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Comment by namenumber | Hacker News Reader

I got started on Duolingo back when it was still a "Help translate the world" app. I've always liked it for getting to dip my toes in a language and learn some basics whilst exploring the language myself through other methods, and I've shown my support of it by paying for Duolingo Super or whatever they're calling it for years on end whilst hopping on and off my language tracks.

But it's just so horrible now, constant gamification, attempts to pull me in with streaks and freezes and notifications and "did you know you can have us nag you even more"-breaks between the lessons I'm actually there for. It's gotten to the point where I'm just done because I've already paid for the service and i just want to be left alone to do the exercises, but they never let me get from one exercise to the next without having to go through at least two or three of those annoying "gamification and engagement" attempts.

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Some (but not most or all) of Duolingo's social and gamification features/social nags/upsells/"reminders" default on but can be turned off in the settings. But yes it's out of control and a strong reaason to disable Auto-update on the Duolingo app to not constantly the ever-more-AI-driven-nags/upsells. DL is becoming its own antipattern in the quest for revenue $$$ growth at all costs, e.g. reducing the actual amount of language being learned, beyond a certain plateau. I've been saying that here for a couple of years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783

When I returned to Duolingo recently -- I used to use it heavily but set it aside for 2 years -- I counted 14 gamification popups in a row after my first lesson in a new language.

14! The damned popups lasted longer than the lesson had!

I switched over to Busuu, which has blatantly copied some of Duolingo's mechanics but at least uses them with a modicum of restraint.

This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams and I really wish it wasn’t. I still use Facebook quite a bit and I’m consistently frustrated by how degenerate the concept of a “notification” has become. Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta, I know it’s not a technical problem, I think it’s an organizational problem. For example…

Team A ships feature X and sets their KPI to some arbitrary measure of engagement. They miss, obviously, but instead of regrouping and hitting the drawing board, A doubles down and pressures Team B to point towards X in feature Y. A sees some marginal level of gain in engagement for X, obviously, so the intervention is deemed a success. 6mos later, Team A is asked to return the favor and add a modal pointing to new feature Z, per the request of Team B.

I don’t really know what the solution is except outside of careful org-wide watchdogging to ensure this sort of user-hostile engagement infighting gets nipped in the bud.

It makes you wonder whether they use the app themselves...

> This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams

That makes me think about how everyone defining an operational alert/warning thinks theirs is very important, leading to so many that users time them all out and everyone loses.

It’s especially frustrating when DoorDash will happily use notifications for both order status/issues and spam various deal/promotion notifications. There’s simply no way to turn them completely off so you only get order status notifications on iOS.

I ended up disabling notifications completely (and eventually just deleting it)

You can get order status via SMS. That way you can disable all notifs

For the team that worked on a feature for month it's the whole world at the time of release. Being mindful that is not the end-users whole world, but just a tiny insignificant fraction is something easily lost in denial.

> Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta,

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher

Yes, the popups/gamification/forced ads/social nags are hugely annoying and eat up the useful time in a (say) 15min learning session . Not excusing them, but you can turn off some but not all of the popups/gamification/forced ads/social nags, as an opt-out. But still an awful antipattern as defaults.

I disabled all possible notifications hoping I would only have the streak reminder, but no - it still abuses them with random crap. I then set an iPhone reminder for the streak, and completely disabled duolingo's notifications from the phone settings. Peace.

It still spams you after every lesson, but I often just kill the app when it does. Quite a few ads also fail to load due to Lockdown mode or my pihole (also when away from home, due to the vpn I always keep).

I may just be their worst customer, having never given them a cent or even clicked an ad (and often not even impressions). On the other hand a bunch of people use it because of me and follow me due to having a long streak, so maybe I'm still worth keeping around.

Yeah the first thing I translated on DuoLingo was the Wikipedia article for Ubuntu.

I finished the Spanish course many years ago (is finishing still possible?)

Thanks for reminding me it had page translations, I did a few of those and enjoyed it! Shame it went.

Yeah it really helped me at the time as I didn’t know any Spanish but did know a lot about Ubuntu.

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