub community for your language of choice.

As an adult learner:

For apps, I use Clozemaster and Babbel. Unfortunately Babbel is starting to feel like it's also chasing gamification, but it does have sensible content.

For podcasts and YouTube content, I follow EasyGerman and Coffee Break German, and both are part of larger brands for other languages:

https://www.easy-languages.org/our-languages

https://coffeebreakacademy.com/

For kids… what about kids books in the target language?

Not knowing what language she’s learning, it’s a bit tough to say. Many have an app with lots of reading material with audio and assistance tracking learned words, tap to dictionary lookup, etc. It’s a pretty good category and a lot of kids enjoy them.

I think it's about expectations, for me it's my favorite mobile game with a minor learning side effect.

I 100% get this, but I will say that the gamification has meant I've stuck with it for a while. I don't know if it's out there, but I'd love something with better teaching methods, but just enough gamification to keep me going.

Hot damn six years is no joke. Is she fluent in any of the languages she’s attempted to learn?

Duolingo, Facebook, Google, yada, yada. I'm not sure why, but it seems like when a vc track co. becomes a unicorn they game their own system into the ground almost every time. (no pun intended)

People get some small joy and relaxation out of playing dumb games on their phone, better Duolingo than Candy Crush or scrolling TikTok.

What platforms do you think could fill that space up?

Recently discovered brilliant.org, do you have an opinion about them?

> barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn

This was the impression I got from the app the first time I tried it, which had to be some time before 10 years ago (not that I'd suggest nobody gets any value from it, I assume mileage varies). It just seemed to reduce an inherently arduous and deliberate effort into something that was primarily easy and gratifying. There's a very lucrative market in convincing people they've learnt rather than entertained, whether it's through easily digestible YouTube videos (a trap I've fallen into) or apps that intensely use gamification elements.

There's a difference between the concept of delivering better methods of learning or easier access to good information, and delivery mechanisms that try to make it as fun as scrolling Instagram, in my mind anyway. Coursera actually has some really solid learning paths, and free university lectures are invaluable, but even those aren't effective if you don't deliberately allocate significant time and mental energy into grinding through the stuff you don't understand, and this seems just as true for languages.

So it just always seems like a false promise to me, at least beyond the premise of making it more approachable at the outset, and I guess it doesn't surprise me that things seem to be further going in a lame direction.

But consider I have no will to spare and need the green owl to nag me aggressively.