Tough Way to Make a Wage (or maybe Skynet is planning to raid Paris?)

About a year ago, I logged into DuoLingo.com for the first time in a couple of years. Then I skipped for a bit, and logged in again. To my slight surprise, I had a notification that I had a new DuoLingo follower.

One frustrating thing about DuoLingo is that interpersonal chat facilities are sorely lacking. Users can leave questions (or quarrels) with some of the answers that they don’t quite understand (or that they think are wrong); and users can reward each other with “Lingots” (the rather useless in-game currency) in those comments and questions. Conversations there are mostly focused on grammar and usage, and unfold rather slowly. Not an ideal interactive chat medium.

There also is “DuoLingo Clubs”, available only on mobile apps (i.e., not through the browser). Clubs can have up to 50 members; and any user can join only one Club per language they’re learning. Users can invite each other to join a particular Club. Chatting within the Club is more feasible than elsewhere on the site, about at the same level as the old AOL chatrooms, but usually a lot quieter (because people there are focused on learning a new language, probably, rather than “A/S/L”).

I’m saying all this to convey the point that, in general, the options for reaching out to new people in any kind of meaningful way are quite limited on DuoLingo. So it was with interest that I observed that my new follower had a rather creative username: [redacted].[redacted].pw (Nicole[redacted])

It looked like a username at a website with a .pw top-level domain name. Curious, I looked up .pw — turns out it was originally for the island nation of Palau, but has since been rebranded as “professional web” or some such silliness.

So, I went to the website, and found it redirecting to, ah, an “adult dating website” (which looked to have a stereotypically juvenile approach). I tried putting in the server portion of Nicole’s username, and I got served a steaming serving of virility pill advertising.

This means that pornospammers have found a novel way to approach a new market: recently active DuoLingo users who are bored enough to figure out the target website based on a username. The most surprising thing is that this follower is a “plus” member of DuoLingo, implying that they paid money to DuoLingo — which, unless things have changed, is free to new users.

My first response was to report this user as an instance of spam. But found none of the usual social media tools for denouncing spammers and hatemongers.

That’s when I noticed the other surprising thing about this account. By Occam’s Razor, it’s a human user, not merely a bot, because this account is currently at Level 17 in French, with over 10,000 XP (“experience points”) earned. (Unless the bot is teaching itself French?)