I don't mean to single out your comment, but it seems like a majority of the comments on hacker news are so negative now.
Yes, the reddit is full of kvetches, but there are a lot of very valid complaints as Duolingo removes major features (like stories) while people are learning from them or removes lesson choice and suddenly just drops you on "the path". And... there are the bugs. So many bugs. Things just don't work (literally UI buttons just DONT), answers are wrong, you get booted out of the app while running and have to restart. Feel free to file a bug nothing changes.
I won't go into the fact that they support a desktop, android, and iPhone other than to say (since I use all of them) that they are all VERY different, and only somewhat linked (as in they can become out of sync). I suspect that's part of both due to their subscriber growth method and technical debt. Probably, they're trying to rationalize things behind the scenes, but as they do everyone who had learned how to use it on each platform suddenly loses things/options/tools they had before to that common denominator. They're not giving you a configurable superset!
I get it, it's a hard problem, but don't be surprised when your rapid growth becomes unsustainable.
There are 0 mentions about language learning or course quality in a blog post about how to grow a language learning app. Instead, the discussion turns on the way you give gems to users, late-night notifications, and the maximum amount of emails you can send per day before people start unsubscribing.
I get that this is a blog post about growth, but it says nothing about the product and you could :s/Duolingo/Candy Crush/ and the text would be equally valid. This looks like a fake blog post from Hooli in Silicon Valley.
See also, my all time favorite; this comment about Dropbox from 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
> "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
Quite trivial indeed.
It was one users comment on how they felt about the app. I doubt it becoming popular changed it for them.
1. The comment categorically dismisses the entire product idea
2. As evidence for (1), the comment cites a rather complicated method that would arguably be out of reach for most users
3. The comment describes the method from (2) as "trivial"
So even if Dropbox had failed, the comment would still be entertaining, IMO.
No estas beuno. That... is probably wrong. You know why? Because Duolingo actually sucks. And so does this teletubby attitude. Le da una siesta.
If people are positive about something there usually isn't much to be said.
I see a lot of positive comments when good things come out, for example.
Setting aside the usual “do we really need to talk about every rust conversion” comments, nearly every rust article is followed by praising the language.
Or when there’s a new software people might enjoy using.
Many of the newer startups also get very positive comments.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287212 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287573