DL is a freemium app with ever-increasingly heavy gamification and upsells, which cannot be turned off. 75+% of DL's revenue comes from the small number of its users who are subscribers.
The former Chief Product Officer openly discusses how they optimized/sacrificed pretty much everything since 2019, to juice their metrics (CURR, DAU, $/user) and monetization for the 2021 IPO ("How Duolingo reignited user growth") [0]. Stock ticker DUOL.
See our recent discussion of DL's strengths, weaknesses, business model etc. [1] with a developer who was acquihired by DL.
I've been using Duolingo for 1300 days now. Currently learning Chinese; the Chinese course was sadly locked in 2021 when China banned for-profit foreign tutoring, but DL locking it prevents volunteer users fixing and improving it.
Strengths and weaknesses: DL does help you to "learn a language" if by that you mean basic competency, vocabulary, basic grammar. But not to exam or conversational level. Some categories of user need the gamification, friending, leaderboard, challenges, streaks, badges etc., but for the rest of us you generally can't turn these interruptions off. Most people find the daily reminder feature legit useful. Other apps could legitimately learn from DL how to gamify and reduce learning to daily chunks, but without going overboard on metrics and retention and sacrificing a large chunk of the learning time to gamification features interrupting the learning.
See [0b] for how Duolingo's claim “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education” is misleading because it's based on their long-discontinued (pre-2013) SRS algorithm. Sounds like false advertising. Note the comparative absence of peer-reviewed studies confirming DL's claims about language acquisition.
Privacy: DL embeds FB tracking which is an intentional trust and GDPR violation, default-on, no informed consent, and the opt-out is pretty buried; doesn't sound ethical [2].
See our recent discussion of DL's strengths, weaknesses, business model etc. [1] with a developer who was acquihired by DL.
I've been using Duolingo for 1300 days now. Currently learning Chinese; the Chinese course was sadly locked in 2021 when China banned for-profit foreign tutoring, but DL locking it prevents volunteer users fixing and improving it.
Strengths and weaknesses: DL does help you to "learn a language" if by that you mean basic competency, vocabulary, basic grammar. But not to exam or conversational level. Some categories of user need the gamification, friending, leaderboard, challenges, streaks, badges etc., but for the rest of us you generally can't turn these interruptions off. Most people find the daily reminder feature legit useful. Other apps could legitimately learn from DL how to gamify and reduce learning to daily chunks, but without going overboard on metrics and retention and sacrificing a large chunk of the learning time to gamification features interrupting the learning.
See [0b] for how Duolingo's claim “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education” is misleading because it's based on their long-discontinued (pre-2013) SRS algorithm. Sounds like false advertising. Note the comparative absence of peer-reviewed studies confirming DL's claims about language acquisition.
Privacy: DL embeds FB tracking which is an intentional trust and GDPR violation, default-on, no informed consent, and the opt-out is pretty buried; doesn't sound ethical [2].
[0]: "How Duolingo reignited user growth" 2/2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435
[0b]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34978841
[1]: "I bought back my acquihired startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456
[2]: "Facebook Still Tracks People on Yelp, Duolingo, Indeed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19319215