[telchior]

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.

[joenot443]

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

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

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

[bigiain]

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

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

[Terr_]

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

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

[LaundroMat]

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

[smcin]

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