How Billionaire Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn Ruined his Own App By Embracing the Worst Parts of Big Tech
How Billionaire Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn Ruined his Own App By Embracing the Worst Parts of Big Tech
medium.com
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Meanwhile, revenue is up 38%. Over 10 million paying users. The shareholders are happy. The venture capitalists at General Atlantic and Drive Capital are thrilled.
The users? Deleting the app in protest.
How is revenue up if users are leaving en masse? I would understand if they said profits are up. Are they shoving more ads and raising prices faster than users are leaving? Because Netflix has shown that is unfortunately a viable strategy for a rather long time. Sure, it might eventually kill the product, but they'll get years out of it.
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I'm absolutely no expert but if this is in line with other similar services, they make the majority of their money from a very small percentage of users.
There have been multiple companies in the recent past that have gone thru the same or similar path and what they're seeing is an overall drop in users but a rise in subscriptions or subscription revenue.
Long story short, people leave, but the people that stay pay.
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Yep. Filtration. 🤮
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All the free users are deleting it.
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I know I used to pay. The free version was excellent and I wanted to support it. I don't know how the pay version is now but the free version is terrible. I don't see why new users would join.
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Some sort of stock/vc chucklefuckery I imagine.
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Duo should have a word with him…
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What are some good alternatives?
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i’d guess… textbooks. like actually though. some are really well written, nicely ordered and prioritize stuff which is actually useful.
also you get a distraction free environment as a plus which, i think, is more helpful than one might think.
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Rosetta stone maybe?
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Anki
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Depending what you want out of it.
Anki Memrise Wlingua
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What language are you interested in? I learned Spanish through Internet resources fairly easily (easy but very time consuming, as all language learning is). If you're wanting Spanish I can give some great suggestions.
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I've completed the spanish course on Duolingo a couple years ago, but I feel like I am still lacking. I would be interested in your suggestions !
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I want to learn Spanish but I haven't found something that's free (or a low fixed cost) that appeals yet. I don't want a subscription fee. I liked that Duolingo was interactive and had little stories.
I speak English and some French. I wouldn't mind learning more french, too.
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Check if your local library has any resources. Mine let me claim a free rocket languages premium account, which supports Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Arabic, Hindi, Korean, ASL, Portuguese, and Russian up to (I think, don't remember) CEFR level B2
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I have found that Language Transfer is the best language learning system I have used.
French, German, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, Spanish and Italian all taught by the same guy. Each course is a set of audio files you can listen to on Soundcloud, YouTube, download, or use the minimalist but very functional phone app.
Completely free, supported by donations.
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I've been using Busuu
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Pimsleur. Scientifically developed method. Lessons are a little longer than we would normally do today but it works.
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Pimsleur! Easily found online
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Duolingo classrooms
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Duolingo was a nice game but shitty tool for learning languages.
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Yeah, Duolingo gets too repetitive. I haven't tried Babbel but I heard it's better.
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Non-paywall link: http://archive.today/KYy0Q
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ITS NOT PAYWALLED
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It wants me to sign up and give it my data which is a form of currency
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please don't yell at me.
\ I get scaroused easily.
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I tend to think this is less an issue with the CEO and more to do with going public. Once share holders get involved they start demanding you lower cost and increase profits. When all this AI shit started every group of share holders started demanding you do something with AI for fear of the company being left behind.
If you found a company, don't go public. If you do go public, sell everything and pease the fuck out.
Going to go out on a limb here and assume he doesn't care, since he's a billionaire.