I may be similarly wired, and I've found abandoning Duolingo streaks on my own terms to be very rewarding.
Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.
People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.
I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.
> They reset your cleared lessons and require you to redo them if they add new vocab to them
The same would be true if that case was never considered, or postponed, during development.
I tinkered with my own toy learning platform; I too found the question of how to deal with added content to an already-completed lesson, and the answer is that there is no easy answer. Every solution sucks in a way.
> as well as randomly clearing them in the name of making you practice them again
Anki does the same, calls it "spaced repetition" and says it's a feature. Should we ban Anki now?
I haven't used Anki either and I'm not suggesting anybody ban either one, though I would be curious how Anki's spaced repetition implementation differs from Duos. In general I don't think bans usually have the intended effect, and trying to ban or discourage dark user patterns seems almost impossible to define usefully, let alone enforce even if it were the right thing to do. I'm not much of a gambler, but I live in one of the holdout US states that doesn't allow sports betting apps, which is an entire ecosystem of human-hacking dark patterns, and it bothers me that I'm disallowed from participating in the name of protecting other people from their own poor self-control. Duolingo has all the time in the world to defeat that kind of thing with loopholes and it would make it even harder for an alternative service to compete with them.
They don't need to design for that. If you want to become proficient in the language, you'll have to use the language for something. Whatever lessons Duolingo provides, they won't get you to become proficient in a language.
I switched my launcher so I could customize the icon, but Duolingo overwrites it.
This is not a toggle feature.
Damn them, so it's gone now.