never give a corporation your labour for free.
People should have known this from the beginning.
These volunteers didn’t think about it in these terms.
They gave away their work for free to help people learn languages, and for a long time Duolingo seemed like the best platform for that.Starting your own platform is much more difficult than contributing to an existing one that seems to be operated with some amount of goodwill…
I understand that. Unfortunately, though, one has to expect always the worst from Corps, no matter how “good” they appear to be at the beginning.
Poor computer literacy is really biting people in the ass. Quotes like this really stand out to me:
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company.
Did you not know that they would be able to do this from the start? Or perhaps you knew and were just being extremely naïve? Either way, not being aware of what kinds of control other parties have when you share data with them is something that’s all too common these days. I really wish people would consider the ramifications of what companies can do when you give information like this to them.
Like giving your phone number away for no reason. The moment you share it, you give companies all they need to start spamming the shit out of you (or giving it away to other companies that will happily do it instead). How is a concept like this so hard to understand?
Unfortunately the gems don’t last long. I can go through 1000 just trying to refill hearts on harder Chinese lessons.
but what if they give you cool digital gems
Yeah, that’s an offer a man can’t refuse.
woo, shiny. my preciousss
Same for people contributing to google maps
Or Instagram, Facebook, reddit… Lemmy. I guess Lemmy isn’t a company so we have that going but if it’s not your own instance you are technically doing work for someone else.
Lemmy is more akin to helping out a community open-source project than helping out a company
At least Lemmy data is public for anyone to read. I don’t care that much if random groups are sucking up all this data for themselves - it’s worth it in my opinion because it means good actors can use it for good too. If it were all going to one company, I would be less happy about the fact that they could just black hole it all for nobody’s benefit but their own.
Seriously. I don’t know what outcome people expected. Duolingo is not a non-profit, or a community project like Anki. I hope everybody who is surprised by this is receptive to the lesson.
While it is true that corporations are terrible and will do anything in the name of profit, what you guys are saying is “they got fucked and it’s their fault.” It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are. They are formed by people who choose to fuck other people over for their own benefit. Fuck off with your victim blaming.
they got fucked and it’s their fault
That’s not at all what I’m saying. What I’m saying is people can choose to participate in a community that is controlled by a for-profit company if they want to, but they should temper their expectations accordingly.
Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to fuck people over or they’ll get outcompeted.
Thieves don’t exist in a vacuum either. So what you’re saying is a thief should rob more, or else other thieves will take what he could have stolen instead, and then he’ll be out of the thieving business? What kind of fucked up bullshit logic is that?
I know corporations are part of reality, but that doesn’t mean they should be excused for profiting on volunteer work. But my point is that the volunteers are being blamed as if they fucked around and now they’re in the stages of finding out, as if they’ve done something so stupid no one would have ever done. Unfortunately, part of reality too is that unless one of these volunteers has sufficient power and money to fight them, corporations like Duo will go on with impunity and they’ll keep fucking people over and others will keep not only justifying them, but also supporting them by buying their products, because it’s just easier to be spineless.
Why do you believe non profits are immune to this? They’re still incentivized to produce value. Maybe we just don’t mock volunteers for doing a good thing and instead shame the people taking advantage of them?
I didn’t say nonprofits are immune to it. I essentially said for-profit companies are for-profit. That says nothing about non-profits.
Never ever ever ever ever give your work for free to a startup unless it’s running under an open source model that guarantees even if they do go public, all that work remains openly available to everyone!
Nonprofits FTW
Oh, there are plenty of counter examples, unfortunately.
Prominent ones?
Same for everything, including open source models
St Jude’s Children Hospital and Goodwill off the top of my head.
I can’t find anything wrong about St. Jude’s.
Everything is bound to have some bad examples. OpenAI and RedHat were also under open source models.
You keep bringing up open source, why? All I did was say that being a non profit isn’t as good an indicator as you might think. How does open source factor in it?
I would not do any unpaid work for anything that was not straight up copyleft.
♥️
That’s right, never trust a private company that might go public in the future.
