I’m a novice investor who mostly owns index funds but buys a few individual stocks if I really like the product and think it’s something I want to support.
I was a Duolingo subscriber for multiple years and found it incredibly worthwhile and time efficient way to learn a German primarily with my commute time.
I was a big believer in the service but recently stoped paying because they’ve failed to a did more content to their German course for multiple years.
Two things I strongly believe that make me want to hang on/buy more after the recent crashses:
\- Duolingo is an incredibly valuable service that cannot be replaced by chatting to ChatGPT in German (which I’ve also started)
\- The use of LLMs can actually be a hug enlist to Duolingo giving “good enough” translations which can expand their less popular courses quickly.
But I feel like the last year has harmed my faith a bit because:
\- Duolingo has enshitified their free tier to the point that I found it unusable. They claim to be focussed on user growth but if I were a new user on the free tier now I wouldn’t have stuck around and wouldn’t have paid for premium. For 3 years
\- Adding Chess as a learning resource seems like a waste of resources especially while failing to add content in a very popular course like German. The existing dedicated services like chess.con are so much better and I really don’t get it.
From the outside I see it as a great product where some (imo) bad decisions are being made. If you’re buying stocks where you like the business how much trust do you out in “they built something great” vs. “I don’t like anything they’re doing at the moment”?