Shadowbans

[_N1Greg]

Hey everyone, I'd like to ask a question to the moderators here. Can you explain how long does a shadowban last? I want to also thank @DuomeTeam for contacting me on DM.

Thank you in advance!

[Vlot Vlaams]

Hey everyone, I'd like to ask a question to the moderators here. Can you explain how long does a shadowban last? I want to also thank @DuomeTeam for contacting me on DM.

Thank you in advance!

Shadowbans were a "thing" on DL, and they would last forever...
But they don't exist here on Duome.

[_N1Greg]

Ah interesting, I have full access on my Duolingo but I think I got a shadowban because I can't see the Leaderboards, so I wanted to have a feedback from the mods or an experienced player, I've heard that someone here can contact Duolingo's staff directly.

[_N1Greg]

@Duome Team Thank you for the quick reply and for clearing that up! I appreciate it.

I hope to be able to have access to the leaderboards soon, I'm a fair player and the game probably thinks that I'm a bot.

I'd love to reply in DM but sadly I cannot, I guess it's because I'm still new here.

If someone else has an experience to share about it, let me know.

Thank you guys!

[SansEspoir]

I've heard that someone here can contact Duolingo's staff directly.

Sadly, that is a rumor without any substance. To my knowledge, nobody here is currently in touch with any duolingo staff. I think a few were in the past, but as duolingo has distanced itself from humans, it's not really a thing anymore.

[_N1Greg]

Oh I see, thank you.

I guess there is no hope to understand how this stuff works then, I’ll wait for the ticket’s answer.

[Thomas.Heiss]

I'm a fair player and the game probably thinks that I'm a bot.

No you're not.

You're likely using a script to farm these 80 / 120 Xps every 14-16 seconds.

Are those the silly word pair matches up to higher levels?

Normal learning lessons hardly are being recorded in your RAW data.

It's not only a few practice lessons but a flood of these sessions over a longer time.
You don't seem to be doing anything else???

• Your fresh 2022 account already has accumulated 6.7 mio. total XPs
• you racked up
  3,633,762 XP in your EN-EN course
• ITA->FR sits on 2,083,179 XP
• XP score this week is: 170,863

This doesn't have anything to do with "normal learning" anymore.

It took me several years to rack up 30,000 xp for L25 in my Portuguese course; I had it long completed.

Sorry to say, but you're just cheating yourself.
This is exactly why most Duome members are ignoring those silly Leagues, filled with bots and people who are making abuse of these new kind of app exercises or have scripts running on auto-complete.

Do you really believe you can string together a longer sentence in the target language when you have to freely type it on the web portal in a free form text field? I have to doubt this.

..(...)..

I had some fun playing around with the old Lightning round exercise (finally it got removed completely which is a definite loss for me as a random practice review method over the whole course) and I also did the Ramp Up challenges, but not always to the last 40xp / level 3 challenge.
But they didn't award you 80-120 xp every 14-16 seconds.
Takes much longer to finish the exercise than 16 seconds on the Android app if some typing or longer sentences are thrown in or sentences got longer.

I'm surprised that DL staff doesn't ban accounts like yours.
Or that their backend service doesn't rate limit what can be recorded in a short time to stop all this cheating.
Allow 2-3 exercises/challenges max, then disallow to continuously restart the same.
They should award all these flooded sessions 0xp, not 120xp.
Obviously they have no clue how to stop even scripted sessions with a 0-3 seconds delay.
So what am I asking here for...
Nowadays they ignore ABUSE reports too.

If your account is visible in a League it won't take long until people report you to DL staff.

It's kinda ridiculous that Duolingo Inc. has replaced thr Lightning round with these match word pair challenges.
It's the worse for your learning, farms XPs and makes people in the Leagues mad.
No serious learner on the Web portal can compete with these app users who rack up thousands of useless XPs, especially in courses like EN-EN.

