Duolingo pissed me off when they narrowed the bands in their leagues. My German has gotten better, but I’m about ready to check out Lingonaut when my Duolingo subscription is up for renewal. I paid, so why not use it until then? I’m just ignoring the leagues.
12 Likes
I’ve been pretty unhappy with Duolingo over the past couple years. It’s just been a constant march of enshitification.
First they got rid of the “tree” and replaced it with the “path”. I hate this. If a lesson track was boring or irrelevant, I could work on something else and then go back to it later. Now I’m stuck slogging through 20 or 30 rounds of a topic I don’t care about just to get to the next one. It was a terrible idea then and is a terrible idea now. Yes, they have done some tweaks to make it better, but it’s still not as good as the way it used to be.
Then they got rid of the forums, which were an amazing resource for understanding answers. Yes, they weren’t perfect but there were still incredibly helpful. But that’s ok, they eventually found a way to bring them back (but worse).
Then they added the new and really expensive Max subscription tier, which I didn’t care about because it didn’t have anything relevant to my language track (I primarily work on Japanese) but despite this they upsell it (and family plans) to me constantly even though I already pay for Super. Then they rejiggered the app to bury useful learning features behind submenus and add more Max-centric stuff front and center even though I don’t have a Max subscription.
Then they added a replacement for the forums, an AI powered “explain this answer” which is like the forums, but is gated behind the Max subscription tier. With a Super subscription, it will show up every time I get an answer wrong but it’ll upsell me to Max if I tap on it.
Duolingo has always had dark patterns in place to lock you in and keep you using the app, but it’s gotten so much worse. For instance, they started adding tons of annoying push notifications that don’t stop even if I disable them in the app settings. If I disable push notifications entirely (which I did), I then get daily nags to enable push notifications or to use the widget. I don’t want any of this shit. This is straight up asshole design.
They recently added a toxic thing into the app where you can make fun of your friends if they miss a day or use a streak freeze. Seriously - it’ll advertise this in your feed now and you can send a 
or 
emoji back to them. That’s fucked up.
Apparently things have gotten significantly worse for free tier users according to the many complaints I’ve seen on Reddit.
I really hope Lingonaut can be a good replacement when it launches.
17 Likes
I have been a free user for about 250 days and only signed up for Super recently. While it’s been nice not having constant ads or running out of hearts, I feel like the upsell stuff for the family plan and Max have only gotten more aggressive. Also it spent a week with a banner across the top nagging me to enable notifications.
(I never allow games to send me notifications… it’s a game, not a job or an emergency or a family member.)
13 Likes
Wow! I use it primarily on my laptop. It doesn’t do speaking exercises on DuckDuckGo, so I’m stuck with Chrome. That’s all I use Chrome for.
I don’t have Max - I’ve never noticed being pestered about it, and didn’t even know it was a thing!
When I do use my phone, it wants me to enable push and I just nope that.
Is that what “Nudge” does? I’ve never used it - I thought it was rude to “nudge” someone at 6:00AM, which is when I’m usually using it. The “worst” I do is not “High Five” my partner on a friend quest if I did 100% of the work. It happens a lot.
I see Lingonaut is in beta. Have you tried it, @ficuswhisperer ?
11 Likes
Nudges will send a push notification to your friends. They are canned messages that are often incredibly passive aggressive. They would pop up on my phone constantly even after turning off all push notifications within the app. That’s why I disabled all push notifications globally for the app. Now I get nagged constantly to turn them on. It’s like, fuck off already.
These are some examples of “nudges”: (not mine)
11 Likes
Duolingo sounds like an an abusive boyfriend
14 Likes
When we moved back to Kansas City, I got Google Fiber for internet access because it’s high speed, relatively cheap, and KC, since it was the first place Google Fiber started before they figured out they couldn’t make as much money with it as they’d hoped, is one of the few places you can still get it. However, it meant I had to do something for tv, since they no longer provide that service. I ended up going with YouTubeTV, because it was relatively inexpensive, had pretty good reviews, and seemed to provide everything we needed. I have noticed a problem lately, though. And it’s something that wasn’t happening a couple of months ago, although a Google search shows people reporting this periodically going back several years. Sometimes, when an add plays, the volume jumps up noticeably louder. Like, a lot louder. Like, the other human yelling “Hey! Why’d you turn that up so loud!” louder. A lot of the Google results claim this is due to something with 5.1 audio versus stereo, but I’m not buying it. First, we’re only using the built in tv speakers. Second, it doesn’t always do it. And third, 5.1 isn’t some new fangled thing that the bugs are still being worked out on. It’s been around a long, long time at this point. There’s no way there isn’t a fix for whatever audio level problems differences between 5.1 recording playbacks and stereo recording playbacks cause, so there’s no way this isn’t intentional. Dammit, companies suck. All of them. Even when their bad behavior is banned, they keep trying to go back to it. Congress banned this practice in 2012. Although I imagine the current FCC is in such disarray that the chances of enforcement now are probably zero.
