Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

Maybe time to boycott the service (which anyway was not that spectacular)

if the labor cost goes down, the service should become cheaper.
if it worked like that, i'd love to have AI replace humans.
AI isn't the problem. capitalism is.

The AI slop is why I quit Duolingo after my 1500+ day streak.
- Is there an alternative? I just started using it but the experience is incredibly grating, especially the way they gate your progress behind "lives" that stop you learning unless you can pay.
  
  Yarr, thar be an alternative. Though some might'n be thinking acquiring such booty be illegal.

Let's also replace the customers by AI, that way the whole system will really be "AI first" and self-sufficient.
- Afraid to find out what an AI Karen would be like.
- it's a matter of time (or more likely has already happen) where an AI company ends up having only AI users, it makes money be selling adds to show to the users, which are all AI bots, and then selling those bots as user data.
  then said company celebrates that it has no humans involved making a shit ton of profit.
  
  So Twitter?

If you looking to replace dualingo, check with your local library, they may offer free access to different language learning apps. I was able to get Rosetta Stone for free using my library. And they also have access to Muzzy and Transparent language.

My son is going to be sad that we don't use duo anymore
- your local public library (if in US) should offer free language courses online - all you need is a library card

So if they're using a ChatGPT wrapper to teach me languages, why do I need Duolingo? Copilot is free.
- This kind of thing is what confuses me as a business model. Take audio books for example, Audible is pivoting to ai voices. Why would people spend $20 on an audio book with an ai voice when they can just spend $1.99 on the eBook and run it through an ai voice program themselves?
  
  most people have absolutely no idea how to 'run it through an ai voice program' ..... yet
- Copilot is free.
  Free.
  Free with ads.
  Freemium with ads.
  Free trial with tiered subscription service.
  New subscription tiers with reduced ads. Premium package for boosts to service.
  Please enter your credit card number and watch the ad to unlock device.
  
  Please drink verification can to continue..
- If it's free you are the product.
  
  This is a fun quote to bandy around but I'd argue when it comes to AI it's more that we're in the honeymoon phase. The platforms are building the user bases. Not to say aggressive monetization isn't just over the horizon.

So they've killed themselves before adding Armenian.
Makes sense.
- As an Armenian with family murdered by the Turks. What was the point of this?
  
  Trying to help Duolingo add Armenian is something I've read about in 2018 or something like that, and it's still there. They are very firmly not interested.

i cancelled my subscription and told them why

Apparently they've already been incorporating it and it's very inaccurate. I've decided to stop using them and have switched to LingoDeer and MemRise. Really pleased with how much better they are.
- I can also recommend Pimsleur. A bit more expensive, but features more traditional style courses, while offering a lot of what Duolingo has. Plus actual topics with grammar, not just random words!
- Why not Anki? Ankidroid works well and there are many great community decks for all kinds of languages (and other topics too BTW).
  
  I'm not great with ONLY flashcards so I personally feed my brain a variety. Anki is great from what I've heard
  
  I've tried AnkiDroid but couldn't really figure out how to use it. I downloaded the Spanish 5000 one which seems cool tho.

Duolingo has enshittified so much over the last few years.
Even if I had the ability to become a millionaire tech founder, I don't think I'd want to because every "I want to make learning new languages free and easy for everyone" becomes a "I have to drive 3% more ad revenue this quarter by charting my users' every bowel movement".
I suspect the reality of being a rich tech bro is watching your adult self slowly consume your own childhood dreams, aspirations, and soul.
- Enshittification is not driven by the founders (mostly, fuck Zuckerberg). It's driven by greedy investors who want their billion dollar unicorn payout and who who will risk a hundred company failures to get it.
  A lot of tech companies that manage to resist outside investors are doing just fine.
  
  I mean, true, but maybe the founders shouldn't take investment in the first place?
  
  It's ultimately driven by the lack of constraints in their market segment. Tech companies will screw over investors as well if they can get away with it.
  But I was more talking about how the founder of Duolingo professed specific, world-bettering goals when he started the company that -- if held sincerely -- would make him ashamed of himself because most of what the company does isn't in the service of them.
  The tech world is rife with founders that ultimately met that exact same fate.
  
  Well it makes sense if you think about it.
  You invest a million dollar in 100 companies, 95 fail, 4 makes 10 million each. If the last one hits at least 60 million you are even, anything above is pure profit. Basically just throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks.
- I canceled Super and uninstalled when they started telling me to get Max. My friends canceled and uninstalled today because of this news.
  We might be a small minority but I do giggle at the thought that Duolingo is gonna have to build AI customers soon because nobody will want to use it.
  
  I've been using the free version almost exclusively for over a decade. It continually gets shittier all of the time.
  The latest thing is you can't even practice the language to earn more hearts to continue your lesson, you have to now watch ads. I think it's rather emblematic of their approach overall... it's not about learning it's about more eyeballs for ads, unless you fork over a recurring payment for increasingly mediocre lessons.

