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
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…
If we always assumed the worst no one would buy/accomplish anything. This is not a realistic way to live. The best we can expect to do is making the best decision with the information we have at hand at the time. Of course a healthy dose of scepticism isn’t a bad thing either as long as it doesn’t get in the way of living a relatively normal life.
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?
It’s not that they didn’t know that they could. It’s that they didn’t think they would.
Because—and I say this as a user of Duolingo who first started using it after the old comments were made read-only, but before they were removed entirely—it’s fucking insane that they did. Those comments were so useful to the user. I don’t know how many times I went to them to have some aspect of the lesson explained to me because the app itself doesn’t actually do any real “teaching”, it just tells you that you got it wrong and what the right answer is. The comments from users helped explain the nuance in word meaning, or the relevant grammar rule, helping add enormous value. By removing them they are literally making their product worse for no gain.
People thinking that they’d act rationally wouldn’t expect that.
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.
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.
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.
If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.
If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).
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.
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
I think you need to read a little more about economics, because this is exactly what they are. In fact, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If we always assumed the worst no one would buy/accomplish anything. This is not a realistic way to live. The best we can expect to do is making the best decision with the information we have at hand at the time. Of course a healthy dose of scepticism isn’t a bad thing either as long as it doesn’t get in the way of living a relatively normal life.
Poor computer literacy is really biting people in the ass. Quotes like this really stand out to me:
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?
It’s not that they didn’t know that they could. It’s that they didn’t think they would.
Because—and I say this as a user of Duolingo who first started using it after the old comments were made read-only, but before they were removed entirely—it’s fucking insane that they did. Those comments were so useful to the user. I don’t know how many times I went to them to have some aspect of the lesson explained to me because the app itself doesn’t actually do any real “teaching”, it just tells you that you got it wrong and what the right answer is. The comments from users helped explain the nuance in word meaning, or the relevant grammar rule, helping add enormous value. By removing them they are literally making their product worse for no gain.
People thinking that they’d act rationally wouldn’t expect that.
deleted by creator
but what if they give you cool digital gems
Yeah, that’s an offer a man can’t refuse.
woo, shiny. my preciousss
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.
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.
That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.
If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.
If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).
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.
Unless I’m mistaken, I read that as them agreeing with you. They were just pointing out the reality, they didn’t say they agreed with it.
I think you need to read a little more about economics, because this is exactly what they are. In fact, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits.
That’s for publicly traded companies. Duolingo wasn’t public when OP contributed to it.
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.
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.
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.