That’s why you should build your communities on Discord instead. 🤡
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Discord is the same thing as technical slack threads, or IRC chat. People try and use it as a reddit replacement when it really truly is not.
Forget reddit replacement, people try to use it as a wiki/documentation replacement.
Deranged behaviour.
Why discord? Everything on it will be lost without exception. Fuck discord.
It’s why they put the clown face emoji at the end. Discord sucks so hard for finding information. The number of interesting projects that exclusively use Discord for their documentation is astounding and frustrating as hell.
Sweats in Mozilla
Mozilla is a non profit foundation, the corporation is owned by the non profit and exists for tax reasons only. They’re different than a regular corp.
Oh, I’m aware. Thank you for the link, though: It’s interesting seeing people talk about Mozilla Pocket 5 months ago, saying user data doesn’t leave Mozilla.
And now, thanks to a new subsidiary, it can:
Browsing history, search history, information regarding an individual’s interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement, and online viewing activities)… Information is Sold and/or Shared [to]… Advertising partners
Source: Mozilla
Well fuck, I guess enshittification is universal. The only safe space is community foss/libre projects I guess
The NFL was a non-profit until 2015.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit that stopped the free distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Non-profit status doesn’t automatically equal good but Mozilla has been good so far…for the most part. It has had its own controversies.
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Not what I’m referencing.
Oxford originally pledged to give their vaccine away for free but Gates convinced them otherwise.
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Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It’s also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it’s a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.
Fantastic recommendation, thank you
Any suggestions for other languages? German? Italian?
Unfortunately I don’t know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I’m liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.
Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!
Thank you for this!
This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.
Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.
Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren’t directly profiting with ads.
Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.
Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform…
🤭 LOL @ the name change.
Reminds me of OpenMW for Morrowind being listed as “OpenMicrowave” on the Google app store
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Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren’t a robot.
Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn’t be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don’t risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.
It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.
Yea it’s become highly enshittified and actively punishes users that don’t subscribe. Fuckers.
Can’t speak for the entshitification but actively punished unsubscribed users?
I’ve been using it for two months, learning Germans, I just use Firefox in android instead of the app and I get no ads, only 5 failures but I rarely reach that on a daily basis (I don’t want to burnout and I’m pretty sure it’s better for learning to not go too fast) and if I ever reach it, I currently have 1k gems. I’m actually surprised at how little use I’d get out of the subscription.
I used Duo pretty solid for two or three years - ended up subscribing to it.
The benefits were negligible - the biggest thing for me was offline play. I used to do a lot of air travel, so the ability to cover a subject or two was super helpful.
The streak freeze was the only other real “bonus” for those who game a shit about it. I started to get quite protective of it when it reached four figures, but I kicked it into touch when I wasn’t learning much more than vocabulary. Duo is fantastic for getting a foothold on a language, but it only gets you through the first two or three exchanges of a conversation.
I enjoyed my time with the owl though.
I’ve got a subscription, I share it with my wife and a couple friends.
I like that it keeps me practicing daily, but I’m not really getting better very quickly, it’s just nice to keep French vocabulary in my active memory and it helps using my brain in the morning to wake up.
Yeah, I did a good three-quarters of the French course too. I distinctly remember the lessons about plays and stage work being an absolute bastard, not that I’d ever use it in my line of work.
I’ve started watching a bit more French media with the French equivalent of “received pronunciation” - such as watching the FR edition of Euronews or France24, plus watching kids shows like Hey Duggee or Paw Patrol is unusually handy, though it does give you some funny looks if you don’t already have kids!
Unfortunately, there’s no substitute for immersion - even on a short break to Paris, my confidence in using the language shot up from being able to just about converse in the language - but more importantly, getting utterly stuck and failing at something where you have to think a bit faster and get your point across anyway.
I should get back into it really.
You get streak freezes for free now (through quests), relatively often even, I generally get them back in two days if I use both of them in a weekend because I’m busy.
I really considered subscribing until I started using it on Firefox because of the ads, without the ads it’s a great free experience imo
I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.
Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.
I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it’s very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don’t like the direction the company has taken and I don’t want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.
Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.
No, they don’t punish typos, to the point I sometimes have mistakes counted as typos (I distinctly remember typing Schwimmt instead of schwimmst the other day and it said Be careful typos, but counted it right, end up having to check with my gf in those cases)
I don’t know why the experience seems so different between people, maybe it actually is, maybe it’s expectations. All in all it’s free, I don’t forget that and through Firefox android I get a very good experience.
There’s pretty odd because it definitely punishes me for typos in french
It was quite lenient with my error-prone French.
That said, Duo is well known for A/B testing so no doubt we were just using different feature sets.
In my experience the typo-tolerance is not very flexible. I write using Dvarok instead of QWERTY, so the typos I make don’t always follow regular patterns. On my phone I use a swipe keyboard, so sometimes a typo comes out as a different word entirely. No matter what I don’t want to be punished for my mistakes, even if they are real mistakes. I just want to keep on learning without the tool I’m using intentionally trying to make that harder for me.
Sure, the punishment for running out of hearts is they send you to rudimentary prison to repeat disheartening lessons.
I haven’t figured out the heart refresh - do they give you 5 new ones each day?
The ads are loud and awful and start before you can mute them. Can only skip the last few seconds. It’s engineered to be very obnoxious.
They could just have a value added premium but instead they choose to punish.
But good to hear you have managed to mitigate that. Gives me some hope to stick with it, thx.
You’re getting a lot of benefit out of running the desktop site with an ad blocker. App users aren’t so lucky.
DNS based ad blocking my friend. System wide
It stopped working. They figured out a way around it 😢 Fortunately I found a cracked version of the premium APK so now I get ad free and unlimited hearts without paying a dime (I didn’t necessarily care about the unlimited hearts but the ads were fucking obnoxious). I might still look into another system though because they keep reshuffling the format, and I don’t feel like I’m progressing.
And I’m not using anything not available to app users, unless you’re using IOS but at this point, I think you have others problems to worry about experience wise overall
There’s a loud ad for “Duolingo super” that has a high chance of showing up after every lesson. Also using Firefox with Ublock installed, and it’s still here.
Privacy Badger and ublock origin here, never ever got an ad on Firefox
I’ll try out Privacy Badger. I never got an ad on Firefox except for this one.
Fun fact, if you want to bypass the hearts system you can go to Duolingo For Schools and create a classroom with only yourself in it. There is zero verification.
It affects the desktop and mobile app. I think it might also hide ads but I’m not 100% sure about that, it’s been awhile since I’ve used it.
I still had the app installed on my iPhone because I wanted to learn a new language a few years back. Just recently checked their App Store page and saw extensive data collection, monthly subscriptions and some kind of “gem” currency. Immediately deleted.
They tried to gamify the process, you use gems to buy an off day for a streak
The gems aren’t as predatory as they seem.
lol learning a new language needs gems. Jesus fucking christ
Next is they’ll hide half the sentence unless you pay 5 gems.
I just wish there were foss alternatives to Duolingo
And the product now is traaaash.
I used to use duolingo to learn every language whenever I visited a country, and I can’t use it at all anymore.
As someone who is a current user and unaware of superior options but is curious, what would you recommend?
I’ve been having better luck with Babbel lately since it actually teaches ya stuff rather than throwing vocabulary at ya. I’ve learned more grammar in 2 weeks of Babbel than an entire 10 months learning Dutch on duo
I likes busuu a lot, felt a lot like old Duolingo, but with more relevant lessons. Duo can introduce potentially unhelpful vocabulary and grammar very early on, and now with the crown system every lesson just feels like pedantic repetition, busuu is fun, properly leveled, and has native speakers, with the Chinese course at least.
I’d be curious to hear which language you try and how it turns out for you since I’ve only done Chinese so far.
Never heard of busuu before, but tried it now and am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!
It’s also worth giving a shout-out to LibreLingo, which aims to be an open source version of Duolingo. For now it’s only Spanish though, and as I’m not interested in learning Spanish at the moment I haven’t gotten any real use out of it.
Oh awesome, I appreciate the rec, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Any advice for an alternative for Japanese learning? I am on a two week streak and getting ready to give up because it’s super repetitive.
A friend of mine moved to Japan about 10 years ago and has spent a lot of time solo developing his site, Kanpeki Study, for efficiently learning Japanese kanji and vocabulary in bitesize, daily chunks. I’d be doing all his effort a massive disservice if I didn’t mention it - hopefully turns out to be a good fit for you 😄.
Man, that site looks slick as hell. Props to your buddy, if it teaches half as good as it looks he’s gonna have wild success! Someone I know was talking about learning Japanese in the last few days so I sent 'em the link. If they enjoy it, I might just buy them a belated Christmas gift of a lifetime account. Cheers for the tip 🙌
Busuu is fantastic. Gets you to think through the words and gets your feet wet with hiragana/ katakana right away.
Take a look at this guide, it’s what I’ve been following https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
Essentially, use Anki to study vocabulary in bulk, and use grammar guides like Tae Kim’s. And spend a lot of time reading and listening to real native content
It’s worth noting that Duolingo has always been considered.very bad by most of the Japanese learning community.
Renshuu is Japanese specific and has been really enjoyable for me. Has a community of people contributing fun mnemonics (eg. “WArio’s big fat dumpy” for the hiragana of Wa) and a clearly caring developer.
Around when I was getting started with Japanese, I studied around 1k of core vocab with Anki. Not that it wasn’t repetitive. The thing with learning language (IMO) is that it’s a lot more fun and easy to stick with if you find something enjoyable to practice with. Maybe in your case that’s reading really simple stories or something like that. BTW, I’d also recommend Cure Dolly for grammar.
Assimil courses are always a good choice
I used Wanikani to learn most kanji… textbooks and actually talking and listening to Japanese ppl for the rest… still not that good but can converse. Much better at reading. Recommend watching japanese shows w japanese subs once you get to that level.
Why would you give away your production value to a capitalist for free?
It’s literally the only power you hold in the labour market, and it’s your own fault if you give it away for nothing.
Yes, how dare you contribute to a community effort.
Wait, isn’t the post you just made doing just that?
You missed the word “capitalist”
If it’s a for profit organization then ask for a salary or don’t help them.
Has shitjust.works paid you for your commentary here? If they decide to become a for profit company in 14 years, are they going to pay you back salary? What about all those people that ever posted to reddit? Is the world a better place if they never did it? Does reddit owe each of them a salary?
Sometimes you contribute to something because it makes the world a little better place.
Maybe now that we’ve seen it done and people know how to contribute, we could make a free and open version of duolingo.
There’s a difference between participating the way most users do (using the service) and participating the way this post is talking about (keeping the service running). Funny you should use Reddit as an example considering how pissed the admins were when they finally realized they were doing slave labor for a bunch rich tech guys.
I wasn’t aware that Lemmy is a for-profit enterprise.
Plus, my getting use out of a product and simply by doing so helping the company make money (say by increasing engagement or such), is extremely different to somebody going out of their way to produce work for that company in a way that doesn’t directly benefit the producer at all.
Put another way - Am I helping keep my local supermarket in business simply by shopping there? Sure. Would I offer my free time to help clean their store?
Hell. No.
In 2009 Duolingo was originally funded by the NSF. Their motto was free education will change the world.
In the 14 years since, they became something else. All those crowd sourced comments from a good upstanding project require the project and it’s data not to become evil.
not everyone started as an epic lemmy leftist
New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.
People who keep trying to do Socialism in a Capitalist system are doomed to fail, because Socialism produces enormous surpluses and Capitalists love to just gobble that shit up.
“If peoples basic needs were met nobody would work!”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.” People love saying “I don’t want to work,” but really what they mean is “I don’t want my economic output stolen from me by my employer while what’s left is stolen by ever increasing prices with no wage adjustment to compensate.”
Just use anki.
DuoLingo imo is kinda crappy anyway. Boring, repetitive, and terrible at teaching listening comprehension.
I can give it credit for getting people interested in language learning in an approachable way, but that’s about it.
I should have that pikachu face meme handy.
I gotchu.
