Comment by troad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troad | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo is a gambling company masquerading as a learning resource. (Buy gems! Buy lingots! Increase your chance of loot drops!) Their entire business model is preying on addictive dark patterns. (Loot drop animations - so much colour and motion - so exciting! Don't let that streak lapse - buy a streak freeze now! Oh no, the owl is sad you haven't watched enough ads! You don't want to make the owl sad, do you? Duolingo for Schools available now!)

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.

I’ve been regularly using Duolingo to learn Portuguese for the past almost year (according to my streak). All the “dark patterns” you describe have helped me stay on track. I actually appreciate the addictive nature of the app pushing me to use it every day since it’s helped me learn a lot of words so I can better communicate with a friend in Brazil. I haven’t paid a dime for any of it (but I’ve watched a lifetime of ads)

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

You paid a great opportunity cost. You could have been using something good for a year, rather than something designed to prey on your mind.

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.

Did you not know about the free hearts you get if you watch more ads?

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

> You could have been using something good for a year, rather than something designed to prey on your mind.

Do you know of any good, free, alternatives?

Anki for flashcards, downloading any good textbook online honestly. It will be way effective way to spend your time.

Anki doesn't give me push notifications on my phone to study every day. It doesn't berate me for missing a day.

It works for people who can stick to a schedule without pushing.

> Anki doesn't give me push notifications on my phone to study every day.

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)

Language requires repetition and prolonged attention to learn. Anki is good for sure but even with push notifications is not pushy enough to keep most people coming back to it on a consistent basis. Miss a day of Anki and now you're doubled up on cards to review next time which can disincentivize people from ever coming back.

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.

Use it with PiHole, and all you get is the "Get DuoLingo Pro" (or whatever it's called) video. I always close the app (open the "task switcher" on the phone and swipe up to end) and relaunch it instead of watching the ads.

I spent a year learning a language on Duolingo, and I both agree and disagree:

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.

I agree Duolingo is not a substitute for more immersive learning or even just taking classes. It's especially not very ideal for the spoken parts of a language since it can't do the best job at judging your pronunciation and you're not going to spend a lot of time in the app having coherent conversations in another language. From my experience so far, it's good at teaching you the basics of a language so you can be just good enough at sounding like an idiot in front of your Brazilian friend.

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

That's the point, isn't it? It takes these dark patterns that predatory game devs/actual gambling apps have been researching and minmaxing for years and points them at something useful and productive instead (language learning). The result is a language learning app with very effective user retention and repetition, which is especially useful for a subject that requires lots of repetitive practice.

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.

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