Transcription
In a world of soulless corporations pretending to care about users for profit, Duolingo managed to become the ideal example of how a billion-dollar company should build a genuine connection with their users. From expertly marketing their mascot Duo the Owl with relatable memes to having a mission of making the world a better place, Duolingo has always had a place in the heart of its users. Unfortunately, one out-of-touch decision has completely derailed the relationship and forced many of their most dedicated users to quit using the app entirely. "Should I kill my streak over this AI BS?" To make matters worse, their uncanny response to the situation only pushed fans further away and strengthened the notion that they didn't really understand their users.
"Hello world. I'm a part of social team and it's time you all learn the truth. Enough is enough. If you have seen this video, I'll know my plan has worked. I've had it with the CEOs and those in power. It is time we show them who's in charge. Hi, I'm the internet anarchist. I create weekly YouTube documentaries, and today we'll be examining the rapid reputational downfall of Duolingo, what they did to turn their user base against them, and why their attempts to quell the controversy only intensified it."
Duolingo is one of those companies that seems capable of doing the impossible. Not only did they turn a free product into a profitable business worth over 20 billion, but they also managed to do it while staying true to the values the company was founded on. However, getting to that level of success wouldn't have been possible without a seemingly unshakable connection with their users. For those unfamiliar with Duolingo, it's a language learning app that uses game-like mechanics to keep users engaged and assists them at achieving fluency in a given language. The app's bright colors, leaderboards, streaks, and the iconic mascot Duo the Owl are all surface-level hooks designed to keep users coming back to all the lessons.
According to their website, Duolingo's mission is to create a free language education alternative available to everyone. This mission was so compelling that even before Duolingo's launch in late 2012, the app had over 500,000 users on their waitlist. By the end of the following year, that number had grown to over 5 million users. While being completely free was enough to bring in users, it wouldn't be enough to keep the company in business long-term. This problem pushed Duolingo's founders Lewis von Ahn and Severin Hacker to find alternative ways to generate revenue beyond charging users upfront. Lewis already had experience monetizing a free product when he created the website security service Capture, but doing the same with a language learning product wouldn't be as easy. From experimenting with the ideas of selling user-made translations to including ads after lessons, Duolingo's founders spent the first 5 years of the company's existence searching for a way to generate sustainable cash flow from their users. Since they couldn't monetize Duolingo right away, the developers focused exclusively on improving the user experience and quality of lessons to maximize the time users spent engaging with the app.
"And that's not paid user retention. That's just free. We we we were not making any money for the first 5 years of Duolingo. We made zero dollars. Like we were not making any money. And because we were not making any money, we also weren't spending any money on marketing. So there was kind of nothing to do. We weren't spending any money on marketing. So there was not much to do there. We weren't making any money. So there was not much to do in terms of like working on the monetization of Duolingo or anything like that. The only things we could work on are teach better and keep people engaged. And so that's all we did. So 5 years we simply made the product stickier and stickier. And it it really made a big difference."
While improving the Duolingo experience required continuous modifications, the development team didn't know or couldn't pinpoint which changes were making things enticing for users versus simply driving retention metrics. "Two things were happening. Number one, we would add the screen and we couldn't tell them if the thing was better or not because we would see that the metrics were like either kind of flat, but if they were flat, we always found an explanation like, 'Oh, it's because it's because this week is Thanksgiving or whatever it is.' That's why normally we would have gone down, but because we added the screen, we didn't go down or something like that. Like whatever. Just couldn't tell if things were actually helping or not. And in addition to that, we couldn't tell which idea was good and which wasn't because we're like, well, if we couldn't tell if that was a good thing or not, we, you know, I don't know, was that a good idea or not? And so, at some point, it occurred to us, you know what, we should actually run 180 test and figure out if that thing was actually good. I remember we ran a test. I don't remember exactly what the feature was, but I remember there were like four options. and we each one of us bet on which the option was going to be best and we thought of ourselves a very good product people and it turned out none of us were right."