[John Little]

I dont understand why anyone would bother. What does it gain or prove? And I ask that honestly not rhetorically.

And that also applies to fake accounts here. What is the point? It is very odd.

[_N1Greg]

@Thomas.Heiss I am fully aware that Duolingo’s primary mission is language learning, absolutely. However, I want to point out that there are many people like me who love the competitive side and spend every day discovering new methods to challenge the top users, like those from China or Korea who have dominated the leaderboards for a long time (for example, nekonekokoneko with 21 million total XP and 150,000 weekly).

On my end, I actually own another Duolingo account where I focus strictly on language study for 1-2 hours a day; I have reached a C2 level in English and C1 in both French and Spanish, so I have no complaints there. You suggest that I am not an honest player, yet I even created a post explaining in detail how to achieve these numbers and I was thinking to create a guide on YouTube as well.

In my opinion, you should simply understand that not everyone has the same interests; we are all different, and that’s how it should be. Why should we be banned? We are Super/Max users, we pay for the service, and we work hard to discover new strategies.

@John Little There is nothing to prove, it's just the strategical part of the game and I could name you 100+ names who are consistenly creating strategies to improve in that department. We are all different and we all have different interests, the most important thing is to not offend anyone. If you want to be competitive in the Leaderboards that's how it works with top players, if not just focus on the learning side, which is in my opinion much better.

[John Little]

I asked chatgpt for a psychological explanation of such behaviour and got a very long explantion. Because it is so long and comprehensive I'll hide it for those interested in a long read:

► Show Spoiler

Reward-seeking & dopamine loops
Games are designed around reinforcement psychology (similar to slot machines). Points, badges, streaks and levels trigger:
Dopamine release
A sense of progress
Micro-rewards
Some people become highly focused on maximising these rewards — even if it means bypassing the intended process.
Competitiveness & status signalling
Leaderboards create social comparison. For some people:
Points = competence
Rank = identity
High scores = visible success
If status feels scarce elsewhere in life, digital metrics can become especially meaningful.
Compulsion or behavioural addiction patterns
When it becomes excessive, it can resemble:
Gaming disorder patterns
Obsessive reinforcement cycles
“Completionism” traits
It’s not automatically pathological — but extreme point-maximising can sometimes reflect difficulty tolerating “unfinished” progress.
Creating fake social media accounts
Motivations here vary more widely.
Identity experimentation
Some people use alternate accounts to:
Explore aspects of identity safely
Separate different social circles
Try out a different persona
This can be relatively benign.
Control & impression management
Fake accounts can allow someone to:
Observe others anonymously
Influence conversations
Gain attention without personal risk
Avoidance of accountability
Anonymity lowers social consequences, which can:
Reduce inhibition
Encourage behaviour the person wouldn’t show under their real name
Psychological drivers that sometimes appear
Not diagnosing — but patterns can include:
Need for validation
Fear of rejection
Social anxiety
Narcissistic traits (in some cases)
Manipulative tendencies (in more problematic cases)
What links the two behaviours?
Both can involve:
Externalised self-worth (metrics = value)
Control in digital spaces
Low real-world risk, high perceived reward
Detachment from consequences
Compulsive reinforcement loops
They’re more about what psychological need is being met than about the behaviour itself.
Important distinction
Occasional:
XP farming
Anonymous accounts
“Alt” profiles
are extremely common online and not inherently pathological.
It becomes psychologically concerning when:
It’s compulsive
It harms relationships
It involves deception or harassment
It replaces real-life functioning

[_N1Greg]

Nah from my point of view it's way easier than that, we just want to stop those guys at their game.

We all have our vices, some more than others; the important thing is to treat it as fun without overdoing it.

Normally, I do XP sessions of 1 to 2 hours at most, whereas some people spend the entire day on it. Fortunately, there are other things to do during the day as well. But thank you for your reply @John Little, for some guys out there it might be true.

