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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?)
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.
> 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.)
(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.
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?
> 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!
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.
For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower.
I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo.
Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference.
When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that.
IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)
Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago.
This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech problems.[2]
“It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” [3]
Duolingo is for getting to an A2 level. It’s hard for most people to get much value from trying to read a book or talk with someone unless they’re at least at A2 level
> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people.
odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
Side note: the linked articles are really disturbing, particularly in regards to the growing numbers of illiteracy worldwide and - absolutely astonishing for me - the extraordinarily high number of education/job requirements mismatch in Western countries (first link and then directly to OECD report). This suggests that we're doing education wrong with the US leading at 25%.
I stopped using duolingo regularly about a month ago. It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. You can get 10+ pop-ups after a lesson. The friend feed is cluttered with meaningless achievements. The web app is tolerable, but the phone experience is miserable. But if you're behind a computer and keyboard, there are much more effective ways to learn. Busuu is a much warmer product on either device, with videos of native-language speakers to help with listening.
Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.
This might be a nice time for me to plug the FOSS software I've been quietly building over the last ~3 years for English speaking learners of Finnish specifically. I've recently collected them all onto a little landing page at https://finbug.xyz/ .
I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.
Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value. If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then I’ll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.
I was happily paying for Duolingo Super, despite being unconfident in its pedagogy, until they announced they were replacing their human curriculum writers.
Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual money for a service, I want said money going to humans.
If an LLM is what's going to teach me a new language, why would I ever pay some middleman $100-200 a year for an app wrapper? This guy doesn't seem to realize that embracing AI-first doesn't just put his employees on the chopping block, it actually suggests his whole company is unnecessary.
This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.
I wish I had the funds and a curriculum expert on my side to build a language learning app with LLMs.
Part of my PhD thesis[1] was to study how robots (voice agents) can influence human language. The key component is a social connection. Back in 2017 I did that in the lab. But the research is pretty clear about it.
Also my own experience (trying to learn Arabic) is, that I only remember words/phrases which I picked up during social gathering (camping in the dessert).
The "perfect" learning app would work like how children learn: by interacting with their social surroundings. No need to learn the vocabulary or the alphabet at the beginning.
The hard part is, to create a social interaction between the learner and the AI that evolves over time.
Slight tangent. I remember many jobs ago when our CEO went on a mobile-first campaign. I literally watched him talk about the type of innovations we were making to cater to our customers, while I was writing a regex to redirect mobile to m.example.com.
Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data. We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion dollars.
I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's ok, because quantum is going to change the game.
The leaked AI memo had phrases like “productivity expectations will rise” and off comments about how they now know that LLMs “work better with context”.
It felt like the Duolingo CEO saw the trend of companies embracing AI coding tools and tried to come up with a way of being the on of the most extreme thought leaders in going “AI first”, without really understanding anything beyond surface level.
Duolingo has seemed like a very sketchy app to me for a long time. I have used and recommended it when it first came out. However, when I used it more seriously, I realized he Duolingo is nearly pointless. It is pretty terrible way to fool yourself into thinking you are learning a language. It is at best a way to kind of get familiar with the language but it is not a primary or secondary resource, perhaps more of a fifth or sixth resource and only then more as a break. I think you can just spend a lot of time on Duolingo, which they want, accomplishes nothing at all other than accumulating their useless badges. If they want to go “AI first,” I invite to consider just shutting down their business altogether and tell people to just use ChatGPT for learning, or better yet, with their vision of the future, just tell people not yo bother learning another language at all.
> “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with AI, but I do know it’s going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we have to get ahead of it,” admits the man who just a few weeks ago crowed about how vital AI was to Duolingo’s business.
> “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.
We don’t know what is going to happen, but we can plainly see what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has been absolute garbage. We’re not responding with fear or curiosity. We are responding with disdain.
To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success and I later have to eat crow, that’s fine. I’m a wealthy CEO, who cares?
As for me using Duolingo, I think I’m going to switch to live human tutoring over video and/or in-person.
Anyone who doesn't think that AI is going to disrupt everything in software hasn't watched as software ate the rest of the world. this is the latest iteration.
For the most part consumers do stuff like this and then change their minds or forget about it. Boycotts like this rarely work. Don't overestimate the conscientiousness of the average consumer. Duolingo is still going to do this, and probably get worse, and users will continue to use it.
I'll chip in with my shameless plug - Latudio [0]. A language learning app where all the content was written and audio recorded by real humans™.
We purposedly went that way, with no ads and a one-time payment option.
I feel that human touch is what makes our interactions special as everyone is different, unique, imperfect while being the same like everyone else, in a way...
Howewer as a relatively new and bootstrapped app in the market we have still some way to go. As a next step we are investigating how to add audiobooks and podcasts. Would someone be interested to cooperate?