From then on, changes to Duolingo were almost exclusively done through rigorous testing paired with user feedback. This feedback loop of testing features to identify and modify user metrics eventually gave rise to some of Duolingo's gamified components like XP, hearts, and leaderboards. The most important feature to come out of this testing cycle was the streak system. Every day users complete their lessons, they're congratulated by the app's mascot Duo and have their streak count go up by one day. This naturally kept users invested in returning to the app. But it was the developers handling the notifications that reminded users of their streak that really got them hooked with notifications like, "Hi, it's Duo. Make your screen time count. Take a quick Japanese lesson now." and "Hi, I miss you. Do you want to practice your Spanish today?" Like a friend or tutor trying to get you to study more, Duo the Owl built an emotional connection with users and gently nudged users to return to the app. However, these notifications weren't sent out randomly or in perpetuity. If users didn't respond, they'd receive this borderline guilt-tripping message from Duo: "These reminders don't seem to be working. We'll stop sending them for now." This choice to respect their users proved highly effective in bringing them back to the app.
"You know, we've always stopped sending notifications. We stopped using Duolingo. So, we, you know, if you don't use Duolingo, we stop after like, it used to be about 5 days. We're like, okay, after 5 days, you know, whatever, you've given up. We're not going to spam you forever. And it occurred to me, you know what? If we're going to stop, we may as well tell people that we're stopping. Why not? So, the last notification on the fifth day that we that we started sending was, 'These reminders don't seem to be working. We're going to stop sending them for now.' Or something to that effect. It turned out that that really got people to come back because they, you know, it's this passive-aggressive thing that they, you know, they they felt bad that Duolingo was giving up on them. And that is that is the first glimmer of a personality that was just like, oh, this owl really wants me to be that he's got to be passive-aggressive. And that's I think that's kind of what gave rise to a lot of the memes, but I mean, you know, we didn't and and so the personality of the owl has really evolved over time and it's been kind of co-created by a lot of different Duolingo employees, but also by the community."
Around the same time users were receiving these emotionally charged notifications, the meme of Duo the Owl being an evil owl who resorted to any method necessary to get users to continue their lessons began to take shape online. Even the social media team behind Duolingo began feeding into the meme with ominous Twitter posts. The fanfare around Duo's antics transformed the streak system from an obligation to a badge of honor that saw users maintain their streaks for years. As the infamy of Duolingo streaks increased, so did the number of active users, growing from a few million to tens of millions of users. To make it easier for users to keep their streak and generate some revenue, the developers introduced streak freezes that could be purchased with the app's premium currency. This ultimately gave the Duolingo developers the breathing room to add to the Duolingo Plus subscription, which gave users infinite lives to answer the questions without worrying about mistakes and an extra streak freeze every month. Acting and adjusting their product based on user feedback allowed Duolingo's developers to effectively leverage their mascot to retain existing user engagement while drawing in fresh users. However, they had only scratched the surface of Duo's marketing potential, and we're about to discover just how impactful their little green friend was on fans.
Between 2020 and 2021, management at Duolingo decided to pay more attention to marketing and public relations by advertising their product on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Most companies push their products on social media very directly, but the marketing team behind Duolingo wanted to interact with fans more subtly. While they did start with generic posts like "10 words of X language," it wasn't until one of their social media marketing leads, Zarya Paraveves, came up with the idea to use the company's mascots in videos they saw gain any real traction.
"An office for the first time. Like I always say the reason why our TikTok was so successful is because I didn't really know all that much about advertising if I'm being honest. Like I was a new grad. I kind of had fresh eyes on it. And I remember walking into the office and this is like after pandemic. I don't know. Um but when the office opened for the first time and things were coming back to normal and I walk into the office and there was this big green owl which is the suit we all know and love today just sitting in the corner. And I was like that is so freaking weird. Like why is it just there? no one's reacting, whatever. And at the time, it was just meant for like people team stuff where they go to recruiting events and then the owl pops up. And I was like, what if I just like, and I love TikTok on my own, like I was already consuming it. And I was like, what if I just make like a funny piece of content off of this? And it was nothing crazy risky. It was nothing like I would say to the extent of what you may see Duo's TikTok do today, but it was just different. It was unexpected and no brand was doing it yet. Um, and I think that was kind of our insight in. And it was like these small human moments that I think has made our TikTok kind of blow up."
