cbrinicombe

Hey congrats on the launch! What kinds of gamification features are you thinking of adding? We built Trophy[dot]so for this purpose.

I think what you say about having 'outgrown' the platform is basically hitting the nail on the head here. Duolingo knows their audience is people just looking to start learning a language. That's the top of the funnel and therefore the place where they can capture the most users, which for them makes sense because the majority of users are monetized through ads.

There are so many other platforms around Duo though, Preply being one of them, that go a lot deeper with techniques that are great once you have that baseline understanding but maybe wouldn't work so well on people who are maybe just starting to try to commit to a habit. If from day one you make someone sit down and have a 50min conversation they are much more unlikely to be doing it 7 days later (and therefore watching ads) than if you just introduced them to a few basic words and concepts.

So i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing that duo is built this way, it's just serving one audience. And that audience are the ones that need the most help in habit forming and motivation - hence the gamification is strongest.

Sure maybe they've gone too far, and maybe the way they've done some features like the leaderboards and leagues kinda sucks but even if these things are always a bit marmite, they do work for a lot of people. We've built a very similar system in trophy and we see the data - streaks, achievements etc really do work.

I do think if duo made the leagues, points, challenges etc more friend-focused rather than being put into cohorts of people who you have no idea who they are then that would be better. I think at one point I was asked to 'import my contacts' but tbh phone contacts are such a dead feature in 2025 that I don't want some rando that I spoke to 10 years ago being my friend on Duo lol. If I had a way to discover my friends maybe by username or whatnot then that could be better. Not sure if they already have this...

Great to hear! Lots more we want to add for sure. One thing that would be nice is a way to directly embed code snippets referenced in my OpenAPI spec into the content of a particular page. I know you have <RequestExample /> and <ResponseExample /> but you have to write the code snippet every time for those (unless you use a custom snippet, but I can see that being cumbersome at scale). Plus these are positioned outside of the main page content. Feels like if I've given mint my openapi spec, with code snippets already in there, then in the same way mint can generate an api playground, surely it could generate code snippets as well. This would be nice as the snippets I have defined in my api spec use our official sdks, so are more relevant than those mint generates itself.

Very cool, sounds like a good idea! What's the best way to reach you? Would love to chat more about it.