Kind of funny to watch the crazy AI hype group-think that probably originates in the CEO group-chats gradually evaporate as reality hits that AI is a useful tool instead of a be-all, end-all.
Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
191–200 of 348 posts
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#192My 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 sort of wonder whether they realized gamification works for certain kinds of tasks, but not for others, and then decided to design their language learning app for gamification, rather than designing a gamification system to support language learning. In other words, I don't think Duolingo's system can really make you fluent in a language, but what it seems to excel in is making you use Duolingo every day. In other other words, you always hear people talking about how long their streak is ("500 days!") rather than how well they speak the language.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#193My 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 girlfriend has been "learning" a language on Duolingo for about 5-6 years now, but rarely engages with her target language outside of Duolingo and some of her music library. She's been at roughly beginner level the entire time when, with proper language immersion and practice, she should realistically have a large vocab and be able to engage in casual conversation without looking up stuff. This is not the case.
I've just accepted for some time, to her chagrin, that she's effectively playing a game that just so happens to be language themed.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#194For 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.
I speak three languages and I'm learning a fourth. Don't study grammar, ever, it's a waste of time. Grammar rules always fall into one of two categories: the ones that are so obvious that you would have learned them after two examples anyway or the ones that are too vague and complicated to be useful.
For an example of the latter look up people making flowcharts for the subjunctive or for the ga/wa distinction.
Or, for that matter, find me the place in an english grammar that explains why you get "on" a train, but "in" a car.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#195Their PE ratio is 256. What really matters is convincing wall street to keep funneling money into their company stock
So what he's doing makes a lot of sense. Have to keep the stock high and sell off before reality kicks in. All of this money floating around incentivizes this behavior
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#196Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
It makes you wonder whether they use the app themselves...
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gamificatio…
Seems we need to define what is meant by "gamification" in this context.
If we're just talking about tracking and making visible streaks, vocab words learned, tenses mastered, etc. that seems fine; little different than in fitness training where one tracks workouts, miles run, pace improved, weights lifted, etc.. Adding in a few goals and milestones met can be helpful
OTOH, if we're talking about skewing the content to maximize psychological manipulation at the cost of actual learning, that is toxic gamification, and certainly against the user's goals.
Haven't used DuoLingo, so I'm not sure which one we have here?
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#199Their 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…
Those CEOs are killing their companies with this AI hype.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.