Duolingo’s front page has a completely new design, which appropriately brings my thought to a downward spiral. It is actually more of a winding path, veering from side to side. Gone are the times when you could usually choose between two or three bubbles or nibble a bit of one and a bit of another. Now it is strictly sequential, although you can still go back and repeat earlier bubbles. It is just harder to find them, and really hard to see how far you have come on them. On the bright side, the “crown levels” are gone now that we finally have gotten used to them.
I can’t help but feel that this is another attempt at dumbing down Duolingo. This was probably unavoidable when Duolingo was sold to the highest bidder some time ago. The first thing that was closed down was the Incubator, which let bilingual enthusiasts make their own language courses using the Duolingo system tools. Next the forums were closed, where native speakers and more advanced learners provided helpful advice for free.
The problem with dumbing down a language learning program is that dumb people don’t want to learn languages unless they must. Intelligence is not simply a quantitative measure of your brain’s processing capacity. On a small scale yes, that is what you measure. But on a larger scale, people with higher intelligence have different interests from people with lower intelligence. And learning languages for fun is simply not something dumb people do, which is why it makes no sense to dumb down a program like this.
I fear this is just the continuation of a downward spiral into oblivion, where customers gradually peel off Duolingo to find services that respect them more. This is tragic, because Duolingo was an amazing idea. Hopefully it will still take some years before it becomes completely useless.
PS: The website https://www.duolingo.com/ is still in the old style, although that will probably change after a while as it has before. Grab it while it is still there!