My issue with this thread and others I’ve seen is more around the attitude than the actual complaint. Cuz y’know, no one is forcing you to use this software. In the grand scheme of things it’s a minor issue which is easily worked around if you pay attention. There’s absolutely no reason for folks to be this enraged over it. After using it for a few weeks every day I’m pretty sure LingQ is not a simple application from an engineering point of view. It’s actually fairly rich in terms of features, and the whole thing is built on top of user-generated stuff rather than set lesson material. Meanwhile, I imagine it’s working with a budget comprising a fraction of DuoLingo’s and probably has an order of magnitude fewer engineers. I’m a software engineer, so I suppose I take issue with insinuations that these engineers/designers are incompetent or don’t care about your issue. I promise they do care.
First of all, I and as far as I recall no one else is calling the LingQ staff incompetent. And I am very well aware of the discrepancy between how “easy” something might appear to be implemented versus the real effort involved. For some reason people who are proficient in something (or claim to be so, as I have no means to verify that) always seem to assume everyone else doesn’t. 
That beeing said, the only response that was brought up by the devs was that “this is how it is supposed to work”. Now, what am I to do with that? The request already calmed down to a “move the button to a slightly different position, please 
”. If there is a reason why this isn’t possible or harder then I may think I am happy to hear it. So the “enragement” you seem to experience is also partly more about the response then the actual issue.
LingQ is more of a service then a finalized product, so of course people take the possibility for further improvement into consideration when asking themselves whether they are willing to pay the not so few bucks for what is essentially a reader software. And the devs are communicating exactly that. “We are looking into it.” “We see what we can do.”
And I really don’t know what is the “grand scheme of things”, but calling something a minor issue just because it isn’t one for you while telling people to “pay attention” is exactly the kind of unconstructive arrogance that get people enraged. And whether not using this software is a solution the LingQ devs would favor …?
Hmm, I’m not trying to be arrogant or condescending. I’m simply stating that engineering teams have to prioritize work and a UX annoyance will always take lower precedence over a bug that cannot be worked around, or new features for that matter. The fact they haven’t done anything about doesn’t mean they don’t care about user pain points, it simply means that it isn’t a big enough issue to warrant immediate action, despite the clamor of some passionate users.
Perhaps you personally did not suggest incompetence (never said you did) but I have definitely seen that word used the describe LingQ and/or the team working on it, due to this very issue, in other threads. This thread also exhibits plenty of inflammatory writing directed at the LingQ team. Again, as a software engineer, it bugs me. Not much else to say.
I have called the LingQ team incompetent, particularly on this issue. Users, i.e. paying customers, endlessly complain with excellent reasons. LingQ could fix the problem easily and won’t.
I stand by what I said.
does it matter why i don’t want words to be automatically to known? It seems that it would be easy to make it a choice to automatically move blue words to known or keep them. a lot of people seemingly want to keep them
It matters because if we know more, maybe we can help you figure out how to get around the issue.
I assume it would be relatively easy to make it a choice to keep words as unknown, but I suspect the team is a bit wary of giving people the option to remove the one thing that makes LingQ work as well as it does. If people were to choose such option in the settings, there’s a huge potential for people to then give LingQ bad reviews because “They’re charging money for what is merely an e-reader”.