Submitted 15 hours ago by filister@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-replace-contract-workers
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”.
The reality of being a rich tech bro is watching your adult self completely consume your own childhood dreams, aspirations, and soul.
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.
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.
Why not Anki? Ankidroid works well and there are many great community decks for all kinds of languages (and other topics too BTW).
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.
Holy crap that website needs some serious work, on mobile at least
Thank you for sharing! I will check it out.
Dreaming Spanish, if you are trying to learn Spanish. I seriously think it is the future of language learning, bar none.
Thanks! I’ll have to check this out
Oh no! How will I pretend to learn a language now? Woe is me.
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.”
"past performance is not indicative of future results¨
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
I mean technically the contractors are not employees
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.
Technically my shit is edible, technically.
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
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.
Yeah. Which means, replacing all workers with AI will not work out well. A wrench alone can’t fix your plumbing.
The difference is that the actual revolutions like that generally use technology that actually works.
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.
But AI can be inaccurate, which is a problem when trying to teach people things
Welp, time to quit
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.
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 gen AI 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 languages 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.
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
R.I.P Doulingo.
Well, I prepaid for a year about 2 months ago. I’m gonna use it, but not renew. Fuck em
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.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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.
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
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.
eatCasserole@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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.
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Don’t worry, you can upgrade to Duolingo Max for even more money and have the AI explain it. (Seriously.)
Psythik@lemm.ee 7 hours ago
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?
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
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.
GoatTnder@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Tell me more about Mango library subscriptions? How would one determine?
jabathekek@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
Your local library may have a subscription plan for card holders. You might be able to find it on your their website but a librarian would definitely know.
CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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)
andros_rex@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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 billionaire 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.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
You won’t like the idea but…
spoiler
pirating a textbook from Libgen/Anna’s Archive
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
What language(s)? Lots of good free resources.