Duolingo isn't even language learning. It's closer to tiktok, it produces dopamine without actually teaching very much at all.

Turns out that most consumers just want to feel like they're learning a language instead of doing the actual work, or in extreme cases, literally only care about maintaining their streak or leaderboard score.

Agreeing with you that Duolingo seems more like a nudging/psychological manipulation testbed with a thin veneer of language learning on top to provide legitimacy.

But what makes you think that this is because "most consumers just want" it that way? The whole effect of dopamine hits is to manipulate what users believe they "want". But you cannot claim to be working in the interests of your users after you manipulated them.

I.e. if a user installed Duolingo because they genuinely wanted to learn the language and than got sidetracked by all the gamification stuff, I don't think you can say they "really" just wanted to play games the whole time.

(Duolingo is walking a fine line here, which was probably the reason they picked language learning in the first place: Because in that field, users really do want a certain degree of nudging and manipulation, to help them keep up with the tedious process of frequent repetition.

That was sort of the official value proposition if Duolingo and I think the reason why many users installed it. It's also why many of the nudging strategies work at all, because they can assume a cooperating user.

But if you use the app, you can see that it frequently tries to push beyond that mutually agreed purpose: Trying to upsell you to the paid version, invite friends, take part in global leaderboard challenges, etc - all of which has very little to do with language learning)