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My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-yea

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. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this article from a few years ago [0]. It's a piece by Duolingo's CPO (who was a former Zynga employee) where he discusses at length how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers. He has a lot to say about manipulating users into spending more time with them, but in the entire piece he barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn. The date he cites for the beginning of their efforts to optimize numbers pretty closely correlates to my sense for when my wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful. This past month they finally jumped the shark and she decided to quit after 6+ years. The subsequent announcement that they'd be using AI to churn out even more lackluster content gave us a good laugh but was hardly surprising: they'd given up on prioritizing learning a long while ago. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435

smallnix 1y ago
I think it's about expectations, for me it's my favorite mobile game with a minor learning side effect.
baq 1y ago
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?)
dbbk 1y ago
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
- deleted 1y ago
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- sarchertech 1y ago
  She doesn't read tech news like 99% of the population?
  - dbbk 1y ago
    Oh sorry I read this as she quit working at the company
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      I read that it that way at first as well.
busymom0 1y ago
> 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.
- gre 1y ago
  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?
  - latentsea 1y ago
    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.
Sanzig 1y ago
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).
- cogman10 1y ago
  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.
  - smcin 1y ago
    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?
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  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.
zdragnar 1y ago
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.
- lolinder 1y ago
  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.
- Treegarden 1y ago
  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.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    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.
morkalork 1y ago
Sounds like they suffer from the same illness as dating apps: Being successful means users graduating and leaving the platform.
- rzz3 1y ago
  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.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    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."
    - rzz3 1y ago
      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.
      - ben_w 1y ago
        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.
Aurornis 1y ago
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.
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jmward01 1y ago
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?
- crmd 1y ago
  >… 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.
  - jmward01 1y ago
    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.
- jajko 1y ago
  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?
teekert 1y ago
My daughter gave up because the mascot turned more and more scary (she’s not allowed to use the iPad that much). Any alternatives?
- recursivecaveat 1y ago
  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.
- ben_w 1y ago
  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://www.easy-languages.org/our-languages https://coffeebreakacademy.com/ https://coffeebreakacademy.com/ For kids… what about kids books in the target language?
- AlchemistCamp 1y ago
  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.
namenumber 1y ago
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.
- mattl 1y ago
  Yeah the first thing I translated on DuoLingo was the Wikipedia article for Ubuntu.
  - janosch_123 1y ago
    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.
    - mattl 1y ago
      Yeah it really helped me at the time as I didn’t know any Spanish but did know a lot about Ubuntu.
- telchior 1y ago
  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.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
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.)
huevosabio 1y ago
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!
- boringg 1y ago
  Woah. Comparing duolingo to civ is not fair to civ.
  - dinkumthinkum 1y ago
    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.
theoreticalmal 1y ago
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!
- lolinder 1y ago
  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.
- BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
  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).
- marssaxman 1y ago
  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.
nico 1y ago
What platforms do you think could fill that space up? Recently discovered brilliant.org, do you have an opinion about them?
jimbob45 1y ago
Hot damn six years is no joke. Is she fluent in any of the languages she’s attempted to learn?
zer00eyz 1y ago
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=P6FORpg0KVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUsDbgGQmIM 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?
boringg 1y ago
CPO from Zynga is quite a red flag.
- CSMastermind 1y ago
  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.
vasusen 1y ago
(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.
- cgio 1y ago
  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.
- hintymad 1y ago
  > 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.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    > 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.
techjamie 1y ago
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.
- baq 1y ago
  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.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  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.
  - AlchemistCamp 1y ago
    So trading daily time and effort for six years for an option on learning a language in the future?
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kozikow 1y ago
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
janalsncm 1y ago
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.
dlisboa 1y ago
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.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  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.
flopsamjetsam 1y ago
> 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.
jv22222 1y ago
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)
plantwallshoe 1y ago
People get some small joy and relaxation out of playing dumb games on their phone, better Duolingo than Candy Crush or scrolling TikTok.
g9yuayon 1y ago
> 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.
brailsafe 1y ago
> 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.
hoseja 1y ago
But consider I have no will to spare and need the green owl to nag me aggressively.
kemiller 1y ago
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.

smallnix 1y ago

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

baq 1y ago

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?)

dbbk 1y ago

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

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sarchertech 1y ago
She doesn't read tech news like 99% of the population?
- dbbk 1y ago
  Oh sorry I read this as she quit working at the company
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    I read that it that way at first as well.

busymom0 1y ago

> 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.

gre 1y ago
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?
- latentsea 1y ago
  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.

Sanzig 1y ago

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).

cogman10 1y ago
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.
- smcin 1y ago
  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?
toomuchtodo 1y ago
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.

zdragnar 1y ago

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.

lolinder 1y ago
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.
Treegarden 1y ago
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.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  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.

morkalork 1y ago

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

rzz3 1y ago
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.
- ben_w 1y ago
  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."
  - rzz3 1y ago
    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.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      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.

Aurornis 1y ago

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.

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jmward01 1y ago

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?

crmd 1y ago
>… 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.
- jmward01 1y ago
  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.
jajko 1y ago
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?

teekert 1y ago

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

recursivecaveat 1y ago
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.
ben_w 1y ago
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://www.easy-languages.org/our-languages https://coffeebreakacademy.com/ https://coffeebreakacademy.com/ For kids… what about kids books in the target language?
AlchemistCamp 1y ago
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.

namenumber 1y ago

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.

mattl 1y ago
Yeah the first thing I translated on DuoLingo was the Wikipedia article for Ubuntu.
- janosch_123 1y ago
  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.
  - mattl 1y ago
    Yeah it really helped me at the time as I didn’t know any Spanish but did know a lot about Ubuntu.
telchior 1y ago
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.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

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.)

huevosabio 1y ago

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!

boringg 1y ago
Woah. Comparing duolingo to civ is not fair to civ.
- dinkumthinkum 1y ago
  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.

theoreticalmal 1y ago

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!

lolinder 1y ago
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.
BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
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).
marssaxman 1y ago
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.

nico 1y ago

What platforms do you think could fill that space up? Recently discovered brilliant.org, do you have an opinion about them?

jimbob45 1y ago

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

zer00eyz 1y ago

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=P6FORpg0KVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUsDbgGQmIM 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?

boringg 1y ago

CPO from Zynga is quite a red flag.

CSMastermind 1y ago
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.

vasusen 1y ago

(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.

cgio 1y ago
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.
hintymad 1y ago
> 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > 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.

techjamie 1y ago

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.

baq 1y ago
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.
hombre_fatal 1y ago
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.
- AlchemistCamp 1y ago
  So trading daily time and effort for six years for an option on learning a language in the future?

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kozikow 1y ago

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

janalsncm 1y ago

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.

dlisboa 1y ago

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.

stephen_g 1y ago
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.

flopsamjetsam 1y ago

> 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.

jv22222 1y ago

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)

plantwallshoe 1y ago

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

g9yuayon 1y ago

> 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.

brailsafe 1y ago

> 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.

hoseja 1y ago

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

kemiller 1y ago

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.