Duolingo is a gambling company masquerading as a learning resource. (Buy gems! Buy lingots! Increase your chance of loot drops!) Their entire business model is preying on addictive dark patterns. (Loot drop animations - so much colour and motion - so exciting! Don't let that streak lapse - buy a streak freeze now! Oh no, the owl is sad you haven't watched enough ads! You don't want to make the owl sad, do you? Duolingo for Schools available now!)
It's been apparent for a long, long time that pedagogical considerations have no sway in the direction of Duolingo. I'm not surprised to hear that they're planning to outsource customer support to AI. If anything, I'm amazed they haven't outsourced all their language courses to AI yet. Those are merely the colourful backdrop to the slot machine business that they're actually in. (Come to think of it, how do we know they haven't?)
Kudos to the mods. I have no idea why a bunch of language enthusiasts should be expected to work as unpaid support staff for a ghoulish casino app.
I’ve been regularly using Duolingo to learn Portuguese for the past almost year (according to my streak). All the “dark patterns” you describe have helped me stay on track. I actually appreciate the addictive nature of the app pushing me to use it every day since it’s helped me learn a lot of words so I can better communicate with a friend in Brazil. I haven’t paid a dime for any of it (but I’ve watched a lifetime of ads)
Fixing customer support seems like something they should do but I sincerely hope they don’t change anything else you complained about. Spanish or vanish, meu amigo
You paid a great opportunity cost. You could have been using something good for a year, rather than something designed to prey on your mind.
Every time you made a mistake, you lost a heart. Every time you lost your hearts, you were forced to watch an ad. That's great for Duolingo. You, on the other hand, spent a year being punished for making mistakes, which is the worst pathway one can possibly set up in a language learners' mind. I'm sure you can click on the words for 'Is the elephant under the chair?' very competently in the app now, but I'd be curious to see whether you've been Pavlovian-conditioned to fear making mistakes, and the impact that may have on your productive capacity in spontaneous language interaction contexts.
But hey, your brain is fungible, and VCs gotta get paid. That $14 billion valuation comes from somewhere.
Use it with PiHole, and all you get is the "Get DuoLingo Pro" (or whatever it's called) video. I always close the app (open the "task switcher" on the phone and swipe up to end) and relaunch it instead of watching the ads.
I spent a year learning a language on Duolingo, and I both agree and disagree:
1. Yes, the fact that Duolingo uses techniques to get you hooked on the app isn't some dark secret. On the contrary, Duolingo is very open about it. This is their marketing strategy—they want people to believe that Duolingo will help them get addicted (or, more positively phrased, "form a habit") to something useful and worthwhile, rather than being addicted to scrolling through social media.
2. Unfortunately, Duolingo seems to focus only on the "addiction" part, neglecting the "learning" aspect. To put it bluntly, Duolingo is not very effective at actually enabling you to use (communicate in, understand) the language.
It was only after I switched from Duolingo to truly immersing myself in content in the language that I started to gain the skills that (pretty soon) allowed me to use the language in real life.
That's the point, isn't it? It takes these dark patterns that predatory game devs/actual gambling apps have been researching and minmaxing for years and points them at something useful and productive instead (language learning). The result is a language learning app with very effective user retention and repetition, which is especially useful for a subject that requires lots of repetitive practice.
As far as I can tell there isn't any actual gambling and the microtransactions/lootboxes appear to be simulated and don't depend on actual money. This overall doesn't seem like a bad system to me. I think their overt dark patterns are intentional and are tripping your "this is malicious" sense when in fact I would give them kudos for using them in a way that is beneficial to people.
I guess it's been over a year since the reddit blackouts, we were due for more ludicrous drama and laughably inflated moderator egos. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar posts in other subreddits, at least until Reddit swoops in at someone's behest and threatens to take their toys away.
Duolingo only has themselves to blame though, I'm struggling to name another non-social media app who has cultivated a fanbase with such a weird parasocial relationship with it.
Reddit pitched companies that it was a place to meet the customer where they’re at. Fidelity customer support sits in /r/fidelityinvestments, for example, and this is mentioned both on their website and in the mobile apps.
That's all well and good but this doesn't seem equivalent to this Duolingo subreddit where mods and other users were providing support, and I am not sure why they spent so much time acting as unpaid customer support, as they mentioned. It seems like mods self-flagellate on reddit and eventually burn out.
