Duolingo just removed its best feature

I don't like speaking in platitudes but this is truly the worst decision dualingo has ever made after teasing about its removal for the last couple months dingo have finally removed access to the sentence discussions tab entirely a move that inarguably has made the site and app worse this isn't a complaint like oh I prefer the old tree or oh I don't like the way the new Duo Avatar looks this isn't an aesthetic change this isn't improving anyone's experience this is straight up removing a feature that has been vital for everyone using the app's learning experience since day one and today we're going to talk about it hi my name is Evan Edinger a guy who I guess has too much time on his hands to talk about dualingo as I've made quite a few videos in the past I've been on du lingo for a really long time and I've got a seven-year streak to prove it I learned a lot of German through it for three and a half years I'm doing Spanish now and at one point I was even featured in the app for my success with German using their app however these days I can't imagine that type of thing happening because I feel like I'm too much of a liability because I do like to express my discontempt with some changes in the app as well as my positive bits but that that's not good for brand is it so the way du lingo has worked for the past 10 months is they give you a sentence you have to translate it into your target language or from your target language and after you get it right or wrong there'll be a little button to click which has a sentence discussion tab where other Learners that are at the same level as you are that are currently learning that sentence can talk about that sentence maybe they have questions about it maybe they think it's a little funny it's just a nice little social element well it was historically and still to this day duelingo is not a perfect app you can still find many many many sentences that are straight up unnatural in English and in your target language in the sentence discussion tab you'll find others quick to respond with what is wrong with the sentence and also provide you with links helping you out with the grammar that you're having trouble with with that specific sentence linking to different websites that can help you even further I cannot overstate just how useful the sentence discussion tab was for my journey learning German using dualingo in German like many other languages there are a lot of rules that are really difficult to convey to a non-native speaker especially one that's learning through through an app that basically only gives you the information via right or wrong similar to how you would train an AI model instead of a human quick example at one point I was really struggling to figure out what the difference was between T mindist mindest and ventin each one of these words means at least we only have one way of saying that in English and dingo would just give you a word and you'll be like okay but then you're like vinon and it's like actually you meant meses and it doesn't actually explain and that is such a difficult concept to understand it was for me specifically I go to the sentence discussion tab guess what's there a link from a user that's like oh if you're having trouble with this here you go this blog helped me so much and that is something that dualingo could not provide the language is too vast and they haven't put the resources into improving their app only removing things away that can help you I feel like when people say you can't actually learn a language by using du lingo that's probably what they're talking about using dualingo without actually using any outside resources which is weird it's like saying you can't live off of cereal and it's like well as long as you have some milk maybe some apples but who lives like this during lockdown I was one of those guys that was desperate for some sort of human interaction and so I definitely downloaded the meditation apps the yoga apps the running apps and one of the main things that the coach in your ear says while you're doing it is even though you are currently running alone meditating alone doing yoga alone there are loads of people at the same time doing it with you they're using this app as well that feeling of together and Community really helps drive your your feeling like I'm going to keep up this habit like there's others with me like we're all in this together it's basic human psychology dingo removing the sentence discussions tab is very much the opposite oh you you see this sentence and there's a bit of an error keep it to yourself you're alone you learning this language there's no one else with you it's just you let's remove that feeling of togetherness and Community which is so ironic considering language learning is one of the most like social things you can do speaking but you're speaking to yourself actually you're alone get a life you can only speak to The Owl and the Spanish Crowd Goes boo boo Spanish for owl sorry bit of a rusty joke I should have oiled that up oil oila German for owl it works sometimes the app all right but let's talk about some of the comments I've seen about possible reasons why dingo remove this feature sentence discussions were full of bad comments oh this is an easy one it really wasn't I don't know what language you're learning but for Spanish German the bits of portug G and finish that I've learned I saw so few maybe once a year I'd see one comment that might have been negative but here's the thing they would just get downvoted into Oblivion it's a self-regulating community like for instance at one point in the Spanish course there was a sentence that basically translated to the president has small hands all right who at the did that one that was asking for the red Hatters to get all whiny and snowflakey and be like not my president and guess what to solve this problem of people getting angry they just locked that one thread you could no long longer comment on it that's fair wasn't that complex of a sentence anyway but that solved the problem for that very outlier case of negative comments actually a lot of the comments in the sentence discussion tab had bad and wrong advice oh did they oh damn well that actually fits with dingo then considering that there's often times where dingo will also give you bad advice but in reality this really wasn't a problem there were comments genuinely that would give bad advice but within like an hour there would be someone actually intelligent going nope loads of people would downvote that person someone would reply saying actually this is incorrect here is why give a really detailed reasoning or link an outside thread and you're like wow this is so useful it actually kind of felt like you're in a class with other classmates that are all trying to help each other removed yeah okay