fullfathomfive (@fullfathomfive@aus.social)
aus.social
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
  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    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. 🤡

    • TonyOstrich@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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?

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • Facebones@reddthat.comEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        “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.”