Lately being on the internet feels like clamoring up the topsails while it sinks deeper into AI-infested waters. The latest shipwreck is Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn proclaimed his “AI-first” agenda on LinkedIn, much to the chagrin of the language app’s userbase.
Duolingo has been on the enshittification trajectory for a while now, which bums me out, because I’ve actually enjoyed the app quite a bit. It’s cheeky, it gamifies language to make it more fun, and it’s helpful for reinforcing vocabulary. The persistent (if not outright threatening) green owl is probably responsible for me speaking Spanish with more fluidity than I used to.
But in the last year or so, AI has been slowly plucking out the owl’s feathers. The lessons reek of the sterile non-sequitors common with LLM generation. The UI has become more predatory as it pushes you towards higher subscription tiers. And the AI video calls with Lily, while novel, are often clumsy and uncomfortable, as you rush to complete your sentences before she responds to half-uttered phrases. In some cases, the conversations turns weirdly puritanical: when her AI asked what I like to drink, it hung up on me when I mentioned I sometimes like to have a beer.
Despite these foibles, von Ahn’s message to users is, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In fact, he mentions “occasional small hits on quality” as they reorient their systems to AI, an odd promise when your current AI products are upwards of $150 a year. Not to mention those hits on quality will probably be larger and more frequent than a well-polished corporate memo would have users believe.
Although maybe the most sinister aspect of the memo is telling employees that Duolingo “cares deeply” about them. That rings pretty hollow when the first casualty of their “AI-first” philosophy is outside contractors. It’s a bit like telling the permanent crew of your ship you’ve got their back, while you walk the merchant sailors off the plank.
All in all, it’s a terrible look. As a brand guy, my sympathies go out to the marketing team. The frenzied, absurdist meme-fest of their content has garnered a lot of good will from their users for years now, and their CEO just set it ablaze. But sadly, this feels like the inevitable descent of every publicly traded company these days: the quixotic pursuit of infinite profit derived from zero labor. The mythic perpetual motion engine of capitalism.
I won’t be renewing my Duolingo subscription when it expires. Look as menacingly at me as you want, Duo. I’ll just shut the curtains and wait for you to get bored.
In the waning days of the Twitter brand, co-founder Jack Dorsey was talking about his social media platform like Victor Frankenstein being tortured by his run-amok monster.
“In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter,” he said in a tweet on April 25, 2022. “It wants to be a public good at the protocol level, not a company.” Selling Twitter to SNL’s go-to Wario impersonator was “solving for the problem of it being a company,” and given the result, I can only assume he wanted that solution to be zero.
Dorsey’s altruism is mostly a self-assured myth. No doubt he saw the potential for public good in Twitter, but he was also talking about profit models from the get-go, praising the benevolence of his beast while locking it away in a tower made of venture capital and ad revenue. Despite this paradox, he was right: Twitter, up until recently, had always behaved like a protocol. Governments, corporations, activists, comedians — everyone treated it as if it was a utility. But the purchase of the platform by the meme-slinging techno-brat made it clear that Twitter was no longer a public good but a privately owned plaything.
So, is Bluesky here to save the day? By now, you’re familiar with the platform that siphoned escapees from Twitter to reach 20 million followers in a relatively short time. Dorsey himself was part of its development (before inexplicably paying fealty to his original beast once again). In appearance, Bluesky behaves like a Twitter clone similar to Threads. But underneath it is the dormant dream of a decentralized social media experience, one where users have more ownership of their online presence.
So, can it separate platform from protocol as Dorsey sporadically envisioned, so each person can decide what kind of monster their social media is going to be? Maybe, but it has some adoption hurdles.
The deep goal of bluesky is to decentralize the social internet so that every individual controls their experience of it rather than having it be controlled by 5 random billionaires. Everyone thinks they signed up for a demuskified twitter…we actually signed an exciting and bizarre experiment.
The first hurdle is getting people to understand what a protocol even is. I’ve been on the internet since the early 90’s, and I’m still educating myself on the nomenclature. Granted, most of us are familiar with interacting with protocols. If you’re reading this blog, you’re using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with ease. And if you have an email address, congratulations: you’re already surfing on a wave of protocols that let your email talk to everyone else’s, no matter where their email is hosted.
This is what the AT Protocol, the beating heart inside the rib cage of Bluesky, is trying to emulate for social media. Much like your email address, your social media profile can be hosted by a provider of your choice. In this case, Bluesky would serve as a client in the same way Outlook allows you receive and publish emails. It brings to life the idea of a decentralized social network, one where profiles are a multitude of funky houses connected by common streets, rather than one-bedroom apartments owned by a single mercurial landlord.
Being able to host your own social media account has clear advantages. You can own, archive, and transfer your data more easily, and your profile is not as captive to the whim of mercurial ultra-capitalists. Right now changing your Bluesky username to a self-designated domain is easy enough. But as of this writing, fully hosting your own Bluesky account requires a degree of tech savvy.
This is the second big adoption hurdle to making the Bluesky dream a reality. Currently most users are hosted by Bluesky themselves. To me this isn’t a huge problem, analogous to people starting accounts with WordPress.com versus hosting the WordPress CMS on their own. But like WordPress, I can’t imagine many people going through the rigamarole of hosting their own Bluesky account, unless hosts like GoDaddy and the like provide similar managed services. If decentralization is truly going to be the next phase of social media, it needs to be more easily understood and readily accessible within a lower level of technical prowess.
I’m hoping for Bluesky’s success. I want an open social media protocol that gives me greater control of the content I make and consume, one that is less susceptible to Cory Doctorow’s enshittification principle. Right now on Bluesky I am witnessing more of the wacky, irascible energy I remember from Twitter’s earliest days. But it needs to become more than just an X escape hatch. I’m hoping that adoption of the AT Protocol will parlay that energy into a social media environment where curiosity, depth, and joy are easier to sustain.
Time will tell, but if we split the monster into pieces, maybe it can be more easily tamed.
