To each his own, but I personally find the “do you want to repair your streak?” pop-ups super annoying. I also find the “your activity has gone up/down” pop-ups equally annoying.
I would love to just ignore those, as others have suggested, but they always freeze my app for a few moments and I can’t just click out of them like one should be able to. I usually have to close out the app and start over. So every time those annoying pop-ups appear I end up fiddling around for a few minutes to get rid of them and get back to work.
Major buzz kill and a waste of time! So yea I wish they weren’t a thing LOL.
Personally I ignore the streaks. I study a lot outside of LinQ because much CI that I want to listen do does not import correctly from YouTube making LingQ worthless for a lot of my study. However I do understand the incentive of a streak, because it feels like an accomplishment, and it is. I would love to study only within LingQ if they can ever figure out how to accurately import or create transcriptions.
But why do you bother whether or not others have a streak or how long theirs is (okay, that sounded odd)? Is there a price we get if we excel nobody told me about?
The length of their “streak” doesn’t bother me at all. I just find it odd that people would find lying to themselves motivating.
It’s like purposely buying a bathroom scale that displays 5 pounds (or 3kg or whatever) less than you actually weigh. Reality is still reality, and reality is undefeated.
A “total days gaining X coins” on the app stat would be more interesting and useful to me than a streak, anyway. It’s a halfway decent proxy for effort accumulated over time, which can be used to somewhat benchmark progress.
I never understood this either. If a streak is broken, start a new streak…or not. It’s a pretty hollow incentive for me, but I guess not to others.
I feel the same way about the Challenges. I tried one a couple years ago in Norwegian. Once I got in the top 10, I spent more time with strategies to improve my position than I did actually efficiently learning the language. I quit the challenge and never did it again.
It’s like dealing with salesmen. They quickly learn how to “pump the numbers” to improve their commission, but to hell with customer service and anything that gets in the way of earning a commission.
If you want to play games, go find games. If you want to learn, LingQ provides very useful tools.
Exactly. LingQ is a commercial app with countless limitations due to its nature. So they add lots of ‘features’ to provide the illusion of value and learning. I’m not saying LingQ is bad, it’s not, but the user needs to understand that it is not a complete language learning solution, it is just a useful tool.
They waste time adding bells and whistles, and their regression testing is non existant. That is of course because they prioritise acquiring new customers over improving the efficacy of the app. Could they change approach and remain in business?
What I personally find slightly disappointing is that there seems to be a new “please repair my streak” post on this forum every single day and they all receive almost immediate attention - people get their streaks fixed and that in itself is ok, of course. But at the same time there are so many really serious issues that have been reported and they don’t seem to be anywhere near as important to the LingQ team. Sometimes they never get replied to, or if they do, it’s with a generic “our team will look into this” reply, with no further results. I’d prefer the time wasted on repairing people’s streaks being spent on dealing with more serious problems.
I just find it odd that people would find lying to themselves motivating.