- Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
- Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
- 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.
I mean, it is too late. Canceled my sub, won’t be coming back.
Same. Deleted the app this weekend and let my 918 day streak evaporate.
I’m actually kind of surprised at how little it affected me, to be honest. I had a little bit pre-regret about losing the streak before deleting the app, but now a couple days later that feeling certainly doesn’t exist. AND there’s that benefit of no stupid owl guilt tripping you every day.
I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.
Where is the discussion for replacing CEOs with AI? Seems like predicting market trends based off of historical data and managing corporate resources would be just the sort of thing that AI would be good at. Plus it would cost way less and not require massive bonuses nor ownership of the company.
Well, the crux of the problem is that AI is trying to approximate intelligence. That’s not useful for a CEO.
boom
“AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.
Now please explain in more detail how this advice should be followed, practically, by someone you just fired because AI was cheaper. Give examples of how they can “stay ahead of it” so as to “remain in control of the product and mission” they are no longer employed to work on. How should they “embrace” this transition and “respond with curiosity” to no being newly unable to afford food or rent? “Uncertainty for all of us” my ass.
The former employees are now curious about how they will pay rent and eat, so there’s that.
Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they’re part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.
Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.
Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student’s progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.
Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It’s known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.
My advice is to skip language learning apps. The “motivation via gamification hypothesis” is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don’t stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It’s because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.
A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.
exactly. I also don’t appreciate the app changing the icon to guilt trip me back into their odd choice of/irrelevant vocabulary that I am supposed to learn
…or join a reputable language learning academy and go to class in person.
Though I know this is not for everyone. But neither is self-learning online.
You put into words exactly how I’ve felt about language learning apps. Every time I try a game or app that’s supposed to teach you, it feels like I’m starting over, and it never actually becomes fun. I tried Duolingo, but after a while, I found myself just doing super easy lessons to keep my streak going so I wouldn’t have to sit through the boring ones. It felt pretty bad, so I stopped using it when I hit 800 days.
My friend didn’t use any apps and instead started by texting and talking with people and managed to learn Korean in just a year, well enough for casual, everyday conversations or hobby-related stuff. Meanwhile, I’ve been using apps and still can’t hold a conversation with anyone…
In another thread someone told me you can buy gems or something to keep your streak going.
That would’ve made me uninstall long before his comments.
I’m a long time user of Duolingo and you earn plenty to give yourself the occasional streak freeze if you can’t go two days without doing a lesson. It’s not really as predatory as it sounds. It’s nothing like pay to win type games.
Fuck Duolingo for the AI shit though, don’t mistake me for a Duolingo simp thinking their blameless. It’s just that the monetization is not as predatory as it sounds.
I have so many could probably keep a streak foing indefinitely without ever doing a lesson, but I’d need to log in every couple days to repurchase the streak freeze.
Ah, okay, thanks for the info! I’ve never used Duolingo so I genuinely don’t know.
I think it should be added that people who pay premium get infinite lives, everyone else gets 1 life every 6-ish hours with a maximum of 5, meaning they can answer wrong at most 5 times and fail a lesson, forcing them to do a recap practice lesson to earn a heart and then retry the lesson with only 1 heart or they’re just done for the day.
It’s kind of pay to win.
To win what? The lessons are not competitive.
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There actually is a weekly leaderboard bracket where you compete with about 30 to 50 other people.
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Completing a lesson is winning, losing all your lives is losing.
A completely optional, side objective that has no bearing on anything else? You can completely ignore the leader board and still progress. It’s not competitive.
You can set your profile to private to completely disable the leaderboard stuff.
Yeah of course, winning or losing a game has no bearing on anything. It’s still winning or losing.
The main objective is to complete lessons. You have to pay to do that or wait for energy to replenish.
No, you don’t. It’s only when you lose hearts. You get to make 5 mistakes. You can use gems to replenish them or they replenish over time. After playing for a while you earn plenty of gems to restore your hearts mid lesson every now and then. You can watch an ad to replenish your hearts between lessons, but not during. If you’re not making mistakes then you can keep going. It’s not that difficult to not make mistakes either, a lot of times they flat out give you the answer by tapping on words.
There are plenty of things to shit on Duolingo as a company. Calling the app pay to win really isn’t one.
The main objective is not to complete lessons, but to learn. If you use up all your hearts because you make too many mistakes you’re obviously not learning. At that point Duolingo completely fails though, instead of telling you to go back and practice, it asks if you want to buy hearts with in-game currency or switch to the paid super max hyper ultra AI whatever it’s now called for unlimited hearts. Unlimited hearts doesn’t give you shit though, it allows you to bruteforce your way through the lessons to get XP to rank up in the completely optional leaderboards, it doesn’t help you learn. It’s only pay to win if you see it as a game and not as a language learning app.
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“Freezing” your streak is just silly, even if they offer it for free. Is this just for online clout, so you can brag (falsely) to others how long you haven’t broken a streak?
If an alcoholic goes 10 years without drinking, then has a beer, the streak is broken. Doesn’t mean you can’t recover and improve, but it is what it is. It’s dishonest to pretend it didn’t happen, especially if you’re comparing yourself to others…
Really comparing missing a day of a language learning app to alcoholism recovery?
Your streak doesn’t go up on days you use a freeze.
No? It was a comparison of the streak, not the subject of the streak. That was just an example. My point remains. Unless you can literally stop time, the streak died. It’s okay that it did, but why pretend it didn’t?
If you can’t see why someone might have a different criteria for a streak in days without alcohol as a recovering addict and days in usage of a learning application I can’t help you.
