Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period. The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. I understand this mindset but, with all due respect, I'd also appeal to the pragmatic reality. If I were really being put together with a set of humans at the beginning of the league and the scores just played out organically, I would expect to occasionally win big or get demolished, but that never happened to me.Īnd my guess is that being competitive towards the top of the league but not consistently winning is the best for user engagement, so they'd have every reason to fake/engineer that outcome. My experience doing Duolingo regularly was that my own score would vary significantly week-over-week based on my time and effort, and I would always land somewhere in the top four-ish spots in the "league" I was in regardless. As far as I know, Duolingo doesn't document or discuss the mechanics of league formation, so even if they were manipulating outcomes like this it wouldn't be outright lying. And if they do pull real human scores into that list, they don't necessarily need to make that list consistent between users so if you get second place, the real human whose score is shown in fourth place could be looking at their own wholly separate list in which they were second (with a userbase as large as Duolingo, I think of these two things as largely isomorphic). There's no particular reason to believe that the other users and scores in the league you're in represent other real-world humans, and could simply be generated algorithmically to put you at a specific point in a score distribution based on A/B testing for what works the best to keep people engaged. I think it's more than this - it feels pretty unclear that the "league" feature is real in any sense. Work on mindlessly maximizing those metrics instead and you risk not only destroying your product, but also destroying your ability to measure the damage you're causing. Work on making a better product and utilize metrics to see how you're doing. If anything Duolingo seems to be a warning about the dangers of pursuing the maximization of metrics at any cost. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left. I went from a high activity user to a near zero activity user (Memrize is a much better primary tool for learning languages now IMO) yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. Amusingly it still uses the same API, so you get all the core features and then some (turns out premium or not is a client side check lol) without any of the increasingly intolerable junk of the new app.īut what I have also noted is that the activity of users seems to have fallen off a cliff, which I'd tend to assume is because the number of users has fallen off a cliff. But because I'm a technically inclined, instead they drove me to sideload an "outdated" version of the app. The endless gamification, nagging, and destruction of useful features would have driven me from the site. I suspect there's a reason his graph ends 8 months ago. I have never had a French classes, but recently I had no problem to chat with other real person in French. Personally, I have had to click on the icon several times to open a forum to find an explanation of the error.ĭisclaimer: I am paying Duolingo user with 340+ day streak trying to learn French. This is because many answers look good enough, but in reality the other one is correct. ![]() Otherwise you lose your focus and may find that the answer you have entered is not one that Duolingo would accept. Catchy answers: It is not a problem to spend a whole day with Duolingo, but after 15 minutes you need to take a short break. I have also noticed that some players like to compete with others, it sometimes leads to visible competition for the top 3 places (especially in the Obsidian League), which is really fun. ![]() However, some users I follow have found it fun and have been in the Diamond League for over 70 weeks. Gamification: After reaching 1st place in the Diamond League, I found the constant nagging about my ranking annoying. Pronunciation: Sometimes the recorded audio is in so bad quality or spoken in robotic way, that is very hard to repeat it. Similar as in the story previously discussed on HN: / įrankly, there are 3 things that I find annoying / frustrating: It can be used only as a companion and not the only source to learn. This application is not meant to "teach" you a foreign language but "help" you with a grammar and commonly used sentence, so
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