LICA98 wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 4:16 am
buho wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 3:01 am
Drymice wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 6:02 pm
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.