Nobody has ever learned a language by using Duolingo anyways. It’s an app that lets you pretend your are doing something useful with your life instead of just slaving away at your job enriching others.
I have definitely learned a lot of Spanish from Duolingo, and while I’m not fluent, i went from being able to count to able to hold some basic conversations with Spanish people i know.
You’re just pretending you are doing something useful with your life instead of just slaving away at your job enriching others.
/s, obviously. What a wild take they have.
You had me to the /s, NGL
Jesus fucking Christ, lighten up lol.
the realest comment on lemmy, ever
Theres also basically zero server side-checking on anything. Hacked APKs let you get premium features for free :3
That’s awful! Could you please let me know where these APKs are hosted so that I may avoid them?
Mobilism.
It’s worse than that.
Yes, you can pay for a streak freeze. If you don’t, you’ll probably find that you were given one for free anyhow. You’d have wasted your gems.
Yes, you can pay to undo a streak loss. It’s more than paying for a freeze.
It’ll give you multiple chances to pay for all that, too. If you’re out for days and then come back, you can pay to fix your streak.
What is the point of a streak if you can just buy your way back to it?
Also, I had paid for the last couple years, which (IIRC) includes free streak freezes. It still asked if I want to pay for them. I’d say no, and find I had one anyhow, or a friend had miraculously given me one.
But during the last year (365 days) my streak was actually only at 190 or so because I’d used so many streak freezes that I got for free. I wasn’t even trying to keep my streak.
When I finally let my streak die, the icon started trying to guilt trip me into coming back with horrible icons of Duo being sad, heartbroken, or even dead.
The constant mental manipulation that was well beyond what gamification should ever be was what finally drove me to just quit playing altogether. I had already canceled my sub long ago, but I’m not even going to use the remainder of this year I’ve already paid for.
I deleted the app the second he said this. Get fucked, AI.
Make sure you also start the account deletion process.
How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.
Firstly every single company that has tried to replace its employees with AI has always ended up having issues. Secondly even if that wasn’t the case, people are not going to be happy about it so it’s not something you should brag publicly about.
If you’re going to replace all of your employees with AI just do it quietly, that way if it fails it’s not a public failure, and if it succeeds (it won’t) then you talk about it.
How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.
Being a CEO has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, I guarantee you that Duolingo has employees who are far more intelligent than the CEO.
People who are smart in one or two domains often overestimate how smart they are in other domains. They develop a mental model, confirm it quickly, and never re-asses it.
The issue with AI, is we’re probably hitting our first real S curve with the current technology’s performance but a lot of people who bet big are only see the exponential part and assuming there won’t be a level off, or that the level of is far away.
There is no Moore’s law for AI.
If they do it quietly, they won’t get the stock price bump every company gets from saying they’re going to replace (costly) employees with AI.
Intelligence has nothing to do with success. These people are born into wealth, are wealth-adjacent, or are expert ass-kissers.
They also tend to be more greedy than others for wealth, status and power, and not imaginative enough to see that life is about more than this. So they dedicate their life to crawling up to the top of the corporate heap while everyone else gets on with actual real stuff.
People keep forgetting that these companies’ product is stock price, not whatever they’re advertising at any given moment.
Their “CEOs” have gotten sloppy because the grift has gotten so easy they naturally assume everyone is in on it. If everyone is in on the grift, there’s no need to lie about it.
Classic “I’ve made a HUGE mistake” moment from yet another “thought leader” suffering from AI/layoff FOMO. 🙄
What is the point of this news that talk about a walk back that is doing nothing to walk back?
In 2025 everything is just a messaging problem to these goons.
Reminds of Proto CEOs faux pas
Good to see the normie finally turning on these cult of personality clowns imitating Steve apple…
I can’t be believe we had to suffer 15 years of it.
These parasites been getting high on their own farts for too long while normie LARPed everything they said.
faux pas
Not much of a “faux” pas. Not only did he double down on it, but the board supported him.
“the board” lol yeah they used to be governing mechanisms instead of a clown car full of sycophants.
The plural of faux pas is also faux pas, because you know, French. But this is less one false step in the dance, than doing entirely the wrong dance altogether.
Oh thanks for re-teaching me that one! It’s been far too long since I last used French reallistically.
Even tho it’s better that I took that than German, otherwise I’d understand the ich_iel memes which would make them lose half their charm.
crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company. just a couple months ago, duo mascot and Duolingo streaks were cool and fun. they had a good thing going. but now it’s just another shit tech company again. they lost all the good will in like a month.
crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company.
they lost all the good will in like a month.
Twitter enter the chat
Twitter was going downhill hard already when Musk bought the place
I uninstalled yesterday, good riddance Duo.
Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis
Last year in February I uninstalled the app on a perfect, 2000-day streak when I got the first whiff of AI; I’m probably never going back
FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.
So…tries and fails? 😛
except his AI.
I gotta say, the icon of Duo looking like this, plus a snot coming out of one of its nostrils is what did it for me. No way to turn off this “feature” either. I’m not easily grossed out, so seeing it once or twice would have given me a chuckle. Seeing it every time I opened my phone? Nope.
I knew I wouldn’t be renewing my subscription right there and then (there were other reasons, but that one moved the decision faster.)
wait what… they made the official icon look miserable and added snot? wtf?
Yup! Google “Duolingo snot icon” and it will be the first image result.
Or you could visit the orange site and check it out there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/1f2deam/im_sick_right_now_and_this_is_the_app_icon/
holy fuck
I think on iOS they added a thing where it would change based on the days you didn’t use Duolingo. Honestly at this point I think it speaks more about the sorry state of their company more than anything.