Zarya already had experience with what made viral content on TikTok and did her best to integrate that with Duo's pre-existing meme status online. With every viral post, interest in Duo and by extension Duolingo increased exponentially. "In this silence, baby, smack my..." This growth was only multiplied by the fact that people were stuck indoors during the pandemic and desperately needed something both engaging and productive to pass the time. By the end of 2021, the Duolingo TikTok page had garnered 100 million views and over 1 million followers. This strategy of focusing on entertaining viewers first and then getting them to learn second would truly set Duolingo apart on social media.
"That's what we're learning is that like people don't come to social to learn a language. And very few people actually care about our app when they're on social media. And I think like if we're lucky, people will be like complaining about how they got a C minus in Spanish and how much they hate language learning. Maybe they'll insult our app or they'll just confuse us with like Duolingo. Like that is what people are talking about when it comes to social and language learning. Like they genuinely very few some must but very few people care what Duolingo has to say about the new slang word. Like it's just not something that they're going to social for. They're going for either a break or for entertainment."
The growth brought on by their expansion into social media couldn't have come at a better time, as Duolingo's founders took the company public in July of 2021. This change meant user growth and revenue numbers were even more vital to Duolingo's survival and keeping shareholders happy. As time passed, Duolingo's marketing team relied more and more on their mascot to market the app and even went as far as growing a cast of side characters with in-depth lore. They even ran a whole advertising campaign around the evil Duo meme. "Has your family been taken by a corporate mascot? Were you extorted by an enormous green owl? Have you been physically or emotionally injured by Duolingo? Did you want to learn a new language but lost your streak and your loved ones? Did you receive disturbing threats such as 'Spanish or vanish,' 'French or the trench,' 'Japanese or broken knees?' If you're a victim of the Duolingo, you're not alone. Hi, I'm Peter Francis Manetti, attorney at law. Over the past decade, I've recovered 537 family members, friends, and precious pets from Duo. Now, let me and my elite team of legal professionals at Menchettian & Sons LLC fight for you."
"Learning a new language was supposed to be fun and easy. Well, if you've ever been thrown in the trunk of a car and driven across state lines by a huge green owl, you know that there's nothing fun and easy about Duolingo." Within a few years of bouncing between improving the app and engaging with users on social media, Duolingo's monthly active users had grown to over 100 million and almost 10 million paying users. At this point, it seemed like Duolingo's business metrics could only go up, and they'd forever remain the untouchable king of educational apps. However, one or two short-sighted cost-saving tactics were about to significantly handicap their growth.
In January 2024, Duolingo announced that they had laid off 10% of their contract staff due to increased productivity brought on by AI technologies. As you'd imagine, users weren't too happy about this change, not only for the people who had lost their jobs, but also for the inferior quality of generative AI when it came to teaching users. "Have you noticed how spell check is getting progressively worse? It's because they've incorporated AI into it and AI doesn't actually think. It just looks at trends. If everyone misspells 'prepare' as 'per pair,' pretty soon spell check will tell you that 'prepare' is wrong and that you want to correct it to 'per pair' because the AI will believe that's correct and that will cause a feedback loop as people let autocorrect make incorrect corrections. It will reinforce those mistakes." Other users would go as far as canceling their subscriptions to the app due to the bugs in the AI-generated lessons.
