Duolingo’s “emotional blackmail”
🎉 It’s Friday, at last—and welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #178: turning your schedule upside-down and learning from solitude
By Harris Sockel
Hallo! Kaffe und milch, bitte. Danke!
That’s one of the only things I can say in German. I started learning the basics a few weeks ago because I love the word “verschlimmbesserung” and thought exploring one of English’s root languages would be fun. (Also, the animated characters are very cute. I like Lily, who has purple asymmetrical bangs and I bet knows a lot about the Berlin rave scene.) Duolingo starts you out by teaching you how to order things in a coffee shop, so here I am.
Then I got busy and, as design expert Rosie Hoggmascall writes, the “emotional blackmail” started…
I got the same messages, which seemed designed to make me feel personally responsible for this fake owl’s mental health. It was cute… but a little scary?!
It did not make me open the app again, but I’m guessing these tactics work on other people! This all reminds me of another Medium story I read recently, by game designer Sam Liberty, on how Wordle draws in millions of daily players. It all boils down to core human drives:
Wordle gives us a sense of daily accomplishment. So does Duolingo… until you stop using it, at which point its messaging gets wild and unpredictable. Every product as big as Duolingo (7.4 million paid subscribers, ~$530 million annual revenue) taps into some combination of positive drives (ownership, accomplishment, empowerment, influence) and negative ones (scarcity, unpredictability).
The next time you get a push notification from a service that wants a piece of your precious attention, try to figure out which core motivation it’s playing into. Are you being made to feel scared? Accomplished? Empowered? A combination of the above?
Elsewhere on Medium…
- There are 31 days remaining until the U.S. presidential election. The number of truly undecided voters is tough to pin down, but by some estimates it’s as low as 3% — and if you’re one of them, you’re probably fielding people from all sides trying to get you to change your mind. Essayist Alisa Wolf discusses the work of philosopher Eleanor Gordon Smith, who’s written on Medium about how minds really change. “People don’t change when they feel attacked or abandoned but rather when they feel supported, loved, and accepted.”
- Essayist Jacqueline Dooley explains how losing her daughter forced her to rethink her schedule. “Grief had rewired my brain,” she writes, “peeling away the superficial crap, exposing my busy work for what it was — meaningless.” So many of us restrict our behavior based on what we think others will think about it, but in reality no one actually cares.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Solitude is a great teacher. Togetherness is a great healer.
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Edited by Scott Lamb
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