I've never had the pleasure of experiencing DuoLingo myself, but by all accounts it's an exceptionally time-inefficient way of learning a language. If the objective is to have fun playing a buzzy mobile game with the rest of the world then whatever, but if you actually want to make progress in a language you'd be much better advised to head over to something like Refold https://refold.la/ or Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ . Even if you simply must have a phone app which does everything for you, you'd probably do better with something like Busuu https://www.busuu.com or Glossika https://ai.glossika.com/ .
So the AI furore is a bit ironic: people profess to hate "bullshit jobs", but if anything is a bullshit job it's probably providing the manpower for a language-learning app which doesn't actually teach languages effectively. Replacing mechanical-Turk slop with AI slop probably is a genuine productivity gain unleashed by AI here, yes? OTOH a drop in subscriber numbers and total user-hours is probably a good thing too, so don't let any of this put you off from giving up on DuoLingo.
I’ve worked in AI for years (and still do!), but something about the callousness of his comments, the almost celebratory replacement of human labor, immediately made me delete Duolingo. I was a daily user and have switched over to Pimsleur.
Kind of funny to watch the crazy AI hype group-think that probably originates in the CEO group-chats gradually evaporate as reality hits that AI is a useful tool instead of a be-all, end-all.
[+] [-] lolinder|9 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] namenumber|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zdragnar|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aurornis|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vasusen|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Sanzig|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] techjamie|9 months ago|reply
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|9 months ago|reply
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?)
[+] [-] huevosabio|9 months ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] morkalork|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kozikow|9 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] dlisboa|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] g9yuayon|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|9 months ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] zer00eyz|9 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] busymom0|9 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] boringg|9 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] flopsamjetsam|9 months ago|reply
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.
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[+] [-] eigenspace|9 months ago|reply
I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo.
Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference.
When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that.
IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)
[+] [-] whyowhy3484939|9 months ago|reply
This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech problems.[2]
“It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” [3]
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad...
[2] https://archive.is/zCxBl (The Atlantic: the elite college students who can't read books)
[3] https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 (Financial Times: are we becoming a post-literate society?)
[+] [-] qgin|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzeek|9 months ago|reply
odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
[+] [-] frm88|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] cyanydeez|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] amsilprotag|9 months ago|reply
Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.
[+] [-] hiAndrewQuinn|9 months ago|reply
I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] i80and|9 months ago|reply
Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual money for a service, I want said money going to humans.
[+] [-] thenberlin|9 months ago|reply
This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.
[+] [-] BrandiATMuhkuh|9 months ago|reply
Part of my PhD thesis[1] was to study how robots (voice agents) can influence human language. The key component is a social connection. Back in 2017 I did that in the lab. But the research is pretty clear about it.
Also my own experience (trying to learn Arabic) is, that I only remember words/phrases which I picked up during social gathering (camping in the dessert).
The "perfect" learning app would work like how children learn: by interacting with their social surroundings. No need to learn the vocabulary or the alphabet at the beginning. The hard part is, to create a social interaction between the learner and the AI that evolves over time.
[1] https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/7da0e989-aa9f-4b92-86bd-92...
[+] [-] foxfired|9 months ago|reply
Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data. We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion dollars.
I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's ok, because quantum is going to change the game.
[+] [-] Aurornis|9 months ago|reply
The leaked AI memo had phrases like “productivity expectations will rise” and off comments about how they now know that LLMs “work better with context”.
It felt like the Duolingo CEO saw the trend of companies embracing AI coding tools and tried to come up with a way of being the on of the most extreme thought leaders in going “AI first”, without really understanding anything beyond surface level.
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Apreche|9 months ago|reply
> “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.
We don’t know what is going to happen, but we can plainly see what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has been absolute garbage. We’re not responding with fear or curiosity. We are responding with disdain.
To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success and I later have to eat crow, that’s fine. I’m a wealthy CEO, who cares?
As for me using Duolingo, I think I’m going to switch to live human tutoring over video and/or in-person.
[+] [-] InTheArena|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] landl0rd|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vitro|9 months ago|reply
We purposedly went that way, with no ads and a one-time payment option.
I feel that human touch is what makes our interactions special as everyone is different, unique, imperfect while being the same like everyone else, in a way...
Howewer as a relatively new and bootstrapped app in the market we have still some way to go. As a next step we are investigating how to add audiobooks and podcasts. Would someone be interested to cooperate?
To se what's inside: [1]
[0] https://www.latudio.com
[1] https://www.latudio.com/whats-inside
[+] [-] leoc|9 months ago|reply
So the AI furore is a bit ironic: people profess to hate "bullshit jobs", but if anything is a bullshit job it's probably providing the manpower for a language-learning app which doesn't actually teach languages effectively. Replacing mechanical-Turk slop with AI slop probably is a genuine productivity gain unleashed by AI here, yes? OTOH a drop in subscriber numbers and total user-hours is probably a good thing too, so don't let any of this put you off from giving up on DuoLingo.
[+] [-] jwilber|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bgwalter|9 months ago|reply
Of course, DuoLingo is superfluous. Watching movies in the target language with subtitles in you own language is more fun and has quicker results.
[+] [-] 9cb14c1ec0|9 months ago|reply