Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

htxt.co.za

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 348 posts

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #62
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 caught a random podcast with an early Duolingo employee who said all the same things: Much bragging about how they gamified their app to juice user engagement and growth, not even a feigned mention of optimizing for learning. By now my friends who use Duolingo all know it’s a game, not a real learning experience. I think they got lucky and filled a void in the market for things people think they want (learning a ne…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by cyanydeez »

kbelder wrote: post #32
adocomplete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not stinginess, it's value. If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs. I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more…

Plus, being stingy even if you have money benefits those who don't have money. It's why I buy the $0.50 macaroni and cheese instead of the $1.69 version. I don't really care; either would be fine. But I don't want companies to succeed in charging more. I want them to desperately need to cut their selling price in order to succeed. People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better ) are helping screw…

i guess, but then youre not integrating the externalized costs of the cheaper food.

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

#123

Post by telchior »

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…

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.

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

#124

Post by Archonical »

eigenspace wrote: post #110

For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower. I switched a while ago to Seedlang ( https://www.seedlang.com/ ), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo. Every exercise involves a real video of a real German spea…

I studied German for 3 years in university, dabbled in German duo-lingo, and completed all German courses on Memrise.

I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these applications.

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

#126

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jrflowers wrote: post #60
godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value. If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then I’ll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.

I cannot imagine being the CEO of a software company and proudly proclaiming that some other software — which we do not make and can easily be had very cheap or for free— is better fit for purpose than what we’ve been able to accomplish in over a decade with almost a thousand employees, and expecting that to impress investors or users or both. Like that would be like the Chipotle CEO proudly announcing that they’re f…

Chipotle already doesn't manufacture the vast majority of their ingredients. Their business consists of delivering supplier-originated ingredients to a standardized storefront in your city and consistently assembling them into a quality burrito, with small amounts of prep work for things which can't be consistently sourced locally and in-store cooking for things which must be prepared fresh. I don't know where people get this idea that packaging and assembly are trivial tasks you can't build a business around.

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

#127

Post by lolinder »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #111
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!

What you're missing is that it's right on the cusp of being a learning tool instead of a silly game because it has regressed below the cusp. It was a useful learning tool, and its trajectory has been strictly downward for years now.

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

#128

Post by Alex-Programs »

leoc wrote: post #104

I've never had the pleasure of experiencing DuoLingo myself, but by all accounts it's an exceptionally time-inefficient way of learning a language. If the objective is to have fun playing a buzzy mobile game with the rest of the world then whatever, but if you actually want to make progress in a language you'd be much better advised to head over to something like Refold https://refold.la/ or Dreaming Spanish https://…

The language-specific subreddits also have excellent advice.

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

#130

Post by foxfired »

Slight tangent. I remember many jobs ago when our CEO went on a mobile-first campaign. I literally watched him talk about the type of innovations we were making to cater to our customers, while I was writing a regex to redirect mobile to m.example.com.

Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data. We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion dollars.

I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's ok, because quantum is going to change the game.

Post reply on HN