Duolingo removing its discussion forums | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo removing its discussion forums

forum.duolingo.com

32 pointsamichail12 comments

This is a very very smart move. It's a massive liability, let Reddit bear it

Why? I think this is a rather regressive and nasty step -- there is a lot of good content on those forums (which are, after all, entirely aimed at education).

I guess there must be incidences which we are not aware of.

Why is this forum so toxic? https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/36957067/Why-is-this-foru...

> Why is this forum so toxic?

I guess it fell into the StackExchange issue, where beginners or newcomers were not using the search and just asking the same question over and over.

Mods got tired of closing threads, so the users basically self police by marking dupe or telling users to use search.

I feel like it's a result of bad UX design if users ask same things over and over again. StackExchange's engineers were quite ingenious by automating answer suggestion and finding possible duplicates even before someone gets to the point of clicking the Post button.

Because when people start throwing out hate speech and stuff, you have to manage and moderate it.

Let someone else do it, and focus on your key business.

But why would they remove the forums? They could just stop slowing new posts.

Maybe for them. As a learned those forums were very useful for me as they provided answers to a lot of my questions, far far more than I could have asked on reddit without spamming the whole sub.

The FAQ is probably worth a read too: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4424678300301

To me this was one of the best features, a lot of things in Duolingo are not well explained but when you go into the forums there are people who have taken great lengths to explain things.

This feels very much like a proactive, defensive decision. Did they recently end up on the receiving end of some legal action?

I had no clue they have forums

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