Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?

Yes, according to Duolingo's (obviously biased) CEO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6uE-dlunY

Found this episode fairly interesting (without being particularly interested or personally invested in the space)

Not doing subscriptions for an app that has ongoing server costs is going to bite you, you may want to reconsider that.

Your biggest issue is going to be that language learning for adults is largely an unsolved problem. I know people with 1000+ day streaks on Duolingo who are nonetheless not fluent, and from everything I’ve read, it seems clear that spaced-repetition techniques are not sufficient (and possibly not necessary) to achieve fluency. Most people say you need immersion, which is difficult for an app to provide (research other people who have tried, you probably wouldn’t be the first and can save a lot of time, effort and heartbreak by learning from other people’s failures).

I used https://learn.mangolanguages.com/ to get to something like ~b1/b2 in French after a year. I did a lesson or two every day, and did all of the review, pretty much much every day.

I spent 8 years in jr high - college studying German without having any real competency in German, it did however teach me something about learning another language.

Mango isn't gamified. Its basically a curated set of flashcards, and the lessons are essentially flashcards themed together. There are some extra explainers throw in that are helpful. I really enjoyed it.

On top of Mango as the primary lessons, I've been listening to podcasts, watching series in french, reading books, etc.

I didn't pay anything for mango, it was entirely funded by my local library so that was great.

To me, a learning needs some kind of gamification and engagement tricks. There is nothing calm about learning, you need the dopamine! Among other things, dopamine is the learning hormone, it is a problem when it makes you learn the wrong things, like "fentanyl is really great", or "I need to buy more stuff I don't need", but it is also what helps you learn useful skills and life lessons.

I remember my father, a teacher, who told me he viewed his job in the classroom as a performance art. His knowledge was secondary, if that's knowledge you want, just read a book, go to the internet, whatever, you don't need a teacher. But it is not very engaging, and a teacher's job is to make it more engaging.

So without engagement, you probably won't make a good learning app, but you can make the engagement entirely targeted towards learning and not monetization, which would be a very good thing.

I think there is room for non-gamified learning apps depending on the field and how it's intended to be used. A good example is the field of early reading instruction. The best two apps right now IMHO are Reading.com and Mentava, and they take radically different approaches. Mentava is pretty gamified and kids can use it on its own, whereas Reading.com is basically a computer implementation of Siegfried Engelmann's instructional approach. Has to be used with a parent accompaniment, and most of the onscreen widgets are just there to facilitate co-teaching. Both apps are good and seem to be landing with their target markets, obviously the simpler one is aiming at a lower price point.

Poor gamification is a bigger risk than non-gamification done well IMHO. That's where a lot of children's learning apps have failed in the past.

Gamification helps with growth and engagement but not necessarily learning. I have a feeling that a "calm" app would grow more slowly but if the experience and results are good, you could have more durable and satisfied customers, less churn, etc.

I think yes. If you don't create an obvious avenue for the user to infer his development, he won't be able to do it. You have to confuse the audience to bring in the sense of progress. People learn by being challenged, confused, and by building something. Nobody learns by interfacing with an application that promises it. But besides learning nothing, they can feel good about being engaged, by completing tasks, seeing progress bar moving, seeing number go up. Someone that decides to interface with a learning app instead of learning the damn thing is doomed, will never learn anything at all. Just give them a sense of accomplishment so they can feel good about it. Without gamification what would the platform give them? If don't help them cope with their inertia, there really is nothing you could do. Maybe you are equating gamification with dark patterns? Gamification is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a powerful psychological trick. Can definitely be used for good. Working on performance often feels amazing because we can profile, identify clear bottlenecks and work to reduce them. When you manage to make number go down, you have a clear indication something went right. Maybe you didn't absolutely improve de code, but you made it better in a very specific way under a very specific lens. People like it because of this aspect, and it does feel a little bit like a game. There is a clear requirement and a clear specification. The game aspect makes it very enjoyable. I suppose development against a test suite provides a similar experience. Feels good in a game-ish way. Gamification is more related to the feels good than dark patterns, but obviously, the whole industry will ONLY be interested in exploiting practices. There is no incentive to make the user feel good, at all, without being pervasive. If you care about your user, you should design around the user. Inevitably, you will think a bunch about what feels good. If all you care about is the user learning, developing competence, you will offer no platform at all. The platform will tell them to close it and go do the thing. If you want to motivate them, another story. If you want them to feel accomplished, another story. You're building a feels good, want to feel accomplished want to fool myself into learning app.s gamification is the whole point.

I actively avoid anything that is gamified or uses engagement tricks.

I don't mind paying a subscription, if the app provides ongoing updates or new content that I value, or I understand why it has running costs. I would prefer if the app had extension packs, like games' DLCs over a subscription. If an app has a subscription, I will immediately cancel the subscription after subscribing to avoid the recurring cost (if I forget to cancel after year or so). If I find the app valuable, I will re-subscribe as needed.

I'll give you one example, and you can decide for yourself.

Mid of this year, I accidentally found out about a great independent language learning app [1]. It clicked for me. It was no bullshit, no gamification, and no distraction. I used it for one or two months, 700 hours in total. I can attribute to it some progress in learning my target language.

