From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism
I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.
Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.
I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it’s very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don’t like the direction the company has taken and I don’t want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.
Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.
No, they don’t punish typos, to the point I sometimes have mistakes counted as typos (I distinctly remember typing Schwimmt instead of schwimmst the other day and it said Be careful typos, but counted it right, end up having to check with my gf in those cases)
I don’t know why the experience seems so different between people, maybe it actually is, maybe it’s expectations. All in all it’s free, I don’t forget that and through Firefox android I get a very good experience.
In my experience the typo-tolerance is not very flexible. I write using Dvarok instead of QWERTY, so the typos I make don’t always follow regular patterns. On my phone I use a swipe keyboard, so sometimes a typo comes out as a different word entirely. No matter what I don’t want to be punished for my mistakes, even if they are real mistakes. I just want to keep on learning without the tool I’m using intentionally trying to make that harder for me.
I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.
Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.
I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it’s very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don’t like the direction the company has taken and I don’t want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.
Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.
No, they don’t punish typos, to the point I sometimes have mistakes counted as typos (I distinctly remember typing Schwimmt instead of schwimmst the other day and it said Be careful typos, but counted it right, end up having to check with my gf in those cases)
I don’t know why the experience seems so different between people, maybe it actually is, maybe it’s expectations. All in all it’s free, I don’t forget that and through Firefox android I get a very good experience.
There’s pretty odd because it definitely punishes me for typos in french
It was quite lenient with my error-prone French.
That said, Duo is well known for A/B testing so no doubt we were just using different feature sets.
In my experience the typo-tolerance is not very flexible. I write using Dvarok instead of QWERTY, so the typos I make don’t always follow regular patterns. On my phone I use a swipe keyboard, so sometimes a typo comes out as a different word entirely. No matter what I don’t want to be punished for my mistakes, even if they are real mistakes. I just want to keep on learning without the tool I’m using intentionally trying to make that harder for me.