The AI-first certainly isn't helping

They also recently changed their life meter, which just feels like a weird move. Now instead of having 5 hearts that only deplete when you get a wrong answer they have an energy meter that slowly goes down whether you're getting questions right or wrong

Which feels like a really weird choice for a business model that I assume gets a lot of money from showing ads.

With the hearts I could keep doing lessons forever as long as I wasn't getting them wrong and they could keep showing me ads the whole time

Now after a while I'd just bottom out the energy meter and then I just can't keep going

Obviously it's an attempt to get people to pay for a subscription, maybe it works to get people to do that, but I know there was no circumstance where I'd ever pay for it.

I've been thinking about ditching Duolingo for a while over the AI thing, but I'm really damn close to the end of my course and I kind of planned to just finish it out then delete my account. I may just ditch it early now.