The real question is whether they'd have used it to begin with— I’d guess not. It seems most folks here discouraged by streak-loss had sizable steaks to lose. That means they reaped real benefit and provided real revenue for duolingo. Nobody uses a language learning app forever.
The gamification requires two coordinating motivations— secondarily the game mechanics, and primarily learning a language. Duolingo won't replace candy crush for non-language-learners. I imagine folks significantly discouraged by poor game performance without doing some serious learning first just aren’t motivated enough to practice their language skills in an app.
Personally, I’m not motivated by gamification at all and am content to ignore it. It is noisy, however, and I also wouldn’t mind the ability to shut it off.
I use Duolingo ever day. Their app/website is heavily gamified to the point where I think it's part of their tagline. But, at least for me, language learning is fun. When it's not fun it's at least engaging and/or challenging. I don't know if gamification can be painted over fundamentally miserable modus operandi.
I've been very skeptical of gamification ever since seeing a marketing agency constantly pitch it as a way to increase user engagement and sales. Now it's a red flag that makes me ask, "what are you trying to manipulate me in to buying or doing?" The experience has been impactful enough that even I stopped caring as much about "achievements" in actual games.
Duolingo is interesting because it shows me I'll still engage with gamification if my goals align, but all those mechanics become a bit heavy. When I want flashcards and grammar lessons, getting a game to manage pushed me away. Then, when I realized our goals didn't align due to Duolingo's ceiling, it didn't seem worth being pressed to such an uncomfortable degree. I won't let myself be mentally abused by a cartoon owl.
For me Duolingo's gamification is better than nothing but it's really not that fun. It wasn't a motivating factor to keep learning.
Spaced repletion algorithms can be really helpful, but they can also be a hindrance. Duolingo treats the user like they don't know better than the algorithm. The language learner needs to be the one in the driver's seat with the algorithms and course material being there to support the learner.
Gamification is great, but it should only be there to help the user stay motivated meeting their goals. Like you mentioned, if you've already mastered something having it presented in your study session is actively working against meeting your goals because you're spending time studying something you don't need to.
I don't see studying everyday as an end-goal, though studying every day can be helpful for retention. You should feel rewarded but not punished when you "loose your streak".
No, I'm talking about the tradeoff between monetization/gamification vs learning. Too much of the former is degrading the latter and this has been getting worse since they switched to juice their metrics (CURR, DAU, $/user) for the IPO, as Mazal posted.
User Kortaggio [0] talks about how Duolingo's claim “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education” is misleading because it's based on their long-discontinued SRS algorithm. Sounds like false advertising.
The gamification features are one-size-fits-all (whether you're age 13 or 30 or 65, occasional or dedicated user) and default-on: interstitial animations, success videos, chests of gems, then yet more 5/15/30-second ads... I challenge you to measure the % of time within a 10-minute segment that is actually spent on learning. Or at minimum, they could show me the cutesy stuff while I'm doing the language task, Super-Puzzle-Fighter style.
I'm a 3.5-year user (>1200 days), I clearly don't need somersaulting owls and faux-challenges to keep me going and I passed that point 1190 days ago, if not always.
Many (adult) DL users write about how the ever-increasing pushiness with leaderboards, quests, streaks ('create false urgency' per Candy Crush which the former CPO cites as a model) turn them off. Should have different use-modes for different segments of user.
I believe DL care about teaching effectively only up to a limit, and that limit is anything that might reduce their metrics, as a freemium app.
They don't care about teaching Chinese effectively, not since back in 2021 if not earlier, they simply gave up. This is quite sad and weird for the world's second-largest language. There isn't "still lots to improve" on the Chinese course, they simply gave up and locked the forums permanently so that now not even well-intentioned volunteer users can fix that one.
Also, DL committing intentional trust and GDPR violations without any online opt-out doesn't sound ethical "Facebook Still Tracks People on Yelp, Duolingo, Indeed" [1]. Obviously tracking without user consent is for monetization of ads. Like I said, monetization trumps other considerations at DL.
(PS I signed up for your ReadLang, but for Tagalog it's pretty beta. Good luck with its second incarnation).
"Gamification" was more buzzword than real and where it was covering the lack of anything actually interesting then no, it's not going to work long term and probably not short term.
Where is was useful was in getting people to pay attention to barriers to entry their product imposed and reduce them. Beyond that it was a fad for anti-social, unproductive manipulation of users emotions in place of delivering value.
I've used Duolingo for about a year and they definitely have a lot of stuff like that built into the gamification. Often times, though, playing the game they designed is counterproductive. I've broken 100+ day streaks twice now because I realized I was only putting in the minimum for the sake of the game. I've found it better to take a month off here and there so that I can come back and focus on my actual goals.
There's also the cracked lesson feature. They aligned cracked lessons to urgency gamification instead of something more sound like delayed repetition. As a result, you'll often have cracked lessons which you've long since permanently committed to memory and will be spending 15 minutes on easy lessons rather than doing the important, harder lessons.
With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been reduced to a game.
The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their game pools.
But that goes against @devjab's experience upthread:
> [gamification] isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions?
