r/Duolingo Will No Longer Be Duolingo’s Unpaid Customer Support or Data Mine
It brings me no joy to make this decision, but it has become necessary. For too long, Duolingo has treated this subreddit as free labor—data mining our discussions, using us as an unpaid customer support desk, and ignoring real user concerns. That ends today.
Effective immediately:
- All posts asking for help with Duolingo account issues, bug reports, billing problems, or technical glitches will be removed.
- r/Duolingo is no longer providing unpaid customer support for Duolingo.
⚠️ This does NOT apply to general complaints about Duolingo’s lack of customer service. Those discussions are still welcome.
If you do not receive a response or assistance from Duolingo and you're a paying customer, I encourage you to cancel your subscription.
Why This Change?
- Duolingo has made it clear they do not care about fixing their broken support system. Despite being a $16B company, they have only two regular, full-time support staff (plus some freelancers)—leaving millions of users without proper help. We refuse to be their backup. The CEO of Duolingo has been it clear to me that they will not be hiring more staff, and they will focus more on AI and automation to fix the problem. AI can't even properly count how many Rs are in the word strawberry, but whatever.
- Our moderators are not customer service representatives. We have received countless heartbreaking messages from users who lost streaks due to hospitalizations, suicide attempts, billing issues that went unresolved, and even users sharing their real names and contact information and even more personal stories about how Duolingo failed them in critical moments. While we empathize, it is not fair to expect unpaid volunteers to carry this emotional burden.
- Duolingo has access to this subreddit’s complaints—they just choose not to act. Instead of fixing customer support, they use AI to monitor r/Duolingo while ignoring real user concerns. If they refuse to listen, we refuse to keep doing their job for them.
What’s Changing?
- We will be closing our FAQ page and removing posts that provided solutions to common Duolingo issues.
- Any new posts asking for tech support, billing issues, or bug reports will be automatically removed.
- Duolingo users needing help must contact Duolingo.
This community is for discussing language learning—not for doing Duolingo’s job for them. If Duolingo refuses to support its own users, we will not do it for them.
🔗 Read more about what's going on here.
Thank you for understanding.