April 19 2017
The Activity stream that was used to communicate has now been curtailed
It is still possible to communicate via the old stream via the bell system
It seems that there were some issues regarding the Communication activity stream where the CEO now explains the Duolingo position now on the activity stream.
Due to performance issues and only a small percentage of total user adoption, today we needed to remove Activity Streams from the Duolingo experience. We want to take a moment to explain why and what’s next for community interaction.
Why?
While we will miss many aspects of the Duolingo Activity Stream, it added a very large load on our infrastructure, has become unsustainable to maintain, and is written in old code—thus incompatible with our upcoming web rewrite. Duolingo’s performance was extremely slow (or down) today due to the stream, so we decided to remove it a little earlier than expected in order to make everyone’s current experience run smoothly.
Unfortunately, the Activity Stream was like a very old car that you have to spend lots of money and time to keep up. Instead, we decided to use that money towards saving up for a new car, which is coming soon.
What’s Next?
A faster website, to begin with. We are also investing in rewriting the Duolingo Forum. This will not only make it faster, but also enable features that surface higher quality content and discourage pesky spam. In addition, we plan to incorporate better tools to communicate with other learners. We understand that social connections are essential, and we plan to expand social features and capabilities as soon as possible.
Thank you for your ongoing understanding as we work to provide free language education!
--Luis (CEO)