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Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

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Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#111

Post by theoreticalmal »

lolinder wrote: post #18

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…

My Duolingo streak is 37 days and I just jumped on to do a lesson and retain my position on the leaderboard. I feel like the app itself is right on the cusp of being a valuable learning tool compared to being a silly game. I am okay with the idea of paying for “just okay” teaching if it helps me stay motivated and interested in the content. That may change in the future, I guess we’ll see!

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#112

Post by nico »

lolinder wrote: post #18

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…

What platforms do you think could fill that space up?

Recently discovered brilliant.org, do you have an opinion about them?

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#113

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

This might be a nice time for me to plug the FOSS software I've been quietly building over the last ~3 years for English speaking learners of Finnish specifically. I've recently collected them all onto a little landing page at https://finbug.xyz/ .

I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#114

Post by crmd »

jmward01 wrote: post #77
lolinder wrote: post #18

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…

This isn't my field, but I can imagine it is hard to optimize for learning only since the reward signal is clearly user engagement (meaning subscription revenue). Finding a reward signal that does both, help people learn -and- make money is hard. I am a Duolingo user and I definitely notice the gamification but I really don't know how it would be done better since that gets people engaged in an activity that is assoc…

>… it is hard to optimize for learning only since the reward signal is clearly user engagement (meaning subscription revenue).

Schools can give reward signals for demonstrating subject mastery, or for tuition payment and attendance. It seems like Duolingo gamified the latter instead of the former.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#115

Post by _aavaa_ »

zdragnar wrote: post #47
lolinder wrote: post #18

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…

Learning a new language to any degree of proficiency requires motivation. It's easy to start and hard to continue if you're not willing to put in the effort. There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app. In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their motivations d…

I disagree with this in principle. Gamification is something we should be very wary of because it is inherently bad. It reduces what you care about in an activity to points and a progress bar.

Instead of sticking with language learning because you have some intrinsic reason to want to learn it (or even a external one such as wanting a new job) you're substituting that with whatever Duolingo puts for their gamification. To the degree you engage with and are motivated by the gamification you are substituting your own metrics of success and progress for points and streaks.

And soon enough we end up here, where Duolingo has gamified their internal numbers and in doing so gamified your "learning".

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#116

Post by recursivecaveat »

teekert wrote: post #80
lolinder wrote: post #18

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…

My daughter gave up because the mascot turned more and more scary (she’s not allowed to use the iPad that much). Any alternatives?

It's a little bare bones for someone young, but you could try Anki. It's a generic spaced-repetition app, so you would need to grab a deck of flashcards from the AnkiHub community for your language of choice.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#117

Post by gre »

busymom0 wrote: post #45
lolinder wrote: post #18

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…

> she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak A friend of mine said the exact same thing. And then a YouTube creator I follow recently made a video where he said the exact same thing too about cancelling Duolingo because he had become more addicted to maintaining the streak than learning.

A streak where you actually learn every day makes sense to me. Missing a day and then paying money to maintain your streak doesn't. I know I missed a day, and if the streak isn't for me, then who is it for?

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#118

Post by mattl »

namenumber wrote: post #83
lolinder wrote: post #18

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak. The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this a…

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, constan…

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

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#119

Post by thenberlin »

If an LLM is what's going to teach me a new language, why would I ever pay some middleman $100-200 a year for an app wrapper? This guy doesn't seem to realize that embracing AI-first doesn't just put his employees on the chopping block, it actually suggests his whole company is unnecessary.

This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#120

Post by zugi »

sandspar wrote: post #30
retnuhllort wrote: post #7

Can someone explain the point of this article? How does any of this matter unless 1. customers stop using this app or 2. all employees quit. Neither one is happening, especially the one where customers leave, because customers are not using this app as a form of charity to fund salaries of contractors.

There's a group of news readers who dislike CEO's and dislike AI. Many of these people have also heard of Duolingo. "CEO of [company you've heard of] makes an AI mistake" is a surefire way to get clicks.

That seems about right. Hacker News was once a more reasonable alternative to reddit, but these days sometimes it's reasonable, and sometimes it displays the same hive-mind reactions, depending on the thread.

The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study approaches eventually petered out.

The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?

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