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I canceled my subscription. In part because fuck using AI to hurt labor, but also unemployment. Capitalists want us to spend spend spend, but they don't want to give us any money to spend.
Exactly that. Everyone is obsessed with eternal growth, pushing SaaS offerings our throats and even more subscriptions. There is a real estate crisis, where putting a roof over your head becomes an even more distant dream for the majority of the working population and greedy companies are firing people and replacing them with AI and then they wonder why people are revolting. Eat the rich!
https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en
So they're trying to pivot from "we are firing all our translators and turing our app into AI slop" to "we're anti establishment and anti CEO?
Which C-Suite came up with this shit?
I'll never use this garbage app now.
Hahahaha. God they really are so fucking stupid.
Like I love how nobody seems to question the expertise of CEOs. Like, I know the board structure, they consult experts and make decisions. That makes sense (I mean it has problems but it makes sense). But if you're choosing a CEO for a Telecoms company, and the last job he did was being the CEO of a successful kitchenware company, I'm gonna question the degree to which this person can do their job well. There are so many CEOs who seem completely disconnected from the company they are in charge of.
Because no matter the business, the game is capitalism. Who has the cutthroat, borderline personality to “make the tough calls” (read: weigh the cost benefit analysis of screwing the next group of people).
It doesn’t matter what the business is. Because it’s just about cost and benefit to these people. If they can cut costs, they will. If the benefits are lacking in that people will be outraged enough to stop buying, or the lawsuits will cost more than the profit increase percentage (factored into the actual viability of the claims and the affected group’s buying power for legal representation), then they don’t do it.
Nowhere does “but is it right” factor in. It’s only “will people find out, and if they do can we weather the storm.”
Capitalism should die.
I mean Duolingo has been riding the "questionable or insane marketing" wave for years. It's hard to say if this is just them taking that a bit to far or if they really are of their rocker this time. I mean their ceo has generally seemed fairly based in the past as far as tech CEO's go.
The TikTok post has been up for days by now. If this was truly a disgruntled employee posting against the company, it would have been taken down by down despite the passwords being changed. This is a corpo post.
just marketing I assume. duo has always been a weird marketer
considering they said theyre gonna replace all their employees with ai, i wouldnt be surprised if this is the marketing departments' last backlash.
Their idea of marketing is to literally threaten people. And it works.
Just uninstall and stop engaging with Duolingo marketing.
Sometimes, the best way to make noise is to disappear first.
Great advice! I'll do just that. Uninstalled.
Fucking click bait title
Save us a click - cliffnotes?
Strange message,
Let’s just say we’re experimenting with silence,” a spokesperson for Duolingo told Fast Company over email. “Sometimes, the best way to make noise is to disappear first."
Even assuming we're okay with using AI for language learning - then why would anyone pay for Duolingo instead of the many LLMs that people already use and pay for?
They've alienated their customer base hard. And this marketing video pretending they are siding with the users and against "their corporate overlords" is horribly tone deaf.
Perhaps because their app and its gamification of learning is addictive and quite fun.
This is it for me. All of this has me pretty down, because the gamification works really well on me and I enjoy it. But fuck AI.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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