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Comment by HomeDeLaPot | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I wonder if the growth is going to last. Another commenter mentioned feeling that questions have gotten easier and there are fewer prompts to write full sentences. Maybe Duolingo is finding the right balance of difficulty, or maybe they're focusing on growth hacking instead of making an effective learning product. If so, users might eventually realize this and decide they'd rather use a different app or learning method. I'm hardly qualified to judge, but on the other hand, as someone who's used Duolingo a bit in the past, the constant gamification features and notifications can feel a bit too manipulative.

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I suspect there's a reason his graph ends 8 months ago.

The endless gamification, nagging, and destruction of useful features would have driven me from the site. But because I'm a technically inclined, instead they drove me to sideload an "outdated" version of the app. Amusingly it still uses the same API, so you get all the core features and then some (turns out premium or not is a client side check lol) without any of the increasingly intolerable junk of the new app.

But what I have also noted is that the activity of users seems to have fallen off a cliff, which I'd tend to assume is because the number of users has fallen off a cliff. I went from a high activity user to a near zero activity user (Memrize is a much better primary tool for learning languages now IMO) yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left.

If anything Duolingo seems to be a warning about the dangers of pursuing the maximization of metrics at any cost. Work on making a better product and utilize metrics to see how you're doing. Work on mindlessly maximizing those metrics instead and you risk not only destroying your product, but also destroying your ability to measure the damage you're causing.

> his graph ends 8 months ago.

Personally I have found no joy in duolingo now that they forced a completely linear path in the tracks. I abhor it so much that I am against using it. i had like a 1000 day streak and they took that away from me through a technical issue but that's not even something i really care about... the lack of options in what i choose to and want to learn next is 1000% a worse product ux choice.

> yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left.

In my experience, Duolingo puts you with other folks who had a similar score to you in the previous league. I at one point was learning Italian aggressively, getting multiple thousands of points a week. I then had a week of vacation where I only did one lesson a day (totaled ~100 points that week) and was demoted. The next week, everyone I was paired with had faaaar fewer points than 'usual'.

I think it's more than this - it feels pretty unclear that the "league" feature is real in any sense.

There's no particular reason to believe that the other users and scores in the league you're in represent other real-world humans, and could simply be generated algorithmically to put you at a specific point in a score distribution based on A/B testing for what works the best to keep people engaged. And if they do pull real human scores into that list, they don't necessarily need to make that list consistent between users; so if you get second place, the real human whose score is shown in fourth place could be looking at their own wholly separate list in which they were second (with a userbase as large as Duolingo, I think of these two things as largely isomorphic). As far as I know, Duolingo doesn't document or discuss the mechanics of league formation, so even if they were manipulating outcomes like this it wouldn't be outright lying.

My experience doing Duolingo regularly was that my own score would vary significantly week-over-week based on my time and effort, and I would always land somewhere in the top four-ish spots in the "league" I was in regardless. If I were really being put together with a set of humans at the beginning of the league and the scores just played out organically, I would expect to occasionally win big or get demolished, but that never happened to me.

And my guess is that being competitive towards the top of the league but not consistently winning is the best for user engagement, so they'd have every reason to fake/engineer that outcome.

Duolingo’s product and growth teams fell into a Moloch [1] trap.

“From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.”

Each individual team is incentivized to drive their metric forward.

Done together as a whole company, this leads to all metrics dropping.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

It might not necessarily be a focus on growth hacking. It's a hard balance even for actual educators.

If you make the learning process too boring or difficult then casual learners won't even get started. The techniques won't get you far but they'll get you far enough to the point that you can start learning on your own once you're more disciplined. I wonder how Khan Academy solves this and if Duolingo can (or even wants to) learn from it.

I understand this mindset but, with all due respect, I'd also appeal to the pragmatic reality.

The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period. Even when "forced" to. I somehow managed to take 3 years of Spanish in school - and maintained a 4.0 in it. I can count to ten, ask you your name, and say a bunch of bad words. Woot for a smart kid gaming education that wants to be gamed anyhow so they can report happy figures to the government. I pretend to learn, they pretend to teach, and the government pretends to care. We all win! Unless the goal is to actually have people able to communicate in Spanish.

I suspect that's a big part of the reason Duolingo can credibly claim that 'x' hours of Duolingo is equivalent to 2 college semesters. Those people in college are disproportionately doing it to fill out a language requirement for graduation, not because they want to. By contrast everybody on Duolingo is there exclusively because they want to be.

Rants aside, the point is that it makes much more sense to focus on the users who actively want to learn than trying to lure in those that don't and somehow hoping to convert them. And I think this is the exact path Khan Academy takes, which is why people still rave about Khan Academy while Duolingo, especially in its current state, is something relatively few are going to have especially glowing things to say about.

My experience: I decided to try a new language on Duo a couple months ago. I unfortunately used the word bubbles because I was too lazy to learn to type Cyrillic.

The result was, after 2 months, that I could spell nothing and knew almost no words. With the prompting from the word bubbles, it's far too easy to click on words and think you're learning. They don't even do a good job of providing high-likelihood alternatives in the word bubbles. Is it тут там or теш? Well, when you're "writing" a sentence with word bubbles, there's only one 3-letter word that starts with a T, so that's the one.

I finally learned to type Cyrillic and was embarrassed and very annoyed to realize that I actually knew virtually no words once I had to type them out.

I think it's exactly as you said: Duolingo pretends to teach, and users pretend to learn.

You've seen the worst side of Duolingo. Duolingo is rubbish for learning most languages, but the Russian and Ukrainian courses are particularly bad.

Not only do they not really teach you the Cyrillic language foundation, but they don't teach cases and tenses. The whole course is trial and error until you learn the handful of phrases they added in.

I think French and Spanish are the only courses on Duolingo that even give proper teaching, probably because they cover most people (Spanish for US citizens, and match up with US/UK school language curriculums). The rest of the languages have much shorter courses, with less content, no teaching, and poorly structured courses, mispronunciations.

My Russian other half forbade me from learning her language with Duolingo.

I started Ukrainian in Duolingo and 4 months later I can sorta kinda understand tweets in Ukrainian. The primary limitation is my vocabulary, I have to compensate by guessing through similarity to other slavic language. I can get gist of meaning from Ukrainian youtube videos.

With languages, passive understanding comes first, always. The active one is different and harder skill.

> The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period

This is not true tho. I never ever had intrinsic motivation for languages. I never liked learning them. Even as I knew my future literally depends on me learning good English, I just kept doing bare minimum I could get away with. Fact is, I knew 2 foreign langues very well - I was fluent in both.

And now, my kids do not like learning foreign languages. But they have them in school and do duoling. While they dont like classes much, they are actually progressing and one of them is already capable to follow netflix series in English.

Growth never lasts. It is impossible

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