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Duolingo regularly changes their app icon to weird things. It's not done to get users to buy things. It's so you post the icon on social media as a form a free advertising. The company really loves that their mascot has become a meme and play into it.
Evil corporate wants us to fucking birdwatch
Good thing birds aren't real.
Isn't that a bad thing? I thought that was the whole point, if you separate the part where the guy was just doing a social experiment to see if people would buy into total nonsense.
Why evil? I’m not a capitalist, but it’s a language learning company being silly; they aren’t causing massive injustice.
This is an engagement app. The goal of the app is to exploit your behavioral patterns to enforce your engagement; to force you open the app everyday. And as a by-product you may learn the language Or may not, I don't know anyone who has learned a language using it among my ~10 friends who were trying to do so using this app.
Many things are designed for engagement, so what’s your point? Some people use Lemmy like Reddit and care about internet points that don’t matter. “The rising number is designed to exploit your behavioral patterns and enforce your engagement.” Instead of daily, it’s multiple times, but the point is you can paint many business models like this.
People download the app to get better at a skill. It’s designed to be effective at doing that. It’s a skill people want to learn. How is that exploitive or manipulative?
Full warning: I’ve worked in game design and F2P for like 10 years. I know there’s some personal bias, but there are much worse examples of this stuff than Duolingo or whatever. Painting good actors as bad actors is not correct.
The anecdote part at the end is irrelevant for both of us. I have the opposite experience and don’t even use this app: a bunch of my friends seem to all use it for learning languages. /shrug