Duolingo Handbook

I'm not sure this really says anything novel. As a longtime user of Duolingo, I feel like my experience of the app is "move fast and break things" -- constantly adding new features and removing old ones, without regard for how it affects existing users. It's interesting that they talk about how they care about user retention over new user acquisition, since that's not my experience. Many features that I found useful have been removed (e.g. word reference lists, forum discussion), and new features added/changed that I don't care for (e.g. many types of review-ish lessons with unclear differences, semi-invisible adjustments to thresholds necessary to reach certain goals).

My assumption is that long-term user retention is a metric that's difficult to measure and optimize for, and so even if they claim to care, it ends up getting worse over time. If your experiment grows DAU by 1% but makes 0.1% of users leave over the next month, most of that 0.1% isn't even noticed in the week that the experiment is running, and a 0.02% drop in user retention isn't statistically significant. But then you ship 1 of those experiments per week for 5 years, and even though you grew your userbase 12x you end up with 25% worse long-term user retention than you would have otherwise. And then you don't even realize that because it's such a different product compared to 5 years ago that you brush off any changes over that timescale as "our new demographics are inherently less likely to stay and there's nothing we can do" or "society is changing how it interacts with phones and there's nothing we can do." Or maybe I'm being too generous and the reality is "there's definitely something we could do but we're too busy rolling in our fat stacks of cash to care"

I like that they rejects MVPs. An initial product should have minimal features but be polished unless you are doing something completely new.

I’d like to know when this was created and if people who work at Duolingo even know the existence of it. The app is filled with ads on the free tier, with ads appearing after every single lesson. I’ve seen this for over a year. If anything, they don’t make courses universally available. They make them universally annoying.

Even if they’re targeting specific users for the ads to upgrade, they shouldn’t make it so annoying. If they want the (freeloading) user to leave the platform, then they should stop notifications bugging the user to not break the streak.

Something is very wrong with how Duolingo’s ad system is implemented. With this background, I can’t believe that they follow anything from this handbook that was probably written at the start by someone who’s no longer with the company.

Wholesome and unhinged.

"Don't do dumb shit" is a great product principle

I respect that everyone learns differently but I can't stand Duolingo's approach to gamification. Between being treated like I'm 7 years old and being bullied into using gems to keep standing in the leaderboards I just can't do it.

I would pay them extra money to disable all of the gamification features and just let me use the damn language learning parts of the app.