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
You keep bringing up open source, why? All I did was say that being a non profit isn’t as good an indicator as you might think. How does open source factor in it?
Nonprofits FTW
Oh, there are plenty of counter examples, unfortunately.
Prominent ones?
Same for everything, including open source models
St Jude’s Children Hospital and Goodwill off the top of my head.
I can’t find anything wrong about St. Jude’s.
Everything is bound to have some bad examples. OpenAI and RedHat were also under open source models.
You keep bringing up open source, why? All I did was say that being a non profit isn’t as good an indicator as you might think. How does open source factor in it?
I’m saying that even if it’s not universal, it’s often one of the better indicators.
“Our non profit pays the ceo $1,900,000 a year. Yaaay”