so why did duolingo get rid of the duolingo forums ?

[Upbeat 88]

so i am still and probably always will be wondering of why did they get rid of the duo-lingo forums

maybe one of scamming of kids and adults or bad behaviors or gross and inappropriate weirdos
does any one have a clue or anything to add to this this is a perfect random thought?

[Drymice]

Not enough money, they wanted to go in a different direction, they wanted to market more towards children, chaos, some other stuff

[panyamnyenyekevu]

My theory? The CEO had little tolerance for negative criticism and that was also seen as negative publicity.

[buho]

Not enough money

Oh hell no!
A quick search would say otherwise. Here's their own report.
it's certainly not because of the money.

if I have to hazard a guess, it'd be one of the following:

• they are making it more children-friendly(but this is a bad way to go about that goal. they could've simply made a duolingo ABC-like app specifically for them).
• they are complying with some regulations to keep their foot in some markets. The reason why I'm saying this is that a while ago, duolingo made changes to their app for chinese users. many users reported not being able to participate in leaderboards and stuff. But this is highly speculative.
• corporate things. seriously, this happens quite a lot with proprietary services. they kill their product anytime without any explanation and the users are left in lurch. a good example of this is google.

[LICA98]

Not enough money

Oh hell no!
A quick search would say otherwise. Here's their own report.
it's certainly not because of the money.

if I have to hazard a guess, it'd be one of the following:

• they are making it more children-friendly(but this is a bad way to go about that goal. they could've simply made a duolingo ABC-like app specifically for them).
• they are complying with some regulations to keep their foot in some markets. The reason why I'm saying this is that a while ago, duolingo made changes to their app for chinese users. many users reported not being able to participate in leaderboards and stuff. But this is highly speculative.
• corporate things. seriously, this happens quite a lot with proprietary services. they kill their product anytime without any explanation and the users are left in lurch. a good example of this is google.

it's not that money is an issue but rather that they wanna spend it as little as possible that's why they keep removing all good functions and instead adding health and other nonsense with the goal of getting as much ca$h out of the users as possible

plus they don't wanna deal with criticism as [mention]panyamnyenyekevu[/mention] said

[back4morelater]

Not enough money

Oh hell no!
A quick search would say otherwise. Here's their own report.
it's certainly not because of the money.

if I have to hazard a guess, it'd be one of the following:

• they are making it more children-friendly(but this is a bad way to go about that goal. they could've simply made a duolingo ABC-like app specifically for them).
• they are complying with some regulations to keep their foot in some markets. The reason why I'm saying this is that a while ago, duolingo made changes to their app for chinese users. many users reported not being able to participate in leaderboards and stuff. But this is highly speculative.
• corporate things. seriously, this happens quite a lot with proprietary services. they kill their product anytime without any explanation and the users are left in lurch. a good example of this is google.

it's not that money is an issue but rather that they wanna spend it as little as possible that's why they keep removing all good functions and instead adding health and other nonsense with the goal of getting as much ca$h out of the users as possible

plus they don't wanna deal with criticism as @panyamnyenyekevu said

Having money is good but wonder if they did a cost analysis and decided that spending the money on forums wasn't a good investment, especially since I think it was said it was only a small proportion of users that used them.

But there are other things that could be costs. Actually probably only the small amount of money needed to host the data and network traffic for the forums, in comparison to that needed for the lessons/stories.
But what about the use of the unpaid moderators, that doesn't fit well with a commercial company and guess they didn't want to have to pay anyone to weed out all the spam and potentially inflammatory or illegal posts
Also I think from looking at the design that maybe also there was a problem in trying to change the way the forums and the way they worked. That might have taken a lot of time to recode which means paying programmers to write and test the new code. This forum is built on public available/free software I suspect from the look and feel

Would love to know how the numbers of users of duo has changed since the closure of the forums - how many people have got frustrated with something and given up? My experiences of logging tickets with them was pretty negative

Also love that Duo still calls itself "the largest community of language learners" or something similar.

[Corinnebelle]

Duo still calls itself "the largest community of language learners" or something similar.

Not a community no more...

[ImportantHunter]

They unfortunately also got rid of the dictionary for no reason. The links to it were suddenly removed from the website late last year but was still accessible via URL and the forums, sentence discussions. I can understand why they got rid of the forums as it's a lot of trouble trying to moderate so many posts and comments, but I don't even understand why they would get rid of the dictionary. They completely stayed silent on it and refused to answer why. Duolingo has become more unusable with the dictionary gone and you can't find sentences outside the discussions any more.

[zerogrqvity]

[mention]Drymice[/mention] Well, the duolingo forums pushed people off of Duolingo, maybe for good, or maybe just a break. But many of these members were PLUS members. This causes Duolingo to loose some of their money.
Is duolingo plus worth it?
After years of using Duolingo, in my opinion, it's not necessary to upgrade to the Plus version. The cost of upgrading to Duolingo Plus for one year (or an annual subscription to Duolingo Plus) would be $83.88, which in my opinion is not worth it! By just using the Duolingo app, you have access to all the same lessons. But, Plus is and would be useful? But it is just a waste of time and money.