that's fine and all but there are children that are using du lingo now have you seen all their animations they're really pushing it in schools it's really not safe for children considering that it was an unmoderated Wasteland in the comment section Yes actually that's a good point and for this reason I think we should probably also turn off the internet children are there too and I really don't want to risk children getting introduced to some sort of bad content and that truly is the only solution that could exist for this problem or you know filters moderation age filters even but in reality this is a straw man this is not actually a problem the community regulates itself there aren't really that many issues I just find it really strange that so many people are bending over backwards to support this decision by du lingo by making up all these fictional fful little ideas on why they could have done it when the answer is quite easy money and I hate saying that but also that's the way that's the society we live in maybe the comments were seen as embarrassing to the higher-ups at dualingo who might pop into a thread and see oh there's a comment that says this correct answer is still wrong April 2019 and people update it in the comment section like every couple months like still unaccepted still not accepted and then maybe you get lucky and dingo listens to the community and they fix one and it's genuinely a good feeling it feels like all of us together that are learning are helping this app be better that's how it's kind of always felt like this nice Community feeling that when you report something it'll be fixed it's like a lovely Society we can live in like old days do lingo like 8 n years ago when you can actually use it to translate web pages into your target language to help other people learn what a cool thing but no this is actually the final nail in the coffin for the community on dualingo without even watching a YouTube video the easiest way of knowing he truly messed up and said something vile just look at the comment section has it been disabled little baby's got a fragile ego and has to protect himself but Evan if sentence discussions are so important to learning a language on dingo why do none of their competitors have sentence discussions actually that is an incredibly good Counterpoint and you know what you're right cuz sentence discussions aren't vital to learning a language through an app but are they helpful yes do they add a social element yes do they improve The Learning Experience greatly also yes do they help people understand the sentences on the app more nine times out of 10 yes and and so we come back to the Crux of the problem here dingo had a good feature and removed it making the app worse and we're still not there yet but now they're going to try and charge for it it was part of social media and now it's trying to Pivot hello Mr burgerman Man we've done some testing recently and have discovered that 99% of our customers will not be able to tell the difference if we switch out 10% of their meat with sawdust but why would we do that that's going to make the product so much worse yes sir but you're forgetting saus is actually really cheap and it will actually make a bit more profit for our shareholders up at the top you know it might not be healthy for our customers to have it but oh god let's let's do it let's do it y money now as I said in my last big video talking about dingo one of their biggest problems is their communication issues they seem really bad at communicating despite being an app to help you communicate when Dingo Took sentence discussions away I immediately went to the feed tab to find out why the feed tab is a part of the dingo app where dingo communicates directly with you updates about a course maybe little funny blog entries about different things about about the language you're learning you know communication so I went there to be like all right why' you do it however I did find they actually have communicated it almost like a YouTuber who's really up recently and has to make an apology video but instead of uploading his apology on his main Channel he just does it on his second channel so actually fun fact dingo did tell us on their subreddit I mean okay listen the only people on the dualingo subreddit are those clinically online people who just have an unhealthy session with the app which yeah yeah that's me okay I'm on the app okay but even then I actually had to seek this post out because it didn't show up in my feed as someone who's religiously on Reddit because it was downvoted so heavily because it's such a bad decision either way the Dango team has communicated why they did this and let's just see what they have to say we have a comment here from Tracy at dingo that says a note about sentence discussions cool get a note I mentioned a week or so ago that we'll be working on doing a better job of communicating about changes thank God let you know this is a start I'd like to not be sarcastic but even having a post on a subreddit that 99.9% of Their audience isn't going to find is a step a step in the right direction I was personally thinking mostly about some of the exciting changes that we have coming up that I'd like to tell you about but this is not one of those okay it's kind of like when a YouTuber starts the video with stay tuned for my big announcement coming soon ooh we're beginning an experiment to better understand the use of sentence discussions you may notice changes to this feature as we start rolling out the experiment and for some Learners sentence discussions will be removed altogether during the experiment the Y is relatively straightforward the content and code are both out of date and this causes issues to come up that are difficult to fix okay listen I've just spent this whole bit of the video being a bit negative in a way but I've been on YouTube for a really long time I know every analogy so far has been about that but it's my job and because I've been on the app for so long the code on this website is like spaghetti string so like I understand they're desperately trying to like fix old code to fit with this new modern flashy app I get that we want to make sure that we are always using our resources in ways that will be most valuable to as many Learners as possible all right that's gobleg I'll be sure to follow up as we learn from this experiment as a community of language Learners ourselves many of Jingo find sentence discussions to be as important an aspect of our experience good Tracy yes thank you you can understand why they're important as you take them away a a weird type of gaslighting thing you're doing here listen I know food is really important that's why I'm going to be removing it from your mouth that said we also know that communities like this will continue to be places where Learners can ask