r/Duolingo Will No Longer Be Duolingo’s Unpaid Customer Support or Data Mine
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It's been apparent for a long, long time that pedagogical considerations have no sway in the direction of Duolingo. I'm not surprised to hear that they're planning to outsource customer support to AI. If anything, I'm amazed they haven't outsourced all their language courses to AI yet. Those are merely the colourful backdrop to the slot machine business that they're actually in. (Come to think of it, how do we know they haven't?)
Kudos to the mods. I have no idea why a bunch of language enthusiasts should be expected to work as unpaid support staff for a ghoulish casino app.
Fixing customer support seems like something they should do but I sincerely hope they don’t change anything else you complained about. Spanish or vanish, meu amigo
Every time you made a mistake, you lost a heart. Every time you lost your hearts, you were forced to watch an ad. That's great for Duolingo. You, on the other hand, spent a year being punished for making mistakes, which is the worst pathway one can possibly set up in a language learners' mind. I'm sure you can click on the words for 'Is the elephant under the chair?' very competently in the app now, but I'd be curious to see whether you've been Pavlovian-conditioned to fear making mistakes, and the impact that may have on your productive capacity in spontaneous language interaction contexts.
But hey, your brain is fungible, and VCs gotta get paid. That $14 billion valuation comes from somewhere.
More seriously, I think you’re taking this way too seriously. I’m happy I learned some words and phrases in Portuguese. I can recognize half of the things I see in the wild in Portuguese. That’s good enough for me.
I don’t have PTSD from an angry owl every time I try to learn a new word, but thank you for your concern
Do you know of any good, free, alternatives?
It works for people who can stick to a schedule without pushing.
I'm pretty sure it does?
Main menu > Settings > Notifications
(It's by pending cards rather than per day, but I don't consider that a meaningful distinction)
This is where Duolingo succeeds and why it's valued so highly. Twisting dark patterns to the benefit of the user for a process that requires prolonged retention is the perfect fit. The techniques it uses are derived from research on how best to keep someone's attention. Saying they add no value to language learning and that people should pick up a textbook is essentially saying that you trust people to be self-motivated enough to stick to something like that for potentially years. That is a losing bet. I'd wager the vast majority of people would never be able to do it in their entire lives.
1. Yes, the fact that Duolingo uses techniques to get you hooked on the app isn't some dark secret. On the contrary, Duolingo is very open about it. This is their marketing strategy—they want people to believe that Duolingo will help them get addicted (or, more positively phrased, "form a habit") to something useful and worthwhile, rather than being addicted to scrolling through social media.
2. Unfortunately, Duolingo seems to focus only on the "addiction" part, neglecting the "learning" aspect. To put it bluntly, Duolingo is not very effective at actually enabling you to use (communicate in, understand) the language.
It was only after I switched from Duolingo to truly immersing myself in content in the language that I started to gain the skills that (pretty soon) allowed me to use the language in real life.
That said, I have heard some people pairing it with HelloTalk to get that immersion piece. It's an app that lets you talk with others in the language you're trying to learn, and vice versa they too are trying to learn your language
As far as I can tell there isn't any actual gambling and the microtransactions/lootboxes appear to be simulated and don't depend on actual money. This overall doesn't seem like a bad system to me. I think their overt dark patterns are intentional and are tripping your "this is malicious" sense when in fact I would give them kudos for using them in a way that is beneficial to people.
Duolingo only has themselves to blame though, I'm struggling to name another non-social media app who has cultivated a fanbase with such a weird parasocial relationship with it.
I would feel the same way if I came to realize that my helpful nature was being abused by a bad acting corporation, and I would refuse to give any more help until I felt it was more equitable.
I’m not sure why Duolingo didn’t already have control over their subreddit. This is a bad look for them, and I just signed up for a family plan. Will I get support?
Generally Reddit doesn't like companies owning the subreddit as it's supposed to be more of a community platform.
After the Pixel launch, Google had this poor guy acting like a customer experience manager for the sub, escalating requests to Pixel team staff, acting as a direct liaison between Support and Engineering, and talking to angry Redditors all day, totally unpaid.
When I point blank asked him whether and how this multi-trillion dollar company was compensating him for his very real labor, he had a "but they're my friends" moment before finally realizing they were taking advantage of him. They got a good year out of him, at least. I suggested he sue.
A decade on, Reddit are scumbags for not addressing this at the business level, and any company using Reddit Requests is cheating customers out of an official, functional Customer Support experience.