> Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.

That's overly harsh. I use Duolingo for Japanese because

- I thought it would be fun to learn a little about Japanese. And I do learn some, and it is fun.

- I wanted to "understand" a bit of what was being said during subtitled anime I watch. This was _partially_ successful. I understand some words, and I notice some things like "oh, that was a question", and sometimes notice when what was said doesn't match the text. I get enough out of it that it adds to my enjoyment

So, clearly there's a group of people out there that are there to gain some knowledge out of it, and _not_ to rack up some kind of score (and feel superior).

Sorry, that came out as unnecessarily harsh on users when it was intended for Duolingo’s product department. I don’t mean to suggest that the amount of language learning is literally zero, just that whenever language learning is in tension with legible metrics, the latter tends to win out internally.