> You make a new product, you charge for it, you advertise it. What's the big issue?
The issue is: from beginning on and for a long time Duolingo advertised with "Learn a language for free. Forever." :-(
The issue is: from beginning on and for a long time Duolingo advertised with "Learn a language for free. Forever." :-(
The original business model (from the guy who made Captcha) was that the learners would translate text for others, for a fee. So the payment was labor.
Unsurprisingly that didn’t work out.
The alternative to charging was going out of business, so hard to vilify them too much.
They tried. They failed. They tried something new.
Not only was there more diverse content when learning (though for that I can at least recommend Clozemaster), but now that some part of my mobile experience keeps defaulting to showing me wikipedia in German[0], I keep realising how out of sync the different languages of wikipedia are.
[0] a bit of a tangent from the article, but it's been irritating me for ages now.
I'm in Germany, but English is the top entry in Settings.app Preferred Languages, and I'm using iOS 16: highlight a word, e.g. "German"; in the context menu select «Look Up»; this text is all correctly in English; tap either the title or in the links list the wikipedia link; what do I get?
""" https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language
German language
Dieser Artikel existiert nicht.
Möglichst ganze Wörter eingeben, die im Artikeltext, insbesondere aber im Lemma vorkommen sollen.
Hilfe:Suche – weitere Möglichkeiten zur Suche nach Artikeln
Suche nach German language in anderssprachigen Wikipedias
"""
I don't even know if this is Apple's bug or Wikipedia's bug
> They tried. They failed. They tried something new.
You only advertise with such a slogan if you are really sure that you will never have to pivot to a business model where you want to have the user pay (even if paying is "optional" (freemium)) since advertising slogans have a tendency to stick. ;-)