The meanest app: Duolingo subjects its users to "emotional blackmail"

I'm a former military linguist who was trained to learn Arabic.

I've always disliked and distrusted Duolingo (and before that, Rosetta Stone), for providing people the basics (which they do just fine) but making it seem like fluency is always just one more upgrade or lesson around the corner while not-so-subtly implying that it's your fault that you're not there yet.

Even for the most talented learners of languages it takes many, many more hours and types of exposure that these apps cannot achieve. For Arabic, for instance, the military gave us 88 weeks of full-day instruction with native speakers, in addition to homework. And that's all just to achieve basic reading/listening fluency. And many of the people who start the program (and have passed an aptitude test even to start the program) do not complete it.

Like I said, it's as good as anything to start, but it's the marketing of it as the complete package that irks me.

If the features of Duolingo are available in another app (i.e. their various memorization techniques, vocabulary building, various interactive learning, etc.) that doesn't gamify or nag. Let me know since I really detest these aspects of Duolingo.

I succumbed to paying for the app since it is virtually unusable with the frequency of ads on the freemium model.

They are a very dislikable brand.

The whole purpose of Duolingo is emotional and psychological manipulation to get us to override our tendencies to procrastinate, forget, etc. Otherwise we'd just pick up a foreign language book.

I don't really get the framing of this article.

I must be in the right demographic because I find their violent blackmailing owl shenanigans really funny for a marketting angle. I like it.

I realised the gamification had missed its purpose when I caught myself memorising the bigrams and trigrams of answers without reading the full text so I could click through and retain my streak each day. My learning had stalled at this point but my streak looked great.

What I really don't like about Duolingo is how they try to progressively increase your load. Whether it's the monthly achievement or friends' quest, if you try to go faster, then you'll have to go through much more in order to finish those. I experimented with this a bit and found out that to keep the app out of the aggressive mode I just need to do the bare minimum, like 1 lesson per day. And having a sub does not help here. So I just canceled it and doing 1-2 lessons per day to stay in a chill mode.

"Younger age groups engaging with marketing are looking for a company that has a special, unique personality that's memorable and feels authentic,"

Let me introduce "Fuck you, Inc.", if you're not into us then fuck you.

I don't know. I'm either too old, or too jaded, or don't give a fuck too much.

It was nagging me, and I just ignored it. It's bad, of course, that I have ignored it, because as a result, learning hasn't happened. But it was very easy for me to ignore it. I didn't feel blackmailed.

And then I keep wondering what all those years of nagging telemarketing calls one has learned to hang up on despite all the tricks can do to one's psyche.

The many ways in which Duolingo is unethical and abusive derive from the simple fact that if it actually worked, even the slightest, then you would stop using the thing and cashing them $$$

For me the worst is that when you indulge, you feel bad and will do something; but with Duolingo you are still indulging the same, however it makes you feel accomplished and that you made your work.

No, you didn't — You just watched the ads they wanted you to watch. Doing nothing is literally better than Duolingo.

My problem with Duolingo, as an English person, is the ‘English’ is actually American English (even uses a US flag!) and sometimes marks my answers as wrong when they are actually correct in English! Some of the required responses aren’t even English (e.g. “the books had gotten lost”). I would really appreciate it if they could allow actual English answers as well as American English ones.

The icon only changes on April fools as a joke or something like that. And it changes for everybody. At least on iPhone, I don't think you can change the app icon without notifying the user.

I had a pretty good streak, but due to hospitalised sickness I lost it by a few hours. Couldn't face picking the app back up and starting again from a zero streak.

A decade ago, this was known as growth hacking, and everyone aspired to master it.