@ikt

Because Duolingo sold itself as a crowd-sourced, semi-open social platform in the beginning, one where we could use Duo's tools to create a course for almost any language (including reviving dying and niche languages). It attracted some of the top language experts in the world who created courses for free.

For some of the smaller languages, those volunteers even donated their voices to the program - for example in the Esperanto course you will hear many sentences read by volunteers.

Then Duolingo changed tack, fired their volunteer workforce and locked them out of their course. The contractors they hired to replace them were often not language experts. Some of them didn't even speak the languages they were working on. All the language experts are gone, because they're expensive.

Many of the smaller languages got no paid workforce at all to replace their volunteer team, because those languages don't make money. Some of the smaller languages haven't had a course update in years and have glaring errors with no one to correct them, because it's not profitable to pay someone to maintain them. A couple that were in the incubator got ditched unceremoniously after 5+ years of work from their teams.

I never "wanted" Duolingo to rely on volunteers, that's how Duolingo built it, with misleading claims about crowd-sourcing and making language learning free and accessible to all ... then they took that free labour and turned it into profit.

More importantly, they hid that knowledge. Now they're using it to create an inferior product by feeding it to an AI, instead of giving it to people to use as it was originally intended.

@ikt

And you and I will have to disagree about the quality of the app. It's very sticky (Duolingo's main metric is now engagement), but IMO it doesn't do much for actually learning a language.