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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

#91
post #44

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 a secret though, their CEO openly said on the Decoder podcast this is their strategy so I don't know how that passed her by

She doesn't read tech news like 99% of the population?

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

#95
post #8

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've noticed that a strong thread of the hacker community, including HN and the guys who wrote GNU and linux, are extremely cheap . Like, you'd rather write a product clone yourself than pay $15/month for the official product. Why is this? What's with the inherent stinginess?

If you're going to drag Linus and Stallman into this, at least read up on your history. A commercial Unix or Lisp Machine was quite a bit more expensive than $15/month. They both got shafted by companies that couldn't care less about anything beyond profit. It's part of the ugly side of capitalism, fuck people and fuck the world.

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

#96
Given the typo at the very start of the article (maybe it's a .za thing?) "Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users." it's worth pointing out that Grammarly would have caught that.

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

#98

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…

Duolingo is just a mobile game where you role play learning a language.

Similar to how you role play being an emperor in Civ: you learn a thing or two but it's no where near what the real thing is.

That's fine as a game!

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

#99

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…

It requires habit more than motivation. I was bored during covid and started Japanese and four years later im still keeping it going. I lost my motivation multiple times during those years (because good god what an ridiculous language coming from a European one), but my habit kept me going until i found my motivation again.

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

#100

Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago. This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Cl…

good thing most of the people driving techno fascism dont news to meet those street people
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