> [gamification systems] seem to fail to incentivise the development their creators want, unless that development is for people to spend a lot of money on video games.
(Unless Duolingo counts as a video game? But even so, I don't think people spend a lot of (any?) money on it?)
Would your streak ever have gotten to several hundred days long if the streak mechanic didn't exist? Gamification is about both the carrot and the stick. The stick can certainly be demotivating in the wrong situations, but it also has plenty of motivational force. I have felt the sting of losing a 3 digit day streak too. The Apple Watch is even more unforgiving in that regard than Duolingo. The first time it happened to me it sent me into a week plus of totally ignoring the goals because of what I "lost". What got me out of that funk was revisiting the whole purpose of why I started with fitness gamification. I wasn't trying to get a number on my watch to increment 1 every 24 hours. Who cares about that? I was trying to get healthier. So I got to work on another streak. Sometimes I lose it due to some extenuating circumstances like being sick, getting injured, or having some all day social event and there is occasionally a hangover before I can back into the swing of things with another streak. However there are also days in which I get home at the end of the day, I didn't work out at all, and my choice is to either veg out on the couch for an hour or workout to continue my streak. As long as there are more days like that than days I sulk over a lost streak, I come out ahead.
TL;DR - Your hard work wasn't lost. Your knowledge of that language didn't disappear when that streak ended. You just forgot why you downloaded Duolingo in the first place.
In the context you mentioned it, the streak sounds like a powerful demotivator.
This is a more general problem with gamification and external rewards: they are just as good demotivators as they are motivators, if not more so.
This is why I wanted to turn off streaks when I was using Duolingo. I knew it was just a matter of time before I had my streak broken, and I was very concerned about what would happen then.
> For me gamification turns some things into a slog.
same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation.
i think the only gamification set of features i've fallen for in the recent years has been duolingo, which has me practicing every day, even if just for 3-5 minutes. the way they've done it is quite interesting as they have what i'd call different levels of gamification you can buy into. the most basic one being your daily streak but then you have stuff like daily quests, monthly badges, league standings, friend quests and probably more stuff i can't remember now.
the article does cover quite a few examples and i like how the author hints at the chance that, at times, he'd probably be better of not maintaining his streak as that alone ends up resulting in an output that's not desirable (eg. stackoverflow answers with little value). however he left out some cases where gamification is tied to a normally positive impact like step counters (ignoring the data collection).
> They also make it a fun activity and incentivize engagement with humor and gamification.
That's the part I hated the most and the main reason I stopped using it. I wasted more time in front of "achievement" animations and shiny rewards than on actually learning the language
After my comment I gave it some thought and figured that's what you meant in the context of Duolingo, which is a great example of this. I've tried in vain to convince others they're wasting their time (it could be spent more efficiently) but they feel like they're "winning" something so it's futile.
Gamification is usually meant for creating addictive behaviors but I think some of it was in earnest effort. I can see how the idea of "Nobody ever wants to learn, let's try to make learning a game" makes sense from above, but it's hard to actually implement correctly. And at some point, some new manager with ideas about gamification for profit's sake inevitably joins the company.
The word you're looking for is "Gamification" and I honestly, I fucking hate it. The problem with Gamification in this context is that apps like Duolingo that uses Gamification to award you good boy points (daily streak) in the form of streak building mainly to build up "good habits". Unfortunately, the reality is that there is only so much what one app can do before it starts holding you back and become detrimental, but because of the gamification aspects of an app and how some people really really want their good boy points they don't want to abandon it and deep down, they probably don't want to. Now some people just end up thinking that one app is the one and be all solution and end up being "expert beginners" while in reality, they had to abandon it and do something deeper (like reading an actual book in another language) or else they'll never learn to being competent.
You can even take this further with reading books. Sure, you can get a star by reading a book for like an hour a day...if you're using Apple's iBook or whatever. That just means you're locked out of other books not on that platform or books you have in other unsupported formats or gasp physical books.
I agree. I'm thinking that online exercises won't get proficiency. If that's all one does, it's just a game.
What I'm seeing for me (and it's incomplete, it might be a fiasco in a year) is that it keeps me doing at least some daily roadwork. Once you get to reading news/magazines/whatever (that's how my father expanded his ESL vocabulary) or childrens books, you can start to work beyond. The real hazard is that once you break the chain, the incentive to do something (even when you are tired) is gone, then you probably drop it altogether. So I see the gamification of 'keep the streak' as helpful.
> Gamification makes you feel you earned "something". And that's the whole point.
The distinction between "learned" in the first paragraph and "earned" in the second is, IMO, crucial. At some point it becomes more about maintaining steaks and suchlike rather than actually learning a language. (Speaking as some who spent a lot of time on Duolingo.)
The gamification requires two coordinating motivations— secondarily the game mechanics, and primarily learning a language. Duolingo won't replace candy crush for non-language-learners. I imagine folks significantly discouraged by poor game performance without doing some serious learning first just aren’t motivated enough to practice their language skills in an app.
Personally, I’m not motivated by gamification at all and am content to ignore it. It is noisy, however, and I also wouldn’t mind the ability to shut it off.
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