Then I went on vacation for a few weeks and completely forgot about it. Today I tried to find it again, but since I forgot its name, I couldn't find it easily. Normally, I would search my inbox, but there was not a single mail from it. When I found it, I learned it improved quite a bit and added a way to support the app through subscriptions.

Now, if it had some promotions or gamification built-in, I would be reminded of its existence and would most probably have been using it at least 700 more hours until today, and maybe even subscribed to it. And it would bring me closer to reaching the learning goal in my target language.

TL;DR: Yes, some gamification or nagging is necessary. But don't overdo it.

[1] https://morpheem.org/

I'm working on a project in a very similar space, and we decided to add gamification. We don't want to harass our users or annoy them into using the app, and therefore our notifications will be easily manageable. But we believe that gamification is very helpful for encouraging users to learn consistently, and so we will include it. But at the same time, we are putting a lot of intention into it not being a distraction (both within the app, and outside it).

Could we say that Anki is a non-gamified app for learning?

For me most forced interactions by modern apps (also the constant nagging about updates and new features) is the main factor why I'm trying to get rid of them. Not really in the market for language learning myself, but the app not being gamified would be a positive selling point, yes.

If your goal is more users, it would make sense to have a calm setting.

If you want to build the app you want to use, go for it.

I'd love an app like this. I usually go through my Anki deck in bed before sleep and in the morning and am always on the lookout for other language learning methods. Being in bed, I don't want anything too gamified or exciting during that time. Just some calm/chill practice before I sleep.

I don't really care if it is calm or not, I care if it teaches me a language. Duolingo doesn't really get you there in terms of language learning. Also, does it teach speaking, listening, reading, writing? Each of these goals is different.

No experience in the field, other than 2048, so take this with a grain of salt.

In my opinion it’s about your ethical stance and who your target audience is, and whether you’re trying to make a ton of money or just enough to survive. You’re obviously going to fight an uphill battle if you don’t employ any such (predatory?) marketing tactics. However, you could position yourself as explicitly standing against those and that might attract a smaller but loyal user base.

If you’re lucky, and build something good, and people talk about it, you might find that you’ll get users regardless. However, at the end of the day, what matters is whether you can keep the lights on, so you may have to relax some of your stances and rules or find ways to market your product that don’t fall into the categories you’ve described.

I don't think it's a mistake. Non-subscription without clear gamification and engagement tricks seems like Rosetta Stone basically and that's the longest-running, most effective language learning software I'm aware of. When I joined the Army 18 years ago, while waiting for school assignment, I had the opportunity to train provincial reconstruction teams as a role player and had to cram learn some reasonable level of conversational Pashtun and that was what we used, before smart phones were widely adopted. The only real innovation I've seen since then is conversational LLMs that allow you free-form practice without a human partner, but even back then, scripted conversational practice was pretty good as long as there was a wide enough diversity of scripts.

Problem is more along the lines of "solo developer" here. Hacker News seems to have a real thing about this niche for whatever reason, but when doing something like this that I think requires real expertise in a wide variety of subjects that aren't software development, I think you need help. There's no way something like Rosetta Stone was developed without the input of experts in language learning and teaching, for instance. Knowing the platforms, programming languages, frameworks, and app store onboarding and delivery processes is already a lot for one person, but expecting to know the target domain on top of that is expecting an awful lot from yourself. I don't think it's a great sign trying to crowdsource business strategy from a free web discussion board, as a single example. This is the kind of conversation you want to have with your private team of people you know for sure have the experience they claim to have, not anonymous comments.

Depends.

Do you want to make an app or do you want to float some VC's balance sheet?

If you are avoiding subscriptions, are you doing credit buckets? Up front X months in advance and a reminder to top up?

I find either of these more ethical but it is worth noting that any non-expiring, roll-over credit scheme is going to kill you. All you need is one or two months where you’re focussed on infrastructure instead of fresh content and you will find users get out of the habit of using it up, which can end up with you effectively in debt to your users, who will expect more value the longer they wait.

Although it's in a different area, I wanted to mention https://calmcode.io/ as an excellent example of a calm learning platform.

There is a whole movement around enshittification, and I see potential in this kind of app, even though it still seems to be a niche.

Books?

> I’m starting to wonder if this approach is fundamentally at odds with today’s market.

I don't want to project, but outside of video gaming, I'm seeing people in my personal networks pull back from digital more and more - not because these tools and apps aren't useful, but because they are so hostile.

So you might be ahead of your time. That said, businesses cost money to run so you need to assess your churn if you aren't going to have a subscription model.

I use anki daily and I like that it doesn't nag me.

I think streaks are a good thing (consistency) if you push the user to look at them in aggregate (ala the Github green checkbox) not in terms of punishment for missing a day (aka a single number).

I like how Anki does it for example.

Also, guide the user to find a non-burnout rate. It is easy to set yourself up for destruction with learning apps and I like how Anki told me "slow down Cowboy" in terms of the new card rate because I hadn't worked out that going too fast on this would result in an avalanche in two weeks in terms of review cards.