[John Little]

In my opinion, you should simply understand that not everyone has the same interests; we are all different, and that’s how it should be. Why should we be banned? We are Super/Max users, we pay for the service, and we work hard to discover new strategies.

But a lot of people enjoy the fellip that genuine competition can give to their learning routine and feel demoralised when they encounter a cheat in their league.

@John Little There is nothing to prove, it's just the strategical part of the game and I could name you 100+ names who are consistenly creating strategies to improve in that department. We are all different and we all have different interests, the most important thing is to not offend anyone. If you want to be competitive in the Leaderboards that's how it works with top players, if not just focus on the learning side, which is in my opinion much better.

Ok. Thanks for that. But I still think chatgpt's explanation is better.

[_N1Greg]

@John Little Again with this "cheat" word, it's not cheating man. It's just about using the potions together and focusing on fast lessons.

For many years, I saw people using these methods and I wondered how they did it. I finally found the answers and, unlike them, I’m even willing to share them. So, as you can see, I’m not as toxic as they are or as ChatGPT says!

If you feel demoralised about the Leaderboards it means that you care (at least a bit) so we can discuss anytime about that, as I said before I have nothing to hide and I'm offering help to literally anyone.

[Vlot Vlaams]

Many “experts” on XP, bots, shadow bans, cheating, leagues, friends and foes — and perhaps even some regular language learning — are probably active on this subforum:
https://forum.duome.eu/viewforum.php?f=456-duolingo

The thing is - nobody really "understands" - they are looking at a black-box, observing what comes out based on a certain input. Every cheater tries to find their own way to "get around" normal use of the app.

In a long-ago post on the former DL forum, I once explained how easy it is to cheat, describing how it can be done and why (mainly due to poor APP programming on DL’s side). I was shadowbanned almost immediately, and those posts were deleted.

As far as I know, the methods for cheating haven’t really changed. As a former IT professional, I was simply curious to see how it worked. I didn’t actually use those tricks in practice, except to confirm for myself that they really did work.

There may have been changes in how DL generates lessons (perhaps with some AI support), but their underlying programming quality hasn’t improved much. Nor has the way they treat customers — including paying users — especially with the random rollout of new versions that sometimes disrupt or overwrite learners’ previous progress.

From an IT perspective, that’s simply not how things should be handled. It’s no surprise that some users eventually decide to leave.

That said, negative publicity is still publicity. It keeps the name circulating. Many people won’t take criticism seriously unless they experience it themselves, so new users continue to join. DL can point to those numbers in their statistics, but there’s little transparency about how many users leave shortly after joining — or how many actually complete a full course with some form of final assessment.

The entertainment value is obvious. The learning value, however, is more questionable.

[Vlot Vlaams]

... we just want to stop those guys at their game ...

"we just want to stop those guys at their game"

Who is "we" and why would "they" need to do that.
If it's the DL app that allows cheating, and if DL does nothing about it, then it's either because

• they don't care (customer ignorance)
• they can't technically (unless by a complete app redesign/rewrite)
• they don't want (marketing)
• ...

[_N1Greg]

@Vlot Vlaams For too many years, we’ve seen people dominating the leagues using these methods, or even worse ones (because real bots do exist, while I am clearly human, replying to you here with the desire to explain these strategies).

Why do I say 'we'? Because, as I mentioned, other friends of mine who use the app have also understood and started using these methods. Since this is also a game, it’s possible to take it competitively alongside the learning aspect. Have you never competed in a game before? Let’s be honest: we all compete in something, whether it’s Duolingo or anything else. We are free to choose where to do it, as long as we aren't hurting anyone.

Our main goal, as I said before, is to teach a lesson to those who have dominated the leagues for over 10 years without ever sharing their secrets. We want to reveal these methods to everyone and use them against those gatekeepers, to frustrate them to the point where they stop playing, making Duo a better place for everyone!

I don't expect you guys to understand it, no worries, but the goal is not to "cheat", it's just to make justice.