I’ve been complaining about how Duolingo punishes users for mistakes for a long time now, they’re now moving from hearts that you lose when you make a mistake, to an energy mechanic according to this article from Jay Peters writing for The Verge:
“Under the new system, you’ll spend one unit of energy to complete an exercise, and a mistake will cost one energy. But you’ll also get extra energy back at a randomized rate for completing multiple lessons right in a row. As a result, users should be able to do more lessons, and that’s what’s showing up in the data, Moses Wayne, a senior staff engineer at Duolingo, tells The Verge.“
There’s a bunch of math that goes into this to figure out that it will be similarly punishing for free users as the current Heart-based system. As before, Duolingo subscribers get unlimited Energy.
I’ve also noticed that Duolingo’ve added a Chess course, which I’ve only tried a little bit.
It feels like the Duolingo company is in Emergency save-our-reputation mode with these changes. I don’t believe the change to Energy from Hearts is good enough, it still slows down free users from focusing on learning with whatever time they have available and will likely end-up penalizing people for making mistakes. They should either move to subscription only or just have more ads for free users instead of slowing them down. What is the cost to the company for a free user these days? It can’t be much.
Here’s my sure-fire way to save the company’s reputation:
- Take the company private
- Drop all internal AI slop and plans for the slop
- Hire the workers back
- Make the company a worker-owned co-op
- Luis von Ahn retires.
- Users now fully on-board, move to subscriptions only for most users, let users buy each other subscriptions and offer no-questions-asked discounts for anyone who can’t afford the full-price subscription.
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