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
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.
“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.”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.”
Never even mind volunteering. $50B/year in wage theft in this country. People contract to do labor and then their bosses simply short them. Back in 2019 a coal company attempted to close a mine without paying over $1M in back wages. The workers shut down the rail out of the money and seized the coal until they were made whole.
Wish more folks who got fleeced by DuoLingo had the gumption to do something similar.
Make sure to put anything you want public under the correct license. If a platform doesn’t support CC or GPL or MIT, then leave.
EDIT: Or Apache, or IDGAF, of course. ;) But what I would really want is a license that forces your content to remain free, even if used in something else. Basically copyleft: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html
This baffles me. We’ve seen time and time again that for-profit will fuck you over any chance they get over a dollar if they must, and people still volunteers for them.
New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.
But then how would spez ever be able to take Reddit public?!
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.
“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.”
Never even mind volunteering. $50B/year in wage theft in this country. People contract to do labor and then their bosses simply short them. Back in 2019 a coal company attempted to close a mine without paying over $1M in back wages. The workers shut down the rail out of the money and seized the coal until they were made whole.
Wish more folks who got fleeced by DuoLingo had the gumption to do something similar.
It’s harder to protest and make demands when most volunteers don’t even know where the fuck Duolingo’s HQ is, much mess live anywhere near it.
Love that username 😂
It’s the best spell in existence
Agitate on the forums. Let other people know about open-source alternatives. Organize other power users to submit bad data in protest.
Make sure to put anything you want public under the correct license. If a platform doesn’t support CC or GPL or MIT, then leave.
EDIT: Or Apache, or IDGAF, of course. ;) But what I would really want is a license that forces your content to remain free, even if used in something else. Basically copyleft: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html
All my stuff is under Apache-2.
I put all mine under AH64
Oi, you got a loicence for that choppa?
This baffles me. We’ve seen time and time again that for-profit will fuck you over any chance they get over a dollar if they must, and people still volunteers for them.
I guess that’s the difference between normal people and capitalists.