Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisfosterelli | Hacker News Reader

In fairness to duolingo, nearly everything duolingo does is like this. They are extremely metric and process driven (for better and worse of actual users).

View on HN

I can tell because when I tried to figure out the cost of the existing Super Duolingo, I was unable to do so. The https://www.duolingo.com/super page gives me lots of information about tiers and benefits but never mentions a cost. I'm sure telling you hurt metrics. Fuck those guys.

If you are signed it the cost appears in the comparison chart.

For reference it is 10$ CAD per month or the Family option which is 12.50 CAD per month.

I assume they do regional price adjustments though.

Thank you. I too wasted a good five minutes trying to find out what any tier would cost, and failed. I wonder if the USD prices are different from the CAD ones?

I'd be very interested to know exactly what metrics allow them to ignore the fact that their most-recent app redesign has been, from what I can tell, unanimously disliked and shown to frustrate their userbase.

This is exactly the example I was thinking of. There is a Reddit AMA where a user asks why they keep it even though it's universally disliked and the CEO essentially says "I hear you but DAU is higher on the redesign".

I think it's an example where metrics are taken too far. Yes, better DAU is good, but if you are alienating 100% of your power users and getting more engagement from your short-term, new signup users that's going to look great for a few quarters but kill your app over the long term as the community experts start telling everyone they used to recommend Duolingo to to go use something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com