14 Likes
I’ve been one for 11 years. 
Same. If there’s an issue, I could use Firefox on my laptop as a backup. In every set of lessons, I opt out of speaking exercises, because no apps other than phone are allowed to use my microphone.
I have zero friends and seven followers. I follow no one, and can’t remember how those people got attached to me. Occasionally, they’ll send congrats for maintaining a streak or meeting some monthly challenge I never noticed. Y’all are making me realized I dodged a bullet there. The nag notifications definitely would’ve led me to drop it.
The gamification of the leagues and streaks can be annoying. I do enough across a few languages each week to stay in one league (landing in the demotion zone shows me my daily lesson totals are dropping). I got into the highest one once and figured the folks in there must be on the app all day to get weekly totals like that. Ten to twenty minutes three times a day is all I’m gonna commit. If I run out of hearts in the morning, I’m done until new ones appear in the evening.
This is what will drive me to Lingonaut if it turns out to be a good replacement.
10 Likes
I haven’t used Duolingo for many years, but was considering starting again once I make a plan for where to move if I can ever leave the USA. After reading this, I’m just evicting it from my phone instead. Gross. Gross and bad. I hope there are decent alternatives, but if not, maybe I’ll just take actual language classes the old fashioned way, if those aren’t outlawed by then.
11 Likes
Soundcloud has changed TOS to say you’re going to get scraped.
11 Likes
I hadn’t been using Soundcloud in ages to listen to stuff but good to know so i can avoid it even harder
10 Likes
8 Likes
Thanks for the update. I just deleted my tracks and my account. In the process:
-
I got a notification that my email/password were found in another site’s data breach. Which is pretty weird, considering that I use a password manager and no two sites have the same password, and that they never sent me any notification of a breach themselves. (I also got an email notification that my password needed to be changed merely due to a long period of account inactivity, which is more likely.)
-
I had to delete my tracks one at a time – there is no bulk delete option, even though there’s bulk editing of other kinds. (Probably could have just deleted the account but I wanted to be sure.)
I haven’t uploaded very much there in the past few years. Most of my plays on SoundCloud were demos of Eurorack modules that I’d done. My own actual music that I put time and effort into got fewer plays, although it was a bit. But as far as I can tell it never actually drove anyone to my Bandcamp site anyway.
11 Likes
TIL a new phrase: “waste colonialism.”
…
The researchers noted dioxins could cause developmental problems in children, lead to reproductive and infertility problems in adults, result in miscarriages, damage the immune system and interfere with hormones.
“They could spend 1.5m rupiah ($97) per week to buy wood as a safer fuel,” said Nexus3 co-founder Yuyun Ismawati, “But with plastic scraps, company trucks drop it off for free.”
Another owner, speaking anonymously, said he was concerned about the health impacts, but reverting to wood would increase costs sixfold. He urged the government to subsidise factories to use cleaner fuels.
Novrizal Tahar, director of waste management at Indonesia’s environment ministry, agreed the practice was “dangerous for human health” and said the government is working to enforce the import ban.
To Dr Setyorini, that is only part of the problem.
A bigger issue, she said, is wealthy nations exporting their waste to developing nations, a practice she described as “waste colonialism”.
11 Likes
My parents have YouTube TV, and we all noticed this during our visit there last month.
IIRC, the Ratliff character in the comic strip Eyebeam worked at a TV studio, where his job was to turn up the volume when a commercial aired. So, blame Ratliff.
10 Likes
Yeah but you can only erode your dominant market position for so long before alternatives suddenly look viable to consumers (see Twitter).
I’ve said it before, if Duckduckgo didn’t have that insanely stupid name, it would have overtaken as the default search engine for most people by now
15 Likes