@fullfathomfive @daniel_bohrer
>But that incredible knowledge base we created, which was unprecedented in the history of language learning, is gone for future learners.

Fun/cool stuff I got to do with Duolingo before it got intolerable:

- Significantly refresh old Spanish knowledge
- Try out the then-new but much-too-short Latin course and use it as a springboard for actually learning it more properly
- Help a lot of newcomers to Latin get their heads around its stranger bits
- Getting to take a look at the following for a few weeks, just because I could: Italian, German, Dutch (I've got family in the Netherlands I'd like to at least sort of talk to in the local language, and there just are not many other good resources out there for Dutch), modern Greek, and Esperanto. I didn't really follow up with any of these, but it was nice to be able to just see what they looked and sounded like.

And then almost all the reasons for sticking around went away. As I noted, losing the forums was the end for me, but watching the appearance of lots of gamified junk like daily and weekly leaderboards (*why??!*) combined with what felt like a lot more emphasis on appearance than substance (all the animations and such) was already very offputting.