and respond to questions and I know that we will continue to evolve the product to meet the needs of our Learners in fresh and thoughtful ways all right but if it really is about code then why the heck did they turn off adding comments to the sentence discussions tab for months not to fix it during that point I thought at that point that's what they were going to do they were just kind of fixing the code instead they've just turned it off and then went all right people have stopped complaining because we waited long enough and they're too dopamine addicted on their streaks we'll just remove it wholesale and then wait again repeat the process but instead we get this experiment experiment let's just experiment and add 15% sawdust to the hamburgers see if anyone complains and if the fact that they keep coming back to this restaurant because we have a nice streak element that hijacks their dopamine a bit more if they're like so addicted to that they're like I'll just keep putting with it maybe 16% maybe 17% sawdust it might be a little unhealthy but man we're going to get a healthy amount of money oh I I mean the the code right oh is about code um yeah the recipes we got to change the recipe guys it's just a better recipe this time for us but saying there will always be communities like Reddit available to voice your concerns and talk about sentences listen I use Reddit a lot I make videos about reddit reddit is not a community to Aspire to as a company first off you have in your app individual sentences that you could literally have comments under so that way you can understand the grammar for that specific sentence are you trying to imply that we should go out of our way join Reddit post a comment there about my individual sentence and why it's wrong no there must be another solution one that maybe I can spend a lot of money giving to dingo to solve H I also just want to say this update hurts beginner language Learners the most someone like me who's B2 in German and B1 in Spanish I can kind of get better grips to this type of thing whereas beginners are really going to have no idea what to do now in the thread a user named lant has voiced her frustrations very similar to mine that I've talked about in this video and she ended with a very important question any info for how long this experiment will last SL how long I'll have to go without having any access to sentence discussions to which Tracy at dingo replies I understand what you're saying and appreciate the feedback we're working on figuring out the best ways to communicate and hopefully posting about updates to this community is just a first step you're right it is the first step you've made one step I would like a lot more please thank you um as far as needing to go outside the app I understand that too it's also more work because you'd have to look for someone who's already asked about the same or a similar question or post a question of your own whereas in the app you know that you're getting a conversation that's relevant to what you're learning okay we do have a sane person here Tracy understands all the problems with removing this it seems like she's got like maybe an owl with a gun to her head and she's like I understand this is a really bad decision is actually really awful and is making everyone's learning experience worse but we aren't at all saying that they don't have value sentence discussions no only that we want to make sure that we're always providing the most value with the resources that we have what a sentence that was I don't have any information on the experiments duration or what the outcomes may be but I'll update the community as soon as I do cool to give you the best value on hamburgers we're going to stop selling you hamburgers hey also I really don't want want someone at dingo to watch this video and then go you know what he's complaining too many people are complaining best action don't talk at all no that is not the response here thank you for the communication but it's just a bit unacceptable this feels like when you're grounded your dad says your grounded child and you're like oh what what did I do and he's like I'm not going to tell you and you're like what but for how long I'm not going to tell you that either oh okay and basically he just Waits it out until you forget what life was like before you were grounded Duo an autocracy but now it's time for the Saucy part of the video the thing that everything that I've just been talking about has led up to let's just say everything that Dingo has communicated which so far has been one redst is true this is all due to some Jank code they need to update it they're running an experiment they want to make sure that we get the best value possible that they can provide if that is true it's just a bit weird that all the marketing people and public relations people that work at dingo wouldn't have possibly flagged up a PR visibility issue of removing a very loved and important feature to the app for an extraneous reason and then coincidentally releasing it again under a paid system to solve the very problem they themselves have just caused almost as if the owl has walked up to you shot you in the foot and then been like hey I'm selling Band-Aids now would you like a pair second foot introducing du lingo m I've made an entire video about this already it's dual lingo new AI functionality the new Big feature that costs £20 a month or 120 extra pounds a year is having an AI language model explain to you why your answer is wrong you know the thing that was available for free done by humans no no no much better to have an AI language model do it for you when have they ever been wrong like never not know why you're wrong well a helpful community of language Learners will be sure to tell you oh that's no good how are we supposed to bleed more of the money out of our customers oh we'll just disable that no more humans actually now you have to pay for a robot to tell you that sweet our shareholders are going to love that one hey there Burger lovers CEO of burgertown here and I just want to say listen we've heard your complaints loud and clear and so for an extra $5 a month you can get a robot sent to your table to suck some of the sawdust out of your Burgers it might make mistakes and sometimes sucks some me up but hey what are you going to do you know we're just trying to fix this problem don't know how it happens but anyway like we always say we're always trying to make more value out of our customer I'm sorry we're always trying to provide more values for the customer yes that's it with the resources we have that's the Burger Town way the CEO said on a subreddit with hidden visibility and now for a bit of a hopeful conclusion I know du lingo is a for-profit company but I also know that the people that work there aren't evil they're not bad people I've met Lewis the