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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

#251

Post by cryptonector »

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…

Why can't the customers go AI-first, no?

Just ask your favorite LLM to teach you .

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

#252

Post by fao_ »

90s_dev wrote: post #177
kbelder wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The $.50 version is barely food. The $1.69 is not much better, and still very unhealthy for you. Have ground beef and a fiber rich low calorie food like brocoli or whole wheat whole grain noodles or something. Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner. If more people…

I don't agree with the person above you in as much as the way they are doing it is very individualist "vote with your wallet", and yes, you're right that it's very ineffective.

The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.

The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.

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

#253

Post by sumeno »

amsilprotag wrote: post #106
Aurornis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral. If you read the article you’ll see how the CEO wrote a memo about how productivity expectations will rise and started cutting contractors in favor of AI. To suggest that this CEO was afraid of reducing morale by asking employees to put fewer pop-ups in the app is completely backward. I don’t understand why you’r…

Maybe you are right that I give too much benefit of the doubt. I have been following the saga and I believe the AI turn was a bad move on every level. That's why I stopped using the app. But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app. I think the pop-ups are a net-negative even purely financially with churn outweighing subscriptions. So my model for the situati…

> But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app.

If the CEO truly wants this he should resign because he is at best a completely ineffectual leader. The reality is he wants more money so he wants to pack as much engagement bait into the app as possible to juice numbers as please investors

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

#254

Post by sumeno »

croes wrote: post #132
zzzeek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?

You definitely meet other people in local colleges

And few of them are native speakers of the language you're learning.

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

#255

Post by ACCount36 »

Archonical wrote: post #124
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.

Humans don't learn the grammar by "understanding the theory". Humans learn the grammar by using the language repeatedly.

But a book on theory can be mass produced and sold to everyone who wants to learn a language. Can't bottle and mass produce an actual experience of using the language for years. So theory it is.

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

#256

Post by zzzeek »

sandinmyjoints wrote: post #53
zzzeek wrote: post #25

im re-visiting learning Spanish in my spare time and am working with Babbel, LingoDeer and a pretty good independent site morpheem ( https://morpheem.org/ ) that has the heaviest use of AI of all three. I didn't even consider duolingo as LingoDeer is generally better in the "cutesy gamified language learning" space.

Curious if you have tried (or heard of) spanishdictionary.com? I work on it, and our users seem to like it and find it effective. The name is a bit misleading—started out as a dictionary but now has a full curriculum up through a couple years of college Spanish. We don’t really do any paid marketing (or any other kind for that matter) so I’m always curious about whether people have heard of it.

I will try it. From my other comments you can gather I'm a sad lifelong monolinguist despite having a terrific Spanish foundation in middle school, and I can hardly imagine ever being conversational. But it's only been a week

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

#257

Post by redserk »

Terr_ wrote: post #240
joenot443 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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)

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

#258

Post by retnuhllort »

minimaxir wrote: post #154
retnuhllort wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like at least 500? I'm sure that will hurt.

Enough that the CEO had to do damage control, which is the absolute last resort for a PR disaster.

All ceos constantly do pr, and respond to media coverage. This is literally another just another day.

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

#259

Post by gruturo »

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…

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.

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

#260

Post by AlchemistCamp »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #220
techjamie wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

That's a feature, though. If she's too disinterested in making other moves like reading books or the news, then at least she still has that base Duolingo momentum that might make the move possible in the future. People always assume the alternative to Duolingo is that everyone will start a habit of reading BBC Mundo in Spanish or something, and it's obviously not true for many if not most people. And that's fine, som…

So trading daily time and effort for six years for an option on learning a language in the future?
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