Many things are designed for engagement, so what’s your point? Some people use Lemmy like Reddit and care about internet points that don’t matter. “The rising number is designed to explode your behavioral patterns and enforce your engagement.” Instead of daily, it’s multiple times, but the point is you can paint many business models like this.

People download the app to get better at a skill. It’s designed to be effective at doing that. It’s a skill people want to learn. How is that exploitive or manipulative?

Full warning: I’ve worked in game design and F2P for like 10 years. I know there’s some personal bias, but there are much worse examples of this stuff than Duolingo or whatever. Painting good actors as bad actors is not correct.

The anecdote part at the end is irrelevant for both of us. I have the opposite experience and don’t even use this app: a bunch of my friends seem to all use it for learning languages. /shrug