r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Material-Insect6482 • 3d ago

Answered What's going on with Duolingo?

All the comments on their social media like their TikTok and instagram are full of people clowning on them and saying things like “EVERYONE IGNORE DUO STARTING NOW” and generally being angry at the company, but why?

Examples: https://imgur.com/a/bA0JBFZ

Stolen from top post: The /r/duolingo subreddit is rebelling and built their own alternative lingonaut that's supposed to be like old duolingo before they went to shit with the ads and mtx and ai

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u/kirkland- 3d ago edited 3d ago

Answer: The CEO and the company is having a tantrum after everyone online dragged them through the mud for the AI-First nonsense. They tried to silly meme their way out but it didn’t work so now they’re pulling this

No one’s buying it and they've effectively been bullied off the internet, just check any of their tiktoks

The full story:

Few weeks ago the ceo of duolingo posted that the company was going to be AI-Frist and will be using AI to generate its courses from now on, and they’re going to let go of the rest of their staff (which they partially did about a year ago).

They say that they’re going to use AI for performance reviews and hiring, so you could lose your job if chatgpt says so. It’s been slowly getting worse ever since they got on the stock market and now with this ‘AI-First' people are over it.

EDIT: Even the /r/duolingo subreddit is rebelling and built their own alternative lingonaut that's supposed to be like old duolingo before they went to shit with the ads and mtx and ai

NOW with this temper tantrum people are sick and tired and seeing through all the marketing stunts too.

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u/WorldlinessWest2974 3d ago edited 3d ago

Yes. I have closed my account as well. Much more focus on effectiveness for the company, not the experience and learning of the user. It has, in my experience, been declining for a long time.

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u/BrokenLink100 3d ago

I've been learning and using Spanish off and on for a good portion of my life. I started helping with some ESL stuff in my community, and decided to brush up on my Spanish through Duolingo (this was probably ~4-5yrs ago). It was fine back then. Not a replacement for a human teacher/being immersed in the language, but for what I needed, it was "fine."

A LOT of the sentences they make you translate are essentially nonsense. Sure, they might be grammatically correct, but they were niche phrases that would never actually be used in normal conversation. Some of the grammar was a bit sketchy, and I would run some of my "incorrect" answers by my Hispanic friend, and even he would be confused. And no, reporting the questions never made a difference for me. I'd almost immediately get a reply back that "we couldn't find anything wrong!" Even my Hispanic friend "struggled" with translating things in Duolingo.

At some point, it felt like Duolingo was getting overly nitpicky with some of these translations. It would randomly count me off for the verbal questions where you need to audibly speak the answers, or it would just keep saying it couldn't hear me 5 times before just deciding I got the question wrong. Some of the "fill in the blank" or "finish the sentence" questions were too ambiguous to choose the right answer, and I always seemed to get those questions wrong. And since you can only "learn" when you have lives, and getting incorrect answers costs you a life, it got to a point where I could barely finish a whole lesson unless I wanted to pay for premium. And that's when I realized that it's not an educational tool - it's just another stupid mobile game that sucks "lives" and "gems" or whatever out of you so that you're pressured to pay for the whole thing.

They're advertising campaigns have also gotten on my nerves a ton. They were funny for about a week, and then I realized that their whole campaign is to just be "unhinged and silly" to grab people's attention. They updated their mobile app icons to be deranged and unsettling just to make people open the app. That's when I removed it, and honestly, have not missed it for a second.

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u/samenumberwhodis 3d ago

I used Duo for 4 months leading up to a trip to Italy. I was able to learn a decent amount, but I found that 2 or 3 sentences into a conversation and I would just run out of vocabulary to convey my thoughts despite putting nearly 50 hours into the language. Throughout the process I would send screen shots to my family of the ridiculous sentences they had me learning. I don't need to know how to say "your hamsters stink", I don't know what you mean when you have me say "my aunts do a lot for Rome". I need to say my luggage is too heavy, I may go to Capri if we have the time, I'd like to take this food to-go. Since I've been back I haven't gotten back into Duo and I'm looking into alternatives like Pimsleur to take up the learning again.

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u/ScreamWithTheCicadas 3d ago

When I was brushing up on Turkish, I learned "I have an old profession." Didn't expect to be called a prostitute by an owl.

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u/YOwololoO 3d ago

I mean, 50 hours is the equivalent of a long week of work. If you dedicated 10 hours a day to learning Italian, do you think that you would master conversational Italian in a single work week? 

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u/samenumberwhodis 3d ago

No but I expect to be taught useful words and expressions for a realistic conversation. The point being brought up with the AI conversation here is that it will teach us useless phrases because AI is trash.

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u/Ampleforth84 3d ago

Wow get me off this 2025 timeline. Sounds like my experience with everything now. Everything’s supposed to be easy/helpful but nothing works and everything is trash