Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

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> You are limited in how long you can access their platform by how many hearts you have. Miss enough questions, your hearts run out. Run out of hearts, you're restricted from proceeding further in your studies. You must buy hearts to stay on their platform. This feels counter intuitive, as you are now kicking users off of your platform and lose the ability to sway them towards other things you have to offer.

Pro-tip: Hearts only exist in the app, not on the website.

As soon as they switched to the hearts system, I uninstalled the app and now exclusively use the mobile website. Considering their app is just a web view, the experience is essentially the same (you'll need connectivity at the start and end of a lesson), except no ads and no hearts!

As a plus, the website actually allows you to view the forum discussion on sentences, for example if your answer was wrong but you feel it should be correct, you can see what other people are saying about it. Why they don't offer this in the app is beyond me.

The decision to gate people's learning by restricting their number of attempts stupid. It's counter to the point of learning, but I guess they didn't feel they were getting enough revenue from just ads alone, so they have to kneecap the learning experience to force people into their over-priced monthly subscription.

> Why they don't offer this in the app is beyond me.

Lesson instructions are even weirder:

When you take the Japanese class in English, you can read the explanations for each lesson in the app. However, when learning French in German, the instructions _only_ exist on the website. If you use the app exclusively, you'll have to guess all the grammatical special cases through trial and error.

This is the difference between Duolingo created content and community created content. The Duolingo courses have a lot more to them in app form. It seems like it is a lazy implementation in the app to me.

I have a over 1000 day streak and I've seen the app change a lot over those 1000+ days. It is heading towards "why am I bothering with this?" territory to be honest. I also do Memrise, and their marketing is just as obnoxious, but the app is actually a lot better at doing the stuff DuoLingo used to focus on IMO.

You can also get hearts back without paying by doing what was previously known as 'practice', a random lesson of what you've previously learnt, by pressing the heart icon - on android, at least.

I think it's more complex, Apple's app store rules make it clear than an iphone app cannot be a clone of their website, and there must be a differentiating factor. Thus, hearts.

Another alternative (for Android) is to roll back to an earlier version of the app that was actually usable.

I use version 3.106.5 and I don't get any limitations on messages and there's a glitch where you can skip the ad by tapping where the 'X' will be before anything loads. Additionally, you can view the discussion in this version and submit change suggestions.

> As a plus, the website actually allows you to view the forum discussion on sentences, for example if your answer was wrong but you feel it should be correct

You can do this in the app. There is a button on the bottom right when you finish a lesson that lets you see the forum for the question.

What boggles my mind is that you cannot collapse parts of the conversation irrelevant to your inquiry about the question.

I like the hearts system. It makes me think about the answer more, instead of just hoping it's right.

You can see the discussion in the app, just click on the flag icon.

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