crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company. just a couple months ago, duo mascot and Duolingo streaks were cool and fun. they had a good thing going. but now it's just another shit tech company again. they lost all the good will in like a month.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company.
they lost all the good will in like a month.
Twitter enter the chat
Twitter was going downhill hard already when Musk bought the place
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How do these people become CEOs they're as thick as several short planks nailed together.
Firstly every single company that has tried to replace its employees with AI has always ended up having issues. Secondly even if that wasn't the case, people are not going to be happy about it so it's not something you should brag publicly about.
If you're going to replace all of your employees with AI just do it quietly, that way if it fails it's not a public failure, and if it succeeds (it won't) then you talk about it.
How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.
Being a CEO has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, I guarantee you that Duolingo has employees who are far more intelligent than the CEO.
People who are smart in one or two domains often overestimate how smart they are in other domains. They develop a mental model, confirm it quickly, and never re-asses it.
The issue with AI, is we're probably hitting our first real S curve with the current technology's performance but a lot of people who bet big are only see the exponential part and assuming there won't be a level off, or that the level of is far away.
There is no Moore's law for AI.
Intelligence has nothing to do with success. These people are born into wealth, are wealth-adjacent, or are expert ass-kissers.
They also tend to be more greedy than others for wealth, status and power, and not imaginative enough to see that life is about more than this. So they dedicate their life to crawling up to the top of the corporate heap while everyone else gets on with actual real stuff.
If they do it quietly, they won't get the stock price bump every company gets from saying they're going to replace (costly) employees with AI.
People keep forgetting that these companies’ product is stock price, not whatever they’re advertising at any given moment.
Their “CEOs” have gotten sloppy because the grift has gotten so easy they naturally assume everyone is in on it. If everyone is in on the grift, there’s no need to lie about it.
FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.
So...tries and fails? 😛
except his AI.
Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis
I gotta say, the icon of Duo looking like this, plus a snot coming out of one of its nostrils is what did it for me. No way to turn off this "feature" either. I'm not easily grossed out, so seeing it once or twice would have given me a chuckle. Seeing it every time I opened my phone? Nope.
I knew I wouldn't be renewing my subscription right there and then (there were other reasons, but that one moved the decision faster.)
wait what... they made the official icon look miserable and added snot? wtf?
I think on iOS they added a thing where it would change based on the days you didn't use Duolingo. Honestly at this point I think it speaks more about the sorry state of their company more than anything.
Yup! Google "Duolingo snot icon" and it will be the first image result.
Or you could visit the orange site and check it out there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/1f2deam/im_sick_right_now_and_this_is_the_app_icon/
holy fuck
People are unfair with this "CEO". Its statement helped me move on from duolingo, which has seen significant decline in quality while never going beyond "a moderately bad way to start learning", toward better, more developed, more cared for, cheaper, solutions.
So, thanks for that.
Please do share :)
I'm mainly interested in Japanese, so I'm currently looking at https://www.renshuu.org/ . In addition to just throwing random stuff at you, it gots some more in-depth training, explanations of stuff (something that never happened in duolingo), additional hints for alphabets including some mnemonics, and years of dedicated experience in the language. I can't tell how it would feel long term, but so far even having some basic explanations is a great improvement.
I'm not gonna lie, I stopped using Renshuu due to having other resources at hand and because it just looks so rough, but I think it's great for a free resource. The fact that they offer a shit ton of vocab/grammar/kanji study sets for free and community built ones is reminiscent of Anki, and Renshuu also uses a SRS. Lots of customization for reviews and answer options.
It's certainly nowhere as eye-catching and addictive as Duolingo is, so beginners are probably more likely to give up than if they used Duolingo. But honestly, that site lost the point of what learning a language was supposed to be about anyway.
Sometimes I feel I should pick it back up, but at this point I want to focus more on reading/watching content for practice/learning.
If anyone wants to practice their Japanese or have questions, they can message me.
主よ、如何なさいましたか。
I love this headline so, so much
What I'd wonder is why it's such massive expensive for Duolingo to hire 2 or 3 people to cover a language anyway. Presumably most of the work is contractual - hire somebody competent to produce a course, get somebody to say the lines, refine the course based on feed back and that's mostly it.
Terminal MBA brain
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boring, broken garbage content. monthly subscription fee. get the fuck out of here
There should be a federated system for blocking IP ranges that other server operators within a chain of trust have already identified as belonging to crawlers. A bit like fediseer.com, but possibly more decentralized.
(Here’s another advantage of Markov chain maze generators like Nepenthes: Even when crawlers recognize that they have been served garbage and they delete it, one still has obtained highly reliable evidence that the requesting IPs are crawlers.)
Also, whenever one is only partially confident in a classification of an IP range as a crawler, instead of blocking it outright one can serve proof-of-works tasks (à la Anubis) with a complexity proportional to that confidence. This could also be useful in order to keep crawlers somewhat in the dark about whether they’ve been put on a blacklist.
Did you comment on the wrong thread?
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