What happened to the Duolingo icon?

They got you talking about Duolingo. That's why they changed it.

Duolingo keeps doing mass layoffs, so the bird is overworked. You can help him out by switching to a language learning app that actually helps you learn a language instead of endlessly throwing flash cards at you without teaching you anything! Win win.

I've been working on my Spanish with practice from some of my coworkers and patients. So far Duolingo's "flash cards" have actually been pretty helpful, but I grant that some of the actual "instruction"isn't there. I went from really rudimentary Spanish to being able to conduct a patient evaluation in Spanish as long as it's straight forward.

Everyone shits on Duo but I've found it to be a really helpful practice tool myself.
- Anything is better than nothing. This is true. But that doesn't mean you aren't wasting your time on something that does the bare minimum.
What app do you recommend? I've seen good progress with duolingo since I upgraded to premium but I'm willing to try something different
- Language Transfer has been highly recommended in the past. I’ve only gotten through two lessons so far, but it seems like a good place to start, at least. It doesn’t have anywhere near as many languages as Duolingo does, though.
- Busuu is much better. It feels like it actually tries to teach you the language in an efficient way, instead of teaching you useless phrases like "my owl never paints" and waisting your time
But I like to see my streak go up🚀🚀🚀

Attention grabbing apparently.

https://stealthoptional.com/apps/duolingo-icon-looks-sad-old/

Changing the Duolingo icon to look sad, old, and wrinkled is a strategy to make users curious, so they open the app to see if there are new updates or content. In other words, Duo is only trying to get your attention.

This tactic is rooted in the psychological effect known as the "novelty effect," where new stimuli can temporarily increase engagement and motivation. Snapchat similarly employs this strategy with the red dot and yellow dot on the Bitmoji.
- It just reminded me how long it had been since I'd launched it so I just uninstalled it lmao
- God I hate marketing bullshit like this.
- Sooo Duolingo is a tamagochi now
- Yep. I figured this is what had happened and it definitely worked on me. 🙃
- Yeah Duolingo uses the novelty effect a lot
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Makes sense. My partner was showing it to me "see? It's probably because I've got notifications muted" unmutes notifications, "no that isn't it" then I suggested they complete a lesson to see if it changed and it still didn't, so she put it away. Later I heard that the app notified her that two of her friends congratulated her for starting to again.

It's a cute program, but wow does it hector people.

It's my fault, y'all. I'm sorry.

I recently started using Duolingo to learn Spanish, and it's clinically proven I ruin everything I touch, so I think I'm killing the bird...

Oh, I thought it's because I stopped opening it daily and broke my streaks lol

I've been opening it daily and I thought duo was just tired of my bad Japanese...

It says it right there. He's 4+ years old.

Not just you, it's the same on Android. Maybe related to April Fools?

Just checked and the last update for Android was on April 3rd. I can't confirm it but I think this happened.after the first.

Duo está cansado y viejo.

I love how (apart from endless commentary on apples) the main thing it likes to focus on first is all about what trabajo does to you.

Como hispanohablante nativo, le están dando un cortocircuito a mi cerebro, pierdo mi sentido de la orientación en la internet, derrepente ya no se si estoy en feddit.cl (chile) o en el resto de lemmy.

😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫
- Omg! Como un estudiante mal de Español (y solo Duolingo), estoy muy emocionada porque entiendes mis palabras!!! Soy de New Zealand, solo entiendo un poco de tu hablo. Hola y kia ora!
- Jaja a mí también, es muy inusual ver a otro hispanohablante fuera de feddit.cl o eslemmy.es

Duolingo became old cuz everyone forgot about them. Tragic ;-;

They change it all the time for funsies

I'm tired, boss. Tired of bein' on the the app store, wantin' to be lonely as an owl in the rain. I'm tired of always havin' people annoying me, tellin' me to give them new words. Mostly, I'm tired of people never memorizin' the vocabulary. I mean, how many times can I give you "Cómo estás?" before you finally remember what it means, Cletus?

There's too much misremembered - it's like pieces of glass in my head, all the time, I've fed you the entire Spanish lexicon ten times, and you've learned three words. Can you understand?