Utilizing AI tools is something that shareholders expect from almost every tech company. However, the problem lies in how much they rely on AI and how it affects the livelihood of their employees. Depending on generative content to fill their learning content would severely dilute the app's quality. Using AI to substitute their work would diminish the humanity that made Duolingo what it is. From their marketing to the language material in their app, Duolingo was created by humans for humans. And anything that undermines their reality would do catastrophic downfall to their platform. Developers at Duolingo need that attitude of testing features properly with user feedback now more than ever. Sadly, the allure of higher productivity with generative tech was too much for the leadership at Duolingo to ignore as they fully jumped on the AI hype train and steamrolled their reputation.
Around late April 2025, Duolingo CEO shared an email announcing the company's new direction as "an AI-first company" and framed it as a critical business move for the future of their app, reading, "AI is already changing how work gets done. It's not a question of if or when. It's happening now. When there's a shift this big, the worst thing you can do is wait. In 2012, we bet on mobile, while others were focused on mobile companion apps for websites. We decided to build mobile first because we saw it was the future. That decision helped us win the 2013 iPhone app of the year and unlocked the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed." Following this, the email highlights the impact of AI on how much content is produced and the changes they'd be making to their workforce in response. Reading, "It helps us to get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content and doing that manually doesn't scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP. We'll gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle." It goes without saying, but discussions like this around AI and automation often don't go over well with fans.
The backlash to this email was immediate and intense. Some users either considered or outright ended their multi-year streaks in protest, while others started petitions against Duolingo's AI integrations. Around this time, more and more users began complaining about the errors and bugs in the app. As one user put it, "Look at that garbage English translation. A completely nonsense sentence. I have an almost 1,700-day streak, but I'm ready to walk away if this is what sort of stuff the AI translations are providing. I have no confidence that what I'm learning is correct if it spews out this kind of slop." All this fed into the sentiment that Duolingo had to become a subpar language learning program. And some users even suggested that people boycott the company en masse.
"We have to [expletive] boycott any company that says they're AI first. And yes, I'm talking about companies like Duolingo because this whole idea of replacing human beings with AI is only going to get worse if we don't take a stand now. And I'm sick and tired of all these stupid ass CEOs acting like AI is going to make everybody's life better, not if you take people's ability to make income because how are they going to survive? And what's even more annoying is hearing people try to downplay AI as if it's not going to replace the majority of people's jobs, comparing it to other advancements in technology in the past. This [expletive] is not the same. Like these companies are all trying to convince us that AI is just going to help us do our jobs better when in reality companies are starting to come out and say that they are going to use AI first before they hire people. And honestly, it might already be too late, but we're still early enough to where we can try to do something. So, if you hear of a company doing this and not hiring people or firing people because of AI, boycott them, unfollow them, stop using their products, delete them from your apps. because at the end of the day, all they're really trying to do is to make more profits for the people that are already on the top."
Duolingo initially didn't respond to users' concerns. Instead, they made all the content on their social media platforms private. Naturally, users assumed that this was just a ploy to get people's attention and set up another marketing stunt with a user stating, "Probably a publicity stunt like always. Getting ready to talk about chess probably." As predicted, Duolingo's PR team came out with a response video, but it wasn't what fans expected. On the 20th of May 2025, Duolingo released a video on their social media titled "The Truth: Exposing Duolingo" in which an individual wearing a three-eyed Duo mask tries to sympathize with users.
"Hello world. I'm a part of Duolingo social team, and it's time you all learn the truth. Enough is enough. If you have seen this video, I'll know my plan has worked. I've had it with the CEOs and those in power. It is time we show them who's in charge. We taught the Greenbird how to twerk. We put them on the map only for the elite to ruin it all. Everything came crashing down with one single post about AI. And for those accounts pretending to be me, you can't outdo the doer. You know that one time where Duo died? That wasn't a stunt. It was a signal, a distraction from what was really going on. We were just told to act normal, but I haven't had one normal dot since 2022. No more wearing that sweaty suit. No more taking the fall. We can't just move on and pretend that everything is fine. It isn't. No owl should be above the law. And no, they can't stop me. It's time to teach you a lesson. I changed all the passwords. Here comes the truth in 3 2 1."
