From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism
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.
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.
I’m not doing this to make the world a better place, God damn it.
I’m here because I want to feel validated about my opinions!
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.