Comment on Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

• finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  1. There actually is a weekly leaderboard bracket where you compete with about 30 to 50 other people.

  2. Completing a lesson is winning, losing all your lives is losing.

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    A completely optional, side objective that has no bearing on anything else? You can completely ignore the leader board and still progress. It’s not competitive.

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    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Yeah of course, winning or losing a game has no bearing on anything. It’s still winning or losing.

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      • zaphod@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        The main objective is not to complete lessons, but to learn. If you use up all your hearts because you make too many mistakes you’re obviously not learning. At that point Duolingo completely fails though, instead of telling you to go back and practice, it asks if you want to buy hearts with in-game currency or switch to the paid super max hyper ultra AI whatever it’s now called for unlimited hearts. Unlimited hearts doesn’t give you shit though, it allows you to bruteforce your way through the lessons to get XP to rank up in the completely optional leaderboards, it doesn’t help you learn.

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      • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        No, you don’t. It’s only when you lose hearts. You get to make 5 mistakes. You can use gems to replenish them or they replenish over time. After playing for a while you earn plenty of gems to restore your hearts mid lesson every now and then. You can watch an ad to replenish your hearts between lessons, but not during. If you’re not making mistakes then you can keep going. It’s not that difficult to not make mistakes either, a lot of times they flat out give you the answer by tapping on words.

        There are plenty of things to shit on Duolingo as a company. Calling the app pay to win really isn’t one.

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    • zaphod@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      You can set your profile to private to completely disable the leaderboard stuff.

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