Owl See You Later
I have been purposefully ignoring Duo for the last couple of days. While I understand that the point of Duolingo streaks is to encourage you to continue studying a language, the encouragement feels more and more oppressive as my streaks grow longer. I really haven’t heard anyone else talk about this frustration before, so I wonder if I’m alone in this.
At most times in my life, I’ve had multiple responsibilities that fell into various categories which made them easy to compartmentalize. Even when it got difficult to manage the need to keep on track with to do list items and creativity (coming up with ideas for whatever needed to happen), simple practices like keeping a notebook solved most of those problems1.
As I’ve started keeping a notebook again, I’ve noticed what’s helping me stay on top of things vs. what isn’t. Now, you could say that Duolingo’s constant urging to continue with language exercises is simply its way of helping me with one of my priorities. And that is how it is designed. But considering it’s one of many of my “priorities” it sorts itself to the top through repeated phone notifications that are very insistent. I use some of my phone’s notification capabilities to help me manage much higher-priority responsibilities.
My system is still far from perfect, and could use some tweaking. I use recurring phone alarms for things like medication and keeping me on time for daily and weekly events/meetings/tasks. I use calendar events for important one-time or longer-term repeating events. I capture to do items that aren’t always time-bound in my bullet journal.
But then there’s this owl that’s starting to annoy me. So I have to put him in his place.
Really.
I suppose you might tell me that perhaps language practice just isn’t a priority for me. And that daily pressure works for people. But the cycle of sneaking in a single exercise before midnight isn’t super helpful. The option to keep a certain running average rate of exercises over an adjustable time would be better for me. And that adjustment would change depending on whatever else is going on in my life. I.m too lazy at the moment ot look up whether there’s research behind forcing people to return to the app every day, but my current belief is that this reinforced behavior is largely serving Duolingo’s interests rather than my own.
As a software engineer, I know the kind of change I’m envisioning isn’t impossible to implement. And it needn’t be confusing for users, either, as the “daily” option could be a default that people can choose not to fiddle with. But I suppose Duolingo would rather lose me for a few days than risk people missing their reminders and failing to support their little online army of people pestering each other about htis one spoecific kind of learning.
Consider me on a short Duo vacation.
UPDATED:
Nice try, Duo. Kill my streak. I’ll come back eventually and build from the ashes. But now that I know you’ll offer this, maybe I’ll start ignoring you more for short periods.
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It’s worth noting that teaching has created many more small-to-medium-sized responsibilities, which has complicated things. But the system so far has managed to absorb the new responsibilities. ↩
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