Companies like like Google love "Reddit Requests" and pushing support to social media because it lets them skirt fixing their non-existent yet legally mandated customer support, helps them catch and avoid PR threads (before problems go "viral"), they come off looking like benevolent angels for providing selective public attention to solve one person's issue while not having to address systemic problems, and, of course, free labor.
After the Pixel launch, Google had this poor guy acting like a customer experience manager for the sub, escalating requests to Pixel team staff, acting as a direct liaison between Support and Engineering, and talking to angry Redditors all day, totally unpaid.
When I point blank asked him whether and how this multi-trillion dollar company was compensating him for his very real labor, he had a "but they're my friends" moment before finally realizing they were taking advantage of him. They got a good year out of him, at least. I suggested he sue.
A decade on, Reddit are scumbags for not addressing this at the business level, and any company using Reddit Requests is cheating customers out of an official, functional Customer Support experience.
What customer support is legally required? Just curious since I've had better experience with Google/etc related support than I have with things like most consumer electronics or appliance manufacturers.
Bottom line is that management just doesn't want to hear anything negative, ever. They're not going to read it and if their lackeys read it the lackeys know better than to tell them about it and risk their own livelihoods. Better for the shareholders if we just pretend everything is great all the time no matter what.
Readit News
It's been apparent for a long, long time that pedagogical considerations have no sway in the direction of Duolingo. I'm not surprised to hear that they're planning to outsource customer support to AI. If anything, I'm amazed they haven't outsourced all their language courses to AI yet. Those are merely the colourful backdrop to the slot machine business that they're actually in. (Come to think of it, how do we know they haven't?)
Kudos to the mods. I have no idea why a bunch of language enthusiasts should be expected to work as unpaid support staff for a ghoulish casino app.
Fixing customer support seems like something they should do but I sincerely hope they don’t change anything else you complained about. Spanish or vanish, meu amigo
Every time you made a mistake, you lost a heart. Every time you lost your hearts, you were forced to watch an ad. That's great for Duolingo. You, on the other hand, spent a year being punished for making mistakes, which is the worst pathway one can possibly set up in a language learners' mind. I'm sure you can click on the words for 'Is the elephant under the chair?' very competently in the app now, but I'd be curious to see whether you've been Pavlovian-conditioned to fear making mistakes, and the impact that may have on your productive capacity in spontaneous language interaction contexts.
But hey, your brain is fungible, and VCs gotta get paid. That $14 billion valuation comes from somewhere.
1. Yes, the fact that Duolingo uses techniques to get you hooked on the app isn't some dark secret. On the contrary, Duolingo is very open about it. This is their marketing strategy—they want people to believe that Duolingo will help them get addicted (or, more positively phrased, "form a habit") to something useful and worthwhile, rather than being addicted to scrolling through social media.
2. Unfortunately, Duolingo seems to focus only on the "addiction" part, neglecting the "learning" aspect. To put it bluntly, Duolingo is not very effective at actually enabling you to use (communicate in, understand) the language.
It was only after I switched from Duolingo to truly immersing myself in content in the language that I started to gain the skills that (pretty soon) allowed me to use the language in real life.
As far as I can tell there isn't any actual gambling and the microtransactions/lootboxes appear to be simulated and don't depend on actual money. This overall doesn't seem like a bad system to me. I think their overt dark patterns are intentional and are tripping your "this is malicious" sense when in fact I would give them kudos for using them in a way that is beneficial to people.
Duolingo only has themselves to blame though, I'm struggling to name another non-social media app who has cultivated a fanbase with such a weird parasocial relationship with it.
After the Pixel launch, Google had this poor guy acting like a customer experience manager for the sub, escalating requests to Pixel team staff, acting as a direct liaison between Support and Engineering, and talking to angry Redditors all day, totally unpaid.
When I point blank asked him whether and how this multi-trillion dollar company was compensating him for his very real labor, he had a "but they're my friends" moment before finally realizing they were taking advantage of him. They got a good year out of him, at least. I suggested he sue.
A decade on, Reddit are scumbags for not addressing this at the business level, and any company using Reddit Requests is cheating customers out of an official, functional Customer Support experience.
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