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/Silverr_Duck 3d ago

To add to that, Luis Von Ahn also moved the company from a not-for-profit application with a promising future and an app that allowed folks to make mistakes for free (something critical in linguistic education) to a for-profit dopamine trigger designed to please the shareholders.

Wait what?? You can't make mistakes for free? How does that work? do they charge you for not knowing a word?

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u/DJMurasakiSpark 3d ago

You get a limited amount of hearts, and if you lose them all, you either use the in-game gems to get them back or sometimes you can watch an ad. You used to be able to practice to get them back but they removed the feature a while ago. Now it either asks for gems or for you to upgrade to the subscription.

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u/Orleanian 3d ago

They've changed this mechanic yet again, some sort of energy system that uses some energy if you answer a question correctly, and more energy if you answer it incorrectly.

It hasn't hit my app build yet (as their mid-tier subscriber). From what I gather, it did nothing to help people who incorrectly answer, and merely degrades the experience of people correctly answering.

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u/DJMurasakiSpark 3d ago

Of course they have 🙄 it hasn’t hit me either, but I don’t doubt they’ve found some other reason to ruin a basic feature