You can set your profile to private to completely disable the leaderboard stuff.
Comment on Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 weeks agoA 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.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yeah of course, winning or losing a game has no bearing on anything. It’s still winning or losing.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks 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.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 weeks 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.