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   fullfathomfive (fullfathomfive@aus.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 01:28:59 JST fullfathomfive

   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

   • clacke likes this.
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     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 03:31:53 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     • Tushar Chauhan

     @tchauhan a devastatingly dry burn, thank you

   • Embed this notice
     Tushar Chauhan (tchauhan@mastodon.mit.edu)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 03:31:54 JST Tushar Chauhan

     in reply to

     @fullfathomfive As far as startups go, duolingo sounds like a home run. A successful business built on crowd-sourcing, deception, and greed. What's not to like.

   • Embed this notice
     Amandine (eco_amandine@mastodon.cr)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 13:11:42 JST Amandine

     in reply to

     @fullfathomfive I've contributed a lot to Google maps. I would like to contribute to open street maps but I think it's less intuitive. I definitely have to read to figure out how.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     fullfathomfive (fullfathomfive@aus.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 13:23:27 JST fullfathomfive

     in reply to

     • Daniel Bohrer

     @daniel_bohrer

     Yeah that's what upsets me about it. I don't feel like I wasted my time on Duolingo, because I learned two languages while contributing and met a great group of people.

     But that incredible knowledge base we created, which was unprecedented in the history of language learning, is gone for future learners. It's completely contrary to Duo's original mission of making learning free and accessible.

     The web is getting more and more closed off and we are losing communal knowledge now, instead of gaining it.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Daniel Bohrer (daniel_bohrer@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 13:23:28 JST Daniel Bohrer

     in reply to

     @fullfathomfive thank you for this post. I am on the other side but somehow yet still on the same; as an avid languague learner for almost a decade, I could profit so much from the lesson notes, the forums, and the community in general, and it helped tons to learn a language! But today Duolingo is just an empty shell.

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     tallship (tallship@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 18:20:39 JST tallship

     in reply to

     @fullfathomfive

     I would suggest that what you really learned was to ALWAYS "License" your contributions to any crowd-sourced project under CC-BY-SA, the #FSF #GPL or #AGPL, or some other #Creative_Commons or strong #Copyleft license.

     Again: "License" your contributions - do not "ASSIGN" your copyright to any project. It's a common technique used by tricksters to steal your intellectual property for their own diabolical, ulterior motives like you just described

     #tallship #FOSS #crooks

     ⛵

     .

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jan-2024 01:08:12 JST feld

     in reply to
     @fullfathomfive Duolingo was never an open platform, so what did people expect?
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jan-2024 02:46:52 JST feld

     in reply to

     • オチュー🕊🇵🇸
     @otyugh @fullfathomfive Unfortunately people are going to have to learn the hard way that you can't build an open ecosystem around a corporation's product.
     
     There is a direct conflict of interest between the enthusiastic users and the company.
     
     Like, imagine if all the volunteers working on OpenStreetMaps were contributing to Garmin's database... :doh:
   • Embed this notice
     オチュー🕊🇵🇸 (otyugh@pouet.chapril.org)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jan-2024 02:46:53 JST オチュー🕊🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • feld

     @feld @fullfathomfive I kind of agree with that ; but it's still sad to be right about it, nonetheless.

     What can be abused will in time, but telling "told you so" doesn't help.

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     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jan-2024 02:58:05 JST feld

     in reply to

     • オチュー🕊🇵🇸
     @otyugh babying them when they're crying "we've been wronged! we've been wronged!" doesn't help either; you're just reinforcing their bad behavior and making them feel like they should be right about this issue.
     
     They're not right about this issue. They will never be right about this issue. They have been taken advantage of and they need to learn their lesson so it does not happen again. They need to learn from the trauma and not suppress it so they get burned again the next time some company promises to e ethical to attract them.
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     オチュー🕊🇵🇸 (otyugh@pouet.chapril.org)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jan-2024 02:58:06 JST オチュー🕊🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • feld

     @feld Sure ! But as a cartoon says "you may be right but you don't have to be an ass about it" ; drinking a glass of "I told you so" isn't very welcoming to potential new allies in the common thingy. 🐙

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     オチュー🕊🇵🇸 (otyugh@pouet.chapril.org)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jan-2024 03:18:43 JST オチュー🕊🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • feld

     @feld Well if you ever did get good result from that, good for you. Being understanding of where people come from works best for me. It's not about babying people, it's about not being a pretentious jerk, to me (and I'm not saying you are, but it may easily be read that way, and I think it's a bit slippery and unnecessary).

     They did, after all, connect the dot in the end. The "you should have done it earlier !" isn't quiiiite what I'd call helpful or welcoming.

     feld likes this.