CEO I've met Colin I've met Kevin I've met some other employees they've all been really lovely people and you can tell they like what they do and there's probably a really good reason why dingo has won awards for being one of the best workplaces to work in dingo's mission statement is we're here to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available sure Jan I just feel like somewhere along the line the individuals that have worked at dingo have lost sight of this original mission statement if it really still is the mission statement that binds what they do developing the best education and making it universally available has clearly taken a backseat to things like poor intention to kpis and driving more and more profits as the highest priority I really hope that the individuals that work at dingo still believe in this mission statement and still want to spread good education of language learning and anything else they're working on to more people and make it universally available but it's hard to believe that when the company as a whole keeps working the opposite direction to make things Act actively worse and more difficult and to be honest more classist I understand companies have to make a profit you can't just give everything away for free I understand this I really do dingo went from being a free language learning app that anyone could access and learn a language for free to a language running app that was still free but you could pay for and your experience would be a bit better to the point where they've removed so many features that now you have to spend 20 for the privilege of learning your language effectively and that just doesn't sit well with me it feels like bad game developers and DLC like rather than just make a fully functioning game and then having things extra added on top that make your experience of the game even better with downloadable content most game developers these days are doing it the shittiest way possible in terms of building a game removing core functionality and then selling it to you at an extra price so if you just buy the core game you actually don't get the full game you you get a shell of it you don't have the full experience you actually have to pay more for that and the fact that that in ification is also coming to language learning with this mission statement it just makes me sad but hey maybe this experiment will end soon and we'll get our core functionality back and maybe the AI team will come up with more enticing offers for their AI subscription rather than just removing features and then putting them behind the pay wall in the meantime I do just want to say in my last video complaining about dingo I did make two feature requests that have been enacted so it's not like dingo doesn't listen which by the way I'm not necessarily the voice of the community I am just one guy who also has a YouTube channel and weirdly because I've been doing this for so long I have a voice in The dualingo Niche but I am just one guy who hopes to represent a lot of other people's feelings about this app that I enjoy so much last time I said I really wish there was a way to hold my two times multiplier they added that as a feature I also said I wish on web I could click and drag the buttons like they do on iOS they also added that feature so I know they listen I just hope that maybe they'll listen to this one which God is so much more important than anything else I've really talked about in terms of how effective learning a language on the app can be the community is one of dualingo strongest assets I know they know that I just hope they don't throw it away does this mean I'm going to stop using the app no like I said it's really frustrating you know they hijack you with the streak freezes and whatnot but it's still an enjoyable experience it's just way less effective and I just want to voice this concern that being said I actually have already scripted a video that's hopefully going to be coming out in the next month or two about comparing the DU lingo way of Education versus American and British High School I think it's going to be really interesting I've done a huge amount of research so if you want to see that in your sub feed please do subscribe to my channel and it'll like I said hopefully coming in in the next month or two and don't worry I'll be sharing it right here if you don't have to go to my subreddit to find it and I won't be disabling comments so please uh leave me a comment below on your thoughts on this uh bit of a long one this is going to sound like this is going to sound like a political slogan but I just wish someone at dingo would do what's right and make dual lingo great again time to break out the green hats everybody and if you're wondering where I am cuz this isn't my normal filming location I'm in Berlin have been for the last month cuz I've been taking a language course with Deutch Academy and they're actually sponsoring this video I went to pay them to take their course without them knowing who I was and then hey they turned around and went how about you just give us a little shout out so here we go de Academy thank you very much uh obviously I reached out to them to take their course over lots of other of their competitors because one they're like one of the cheapest ones you can do they have locations in so many different cities like that's one of the reasons I chose Berlin because I took a course with them already like 5 years ago in Munich they have it in Berlin they've got one in Vienna Frankfurt loads of different cities I thought the experience was really useful there's so much talking in the course they give you homework there's really good useful grammar tips and just honestly being in a course Monday to Friday for 3 hours a day is really really really good for me actually only hearing and speaking German and it's been really helpful for me but hey if you're not actually able to visit any of other physical locations they also have a completely online course in which you're able to join other classmates and practice your level whether that be A1 A2 B1 B2 all the way up to C2 and I actually did one of those in 2020 and it was really good so if you'd like to sign up there will be a link in the description thank you very much to Deutsch Academy otherwise thank you very much for watching today's video if you're interested I'm doing an entire video in German with English subtitles coming up so stay tuned for that otherwise I'll see you guys next week bye chicy chy fruits oh God damn I'm exhausted [Music]

Channel: Evan Edinger

Views: 594,039

Keywords: duolingo, sentence discussions, forums, duolingo forums, update, duolingo update, 2023, evan edinger, language expert, fluent, fluent with duolingo, is duolingo worth it, does duolingo work

Id: Sl7zdTor3Is

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2023