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
This is a bit of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn’t been monetized you can always say ‘yet’
FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn’t get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product
This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.
If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you’re just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.
This is a bit of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn’t been monetized you can always say ‘yet’
FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn’t get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product
This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.
If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you’re just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.