Okay, calling it a ‘game’ is a bit of a stretch, but I’d gotten back into doing Duolingo lessons for French, and they do have a fair bit of ‘gamification’ via daily ‘quests’, monthly challenge goals, different leagues to rank up in, and a streak counter to keep track of how many days in a row you practice.

What do you gain from any of it? Well…not much, really. The main benefit of the streak is showing it off, as other people in the league can see roughly how long your streak is when they look at the rankings. They then also made it so that maintaining a long streak gives you some extra streak ‘protection’ tokens that let you skip a day and still maintain the streak, which in hindsight is really just a self-perpetuating benefit, keep the streak going so you can keep the streak going…

It’s surprisingly effective though, and it’s nice to have a daily reminder to get your exercises in to maintain the habit, so I kept a streak going for quite a while. Eventually though, as I had less free time, I didn’t want to do the full units, but as a creature of habit I still wanted to keep the streak. So, I started doing the bare minimum, just one quick practice lesson since it only takes a few minutes per day and is still enough to maintain the streak. But, that then became the new habit, and for a couple years now I’ve just been doing one simple practice lesson per day just to keep the streak going, even though it’s been the same lessons repeated over and over. And, y’know, I’ve intended to return to doing the full units, any day now, so I gotta keep that streak going for when that happens…

But, I’m now just going to let my streak expire. And stop with Duolingo entirely, really. Their pivot to “AI-first” just smacks too much of disrespect for their own workers, the work they do, and the quality of linguistics work, so I’m done with them. Maybe I’ll pick up some other service, but honestly, I’m probably not going to find the time.

So RIP my streak, killed by AI: