I genuinely doubt so. The app did not changed at all. And more importantly, they experiment with limiting free users more - meaning they can afford loosing users.

Duolingo was also growing - both in terms of earnings and number of employees. They can afford some looses.

Like at least 500? I'm sure that will hurt.

Enough that the CEO had to do damage control, which is the absolute last resort for a PR disaster.

All ceos constantly do pr, and respond to media coverage. This is literally another just another day.

Sure, and X nee Twitter is just doing better and better.

Don't get what you said. Is this about X if so I don't get the ref.

Not buying a lot of them left over this.

The reaction to their AI announcement doesn't feel organic at all with oceans and oceans of content creators flooding feeds with samesy half-deprecating bashes of them using AI.

I think for every person who genuinely was put off, even more either didn't care, or were using ChatGPT for language learning and would try it to see what they mean by an AI-first approach.

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And for anyone who thinks they'd never take that kind of bad publicity on purpose: this is the brand that "killed" their beloved mascot a few months ago and similarly managed to saturate multiple channels with creators bashing them for that.

This is straight out of the "stop hiring humans" playbook.