Idk how to feel about this specifically but I kind of hope they come for Duolingo next. They are up to some similar mind hacking shit to keep people from leaving. There's the downright abusive streak management tactics that have become a major part of their brand and PR, and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub. They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them, as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again. I don't know what the solution is but I've known multiple people now who've gotten frustrated and blamed themselves for not being able to advance their skills with a language, but Duolingo's business model, like Tinder's, is completely opposed with the goals of their users. If Duolingo R&D discovered a magical new method of making you fluent in a language overnight, they would not sell it to you. Tinder R&D might have discovered the actual honest-to-God formula for True Love years ago and burned it because they can make more if you swipe forever.

Funnily all of Duolingo's retention mechanisms (formemost streaks and leagues) have the exact opposite effect on me. I am only moderately encouraged by success and extremely discouraged by failure. That means keeping the streak up is stress for me and failing a streak leads to a big negative impact on my motivation for the failure and a positive reinforcement of not doing it because then the stress goes away and that is nice. They literally train my brain not to use their app.

I think you're giving Duolingo too much credit.

Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.

People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.

I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.

This is pretty much everything in business these days. Medicine too. Nobody is interested in solving your problems for a price. They are interested in selling you a never-ending service or subscription that you pay for over and over.

Devil's advocate here (not associated with Duolingo, and in fact I haven't even used it):

> They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them

The same would be true if that case was never considered, or postponed, during development.

I tinkered with my own toy learning platform; I too found the question of how to deal with added content to an already-completed lesson, and the answer is that there is no easy answer. Every solution sucks in a way.

> as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again

Anki does the same, calls it "spaced repetition" and says it's a feature. Should we ban Anki now?

duolingo is pretty bad overall, sadly most better alternatives [zB: anki flashcards] are a bit less shiny and more difficult to set-up for less tech-oriented people

This is the owl image I got when I finally made it to the “delete my account” page: https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg

actually language learning is complex enough that they could build new products/ features to retain users and still deliver value. But for some reason they don't

> and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub

They don't need to design for that. If you want to become proficient in the language, you'll have to use the language for something. Whatever lessons Duolingo provides, they won't get you to become proficient in a language.

I uninstalled duo lingo in a day recently. The actual app icon changes to a red faced angry owl if you wait too long to refresh your daily activity.

I switched my launcher so I could customize the icon, but Duolingo overwrites it.

This is not a toggle feature.

Damn them, so it's gone now.

Duolingo is a shitty company, they don’t care about education, only retention mechanics and dark patterns. The CEO called his employees communists because they wanted to make the product beneficial for users instead of a money extraction machine.