Duolingo is a tragedy. They really quickly realized that you don’t make money teaching things - you make it on retention and gamification.
Mango languages is great if your library has a subscription. I believe the US’s foreign service materials are also really good, if you want effective but boring.
- I was so upset last year when they got rid of the comment section. There were often helpful explanations for WHY you conjugate the word that way, or how native speakers might use a different word.
  
  Yeah, the comment section was amazing...and then they came out with "max", where you get "explain my answer" for a premium, powered by a [notoriously fallible] LLM. This is the definition of enshitification.
  
  I don't know how good this feature was on Duolingo, but there's a site/app called HiNative that does a really good job at this sort of thing.
  
  Don’t worry, you can upgrade to Duolingo Max for even more money and have the AI explain it. (Seriously.)
  
  Never used it but that sounds like such a neat concept.
  Does anyone know of any free language learning apps that have a comment section? (And a user base that utilizes the comment section, of course.)
- It's not gamification that's the issue. That aspect really held my attention and gave me consistency.
  It's the push to a pay-to-win model that made me quit. They made the challenges harder and harder to complete without using boosts, and to use the boosts you had to use gems. And gems were really hard to get unless you bought them with real money. It doesn't matter if you have a super subscription (or whatever it's called), you still had to pay to get the gems.
  And the prices for the gems were just as predatory and the disgusting mobile gaming industry. Never should there be an option to spend over $20 for in-game consumables, nevermind over $100. It's sick.
- Tell me more about Mango library subscriptions? How would one determine?
  
  Your local library may have a Mango subscription plan for card holders. You might be able to find it on their website but a librarian would definitely know.
- The gameification part was good, it made it easier to keep up the habbit, though I recently got locked out for no apparent reason so apparently they just outright want to fail? Any good free alternatives? (I wasn't using the paid version)
  
  Here’s a website with those FSI courses I referenced earlier, as well as Peace Corps training materials. This is going to be the boring route. Drill drill drill, but you get good at it.
  As a general strategy - on the Omniglot forums a billion years ago there was a method called Listen-Read which I think does wonders for me. You pick a longer book, preferably one you have enjoyed and read already in English. You get a copy of that book in English and your target language, as well as audiobook (let’s go with say, French), then you listen to the audio book in French while reading the book in English, then switch to listening to an English audiobook while reading the French book, then the audiobook in French while reading the French.
  Librivox and Project Gutenberg are godsends. I did Candide this way, and part of Les Miserables. This is obviously less immediate fun/dopamine satisfying than Duolingo is, but will teach you to read better than Duolingo will. It’s not great at expressive language - while I can read Proust, my « je voudrais un Diet Coke » was not well received in Paris.
  If you have a language in mind I can probably point you in some other directions.
  
  Any good free alternatives?
  You won't like the idea but...
  
  What language(s)? Lots of good free resources.
  LanguageTransfer.org looks good but I haven't tried it myself.
- Duolingo was shit for learning, for me at least.
  So i left rather quickly, then came back hoping i could pick up some more Italian and noticed they summomed another paid tier. I wonder how many tiers they can summon up until they stop existing.

I have found Duolingo much, much less useful for language learning than Language Transfer. The latter actually helps you learn to think in another language rather than memorize things (which is still useful, but not nearly as much).
Short if total immersion, I have found nothing better than LT.
- The problem I have with finding an alternative is that most just offer some five to ten largest languages. Want to learn Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese? There are hundreds of both free and paid services available. Want to learn Hungarian, Irish, or Finnish? It’s Duolingo and a scant handful of sites specific to that language.
  
  Well at least now you know you can skip the middleman and ask some ai to help you practice.
- Holy crap that website needs some serious work, on mobile at least
- Dreaming Spanish, if you are trying to learn Spanish. I seriously think it is the future of language learning, bar none.
- Thanks, I will check it out:)
  From the first look: is this just audio or also written practices?
  
  Just audio. But it is presented in a way that helps you to learn, rather than just remember. If you give it a try, I promise that you will be shocked at how you can retain the knowledge.
  It isn't enough on its own, however. You need to reinforce the lessons by speaking to people, reading, and/or TV and movies.
- Thank you for sharing! I will check it out.
- Thanks! I’ll have to check this out

Oh no! How will I pretend to learn a language now? Woe is me.
- I get the hate for Duolingo, but you can actually learn with it
  
  Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won't use it anymore on principle.
  
  Right? My partner has used it for years and is now able to read simple to medium books and watch some movies in the learned language.

If you decide to cancel your subscription and delete your account, they give a warning when deleting that says you need to cancel your subscription SEPARATELY. Just a heads up for anyone thinking of leaving like I did.

“Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees”
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
In 2012, we bet on mobile. [...] That decision helped us win the 2013 iPhone App of the Year and unlocked the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed. Betting on mobile made all the difference. We’re making a similar call now, and this time the platform shift is AI.
I think this is some sort of fallacy, not sure which tho. Maybe a hasty generalization? "We bet on mobile twelve years ago and won, so if we bet on AI now we'll also win."
*It also seems they're using AI to code... those poor programmers will have to double check every single line it shits out because you know, it's a fucking AI. Yet another company succumbs to a CEOs emotional FOMO.
- "past performance is not indicative of future results¨
- Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
  I mean technically the contractors are not employees
  
  Technically my shit is edible, technically.
  
  Yeah, like, I think this is a bad move for Duolingo as a company, since their code quality will rapidly go downhill with the current state of AI generated code.
  But also, if you are a contract employee, you should be prepared to be let go at any moment. That's sort of the whole point of being a contract employee - you are only employed for the contract. It isn't unethical in anyway for a company to not rehire employees who knew up front that they might not be rehired.

It's okay. We can all play that game. I've replaced my use of Duolingo with AI.
Pro tip: have as your "system prompt" in your LLM of choice "at the end of every query, include me a short Swedish relates to my prompt". No need for Duolingo.
- At least AI can give you actual grammar lessons

Duolingo uninstalled

uninstalls Duolingo
leaves 1-star app review

So is there any Duolingo alternative that teaches Esperanto and Indonesian?
- Esperanto you can learn on lernu.net

Welp, time to quit

They have been shilling max so hard, the practice tab now is hidden to make room for the Video Call tab (Max only) and a tab to subscribe to Max or upgrade your plan.
Probably won’t renew this year. I have a 1500+ day streak, but a good chunk of that is just doing a single quick practice lesson every day, the gamification got me and I haven’t learned much new stuff in probably a year.
I learned enough Italian to use it when I went on a two week trip in 2023, but the problem with Duo’s lessons is nothing is conversational. I would be able to say/ask something, understand the response, but then not really have the ability to keep the conversation going.
The differences in languages after so many years is also a bit disheartening, I had a friend show me all the tools available in their French course that I didn’t have, it made their Italian lessons look like vocab flash cards in comparison.
I am not a big LLM user, but I did try to use it as a conversation partner, which worked alright. I haven’t looked in a while, but my biggest issue was it would speak too fast and none of the available tools had a way to slow it down outside of telling it to add ellipses after each word.

There are at least some Duolingo courses that use AI voices exclusively and they are shit.
On the one hand, having an AI to talk to sounds like something that could be good. Getting a real person to talk to every user would be impossible. I just don’t think the technology is going to meet expectations any time soon.
- The problem is if the user asks the AI a question about the language they're learning they'll often get confident bullshit as the response and they won't know it's wrong because they're still learning.
- They do this in the French course. Half the time it still can’t understand what I’m saying. Maybe that’s on me, but still. C’est la vie.

R.I.P Doulingo.

Well, I prepaid for a year about 2 months ago. I'm gonna use it, but not renew. Fuck em
- Could probably ask them for a refund based on their significant change in how services are provided.
  
  It's kind of a gray area for me, because I did split a family plan with a friend. I'll swallow my shame for the next 10 months, but that's the end of the line.

Fuck their greed, I know that the bulk of their users wouldn't caffè if the CEO started shooting puppies on Main Square, but they can train their AI on Deez

It’s just a tool like anything else. You can’t put the genie back in the lamp. Some jobs go away and new jobs are created. Look at every industrial revolution we’ve had in the past. AI technology is not to the point of replacing mankind.
- The difference is that the actual revolutions like that generally use technology that actually works.
  
  This is the kind of guy who's cool and okay about AI untill it takes their job.
  
  Have you ever used AI tools? What kinds of things are you expecting it to do? It can do a lot of minor tasks well.
- Yeah. Which means, replacing all workers with AI will not work out well. A wrench alone can't fix your plumbing.
  
  It can definitely replace some jobs with minimal oversight.
- Yeah, except that ai is almost 40% wrong, yet it pretends to know everything and sounds very convincing. It will never tell you "i don't know" or "that's a bad idea, don't do that" like a real person or friend would do but instead encourages your with everything. Still, app developers sell ai chat bots as "virtual friends" to insecure people.
  
  Of course any implementation will need oversight, but it can do many things as good or better than a human.
- But AI can be inaccurate, which is a problem when trying to teach people things
  
  For sure. You don’t just let it run the show. Nobody is saying there won’t be oversight.
- "the genie" lmfao
  if i knew you fucking people were going to do another round of pretending AI was real, i would have taken up sky diving in 2012
  
  “you fucking people” wow. So aggressive. Parachute-less skydiving was probably a good idea.

For those who aren't leaving Duolingo, you can still get the paid features by creating a class and joining it. Or at least that's how it worked the last time I used it, which was a few years ago now.
- Creating a school no longer provides any benefit for the students.