Today I found out to my horror that Duolingo has sent their ethics on vacation and decided to try to trick their mobile users. Now, I totally understand that they need money. When you have hundreds of millions of users, “free forever” just doesn’t work anymore. Especially since they gave up on the original “translate the web” thing. Not sure what went wrong with that, but there was probably a good reason for it.
Advertising is fine. Servers for hundreds of millions of people don’t just fall down from Heaven complete with electricity and Internet super-broadband. Selling unnecessary virtual objects like streak repair for real money is also fine (except for the many parents that have probably encouraged their kids to use Duolingo and suddenly find that there is small expense on their credit card). Begging for money would have been fine. Sending me mail begging for money would be fine. Actually, even if you ran a profit and still asked me for money for beer and pretzels, I would probably have given you some, because I really like Duolingo. I like the idea. I like the implementation. I like the strategy of letting volunteers add more languages. But I don’t like trickery. And I don’t like the mass desertion of volunteers and enthusiasts that will likely follow this.
The story is that for some months, Duolingo has shown ads for unnecessary apps not connected in any way to Duolingo and not to my life (your life may vary). You could download the app, or skip the ad. Today, the field for “skip this ad” was changed to “go ad-free” and took me to a page where I could buy an ad-free month for a modest sum. That was an unpleasant surprise. I mean, it is OK to offer people to buy and ad-free month for real money. They had this already. But it is not OK to deliberately trick people into clicking on it. But it gets worse. There is no legitimate exit from that screen. No “perhaps later” button or anything like that. The only way out, as far as I could see, was the back key on the phone. Which brought up a message that this would cause me to lose the progress in that unit. Now, that’s just 10 points, or five minutes, so obviously I did that. But it is still extremely petty and passive-aggressive.
(The new way to close ads is an x in the upper left corner, by the way. For as long as it lasts.)
This is not about me being cheap. I already gave them money not too long ago, by skipping a day and buying a streak repair. I would have done it again. Not so motivated for that now. “Sneaky”, “underhanded”, and “dastardly” are not words I like to use about my friends. Duolingo really should not have forced me to warn the people I have recommended them to. But here it is. Be warned.
I still intend to use Duolingo, by the way. Probably. But the enthusiasm is gone. And I can’t in good conscience recommend it to total strangers anymore, since total strangers may not be smart enough to get around whatever trickery Duolingo may be up to next.