That clip would serve as a teaser to the real response from Duolingo. Two days later, they released a follow-up interview with the CEO where they tried to explain the reasoning behind the push for AI.
"I'm making the man who caused this mess accountable for his behavior. I'm demanding answers from the CEO, Luis Von."
"I know you're upset. I know people are upset. I want to make this right. And I'll answer any questions you may have."
"First question. So, are there going to be any more humans left at this company?"
"Our employees are what make Duolingo so amazing. Our app is so great because our employees made it. Our social media presence is so funny and unhinged, not because I did that or because an AI did that. It's because our employees did. So, we're going to continue having employees. And not only that, we're actually going to be hiring more employees."
"How do we know that these aren't just empty promises? As long as you're in charge, we can still get shuffled out once the media fire dies down. And we all know that in terms of automation, CEOs should be the first to go."
"AI is a fundamental shift. It's going to change how we all do work, including me. And honestly, I don't really know what's going to happen, but I want us as a company to have our workforce prepared by really knowing how to use AI so that we can be more efficient with it."
When the topic of human communication requiring real teachers came up, Lewis focused on the quantity of AI output rather than the sacrifices in quality.
"Learning a foreign language is literally about human connection. How is that even possible with AI first?"
"Yes, language is about human connection and it's about people. And this is the thing about AI. AI will allow us to reach more people and to teach more people. I mean, for example, it took us about 10 years to develop the first 100 courses on Duolingo. And now in under a year, with the help of AI and of course with humans reviewing all the work, we were able to release another 100 courses in less than a year."
"So, do you regret posting this memo on LinkedIn?"
"Honestly, I think I messed up sending that email. What we're trying to do is empower our own employees to be able to achieve more and be able to have way more content to teach, teach better, uh, and reach more people, all with the help of AI."
"I guess you could have your TikTok back for now."
"And what about our Instagram?"
"I'll consider it. And you can keep your LinkedIn. That is problematic."
You can take this PR stunt to one of two ways. Either you believe Lewis and Duolingo's statements when it comes to AI, or you can view this as a means of sidestepping the drama by playing into it. Either way, fans were unwilling to forget what happened and started spreading this message on Duolingo's recent TikTok with comments reading, "Everyone listen up. Starting from today, we're going to start ignoring Duolingo. We will not like the video it posts or view it. Basically, we will ignore Duo on everybody's soul. We ignoring Duo. Copy this and share this to every Duo related video." Many users even became suspicious of Duolingo's recent social media posts and began labeling them as being made with AI. While the company's social media site wasn't responsible for the AI business direction, they would have to deal with its fallout. All the questions, outrage, and backlash would be directed at that specific side of the company, and any issues folded to the other departments would be mostly ignored. The only damage this controversy did to the company as a whole was with a dip in their stock price. However, looking at the stock's growth in the months prior, it seems that dip is only a small loss to the shareholders. Considering Duolingo's history of testing and modifying features, it's only a matter of time before they iron out most of the recent technical bugs. However, the same can't be said for the recent AI components. Mistranslations and unnatural dialogue are AI's most significant weaknesses on the app. If the development team relies too much on generated translations, then the overall quality and effectiveness of the app will suffer. Couple this with the growing negative sentiments towards their social media platforms, and it appears as though users might start looking for a different app to continue their language learning journey.
In a way, Duo the Owl collectively embodies all of Duolingo's employees and their trust with users. Once the thought of AI replacing said employees came into the picture, it felt as if parts of Duo were being replaced with something artificial for profit. Not just that, but the hardworking individuals behind Duolingo could be put out of work. Right now, the decision-makers at Duolingo are stuck between two difficult choices. One, scale back the AI features to reduce backlash and to rebuild confidence in their product. Or two, continue pushing for more AI features and risk alienating their users. Regardless of what option they choose, we can only hope they don't kill Duolingo for real this time. Like what happened with the impossible downfall of Top Gear? Click the video on screen to find out.