u/AbdullahMRiad — reddlx

Quick background, I've been a beta tester for Duolingo for as far as I remember by signing up for the beta program on Google Play and I've liked every update rolled out (well, almost *cough* energy *cough*)

So why am I writing this? Because never have I gotten any new features earlier than my friends who aren't in beta at all and I'm even an older user than them. This is I assume due to A/B testing not taking beta users into consideration making the beta testing program completely useless.

This brings me to Microsoft. They recently announced that Windows Insiders beta channel will no longer be subject to controlled feature rollouts (their term for A/B testing), and the experimental channel is even giving users the ability to toggle individual feature flags themselves. Notably, controlled rollouts remain in place for stable Windows. Beta users actually get to be beta users.

I'd love to see Duolingo take a similar approach. Ideally, giving beta testers control over feature flags. At minimum, just remove A/B testing from the beta channel entirely and ship new features directly to testers, or at the very least, let beta users opt out of A/B testing if they want to get new features directly.

Fixing this would make Duolingo better. Beta testers who actually get to test features early will find more issues and report them, identify friction points that can't be identified by metrics alone, and give the team real feedback on what actually works.