I mean, sure, that's more or less how a company operates. You make a new product, you charge for it, you advertise it. What's the big issue? This all seems pretty standard.
> The issue is: from beginning on and for a long time Duolingo advertised with "Learn a language for free. Forever." :-(
The original business model (from the guy who made Captcha) was that the learners would translate text for others, for a fee. So the payment was labor.
Unsurprisingly that didn’t work out.
The alternative to charging was going out of business, so hard to vilify them too much.
They tried. They failed. They tried something new.
I wish they would have tried harder. After I finished Spanish in tried to translate some articles but the UI was confusing and there was no motivation like the learning bit had
Not only was there more diverse content when learning (though for that I can at least recommend Clozemaster), but now that some part of my mobile experience keeps defaulting to showing me wikipedia in German[0], I keep realising how out of sync the different languages of wikipedia are.
[0] a bit of a tangent from the article, but it's been irritating me for ages now.
I'm in Germany, but English is the top entry in Settings.app Preferred Languages, and I'm using iOS 16: highlight a word, e.g. "German"; in the context menu select «Look Up»; this text is all correctly in English; tap either the title or in the links list the wikipedia link; what do I get?
>
The alternative to charging was going out of business, so hard to vilify them too much.
> They tried. They failed. They tried something new.
You only advertise with such a slogan if you are really sure that you will never have to pivot to a business model where you want to have the user pay (even if paying is "optional" (freemium)) since advertising slogans have a tendency to stick. ;-)
Yup. Having and paying employees is a good that deflects from all criticism of price.
When I doubled prices in my coffee shop, at first people were unhappy, but as soon as I told them I threw out the coffee grinding machine and replaced it with 3 new jobs of "hand-grinders", people were overjoyed and immediately stopped criticizing the price increase. I was just making money to pay employees afterall.
When I had to raise prices again because all the hand-coffee-grinder employees suffered severe medical injuries, everyone understood that too.
.....
My point, obviously, is that hiring a bunch of employees to design ways to trick people into clicking more ads (sorry, ahem, improving user engagement) doesn't mean that the company making money is suddenly an obvious and unquestionable good that can be used as a shield from other criticism
Honestly, being able to build a company that creates livelihoods while simultaneously teaching people foreign languages goes against many of the historical and modern definitions of "late stage capitalism".
But I assume you're just using the super modern catch-all fad term of late stage capitalism that means nothing.
Also, from TFA: "Duolingo Max is available to everyone"
C'mon, let's make lingots (the Duo reward system) into a cryptocurrency. Reimplement the service such that people doing language lessons are the proof of work, and miners (learners) get lingots as their reward.
