Like Cinderella rushing to get home before midnight, as the clock approaches 12AM, I can often hear the chorus of dings from the Duolingo app as my friends scramble to keep their streak. Most of the time they complete these daily lessons on their own. However, when times are dire (or the vocabulary gets complicated), they simply freeze their streak or hand the phone over to someone who is more fluent in the language.
This kind of behavior isn’t unique to educational apps. For example, there’s been a rising popularity of “Strava mules,” people who are paid to boost someone else’s stats on Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, just so they can post impressive runs on social media. This made me wonder, how do apps that aim to be mediums for education and productivity end up becoming platforms where social identity matters more than individual growth?
If you know friends or family who frequently use Duolingo, you may be familiar with their current streak. However, sometimes it seems that individuals with a 12-day streak are just as familiar with a language as individuals with a 300-day streak.
An article on the Duolingo blog by Product Manager Osman Mansur explains the logic behind the app’s streak system, highlighting its importance for the app’s retention and its contribution to their learning system. He reasons that their goal is to make learning a new language become a habit and a natural part of the day. He specifically states that they employ loss aversion: “an internal bias in your brain that makes you particularly averse to losing something, like a learning streak”.
He also emphasizes the benefits of the “Streak Freeze”, which gives users leniency by letting them skip their streak for a day.
Our hope is that this would reduce the potential demotivating effects of maintaining a streak as “the fear of losing a streak could prevent learners from even attempting one in the first place.” — Osman Mansur
Streak Freezes on Duolingo
A screenshot of a “125 day streak” that would appear after the completion of a day’s lessons.
Streak Screen
Although these streak freezes are designed to act as limited “get out of jail free” cards, I’ve seen them used as a crutch by some users. Even though streak freezes are limited to 2 at a time, users can easily get them through daily chest rewards or purchasing them with gems.
One frequent user I know said that they use a streak freeze about once or twice per week, despite her highest streak being over 300 at one point. With so many freezes, are the habit-building intentions of the streak feature really being instilled in users?
In addition to frequent streak freezing, there are cases where people will simply let someone who is more familiar with the language complete a lesson for them — just to keep up their streak. When the motivation to using Duolingo comes solely from keeping an artificial record rather than learning a language, how effective can the learning really be?
A screenshot of a run done on Strava with its distance, pace, time, and the route mapped out.
Strava platform
If you are unfamiliar with Strava, it’s an app where runners and cyclists can track their metrics of speed, distance, duration, and more. The selling point of the app is the fact you can share your metrics with other users — showing off how far, fast, and long they’ve run. In an age where people spend more time indoors, the app gives people the opportunity to subtly brag about “touching grass” and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
However, the desire to maintain this image has started to manifest itself within the platform in a dystopian way. Strava users are starting to hire runners to go on runs for them — creating artificially bloated stats. These runners have been dubbed “Strava mules” and demonstrate an extreme case of choosing social identity over individual genuine growth.