never give a corporation your labour for free.
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.
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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.
but what if they give you cool digital gems
Yeah, that’s an offer a man can’t refuse.
woo, shiny. my preciousss
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.
Lemmy is more akin to helping out a community open-source project than helping out a company
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.
I mean, I do that for me. If I’m going to a road I want the name and address to be right. I use g maps a ton.
I wrote the comment more as throwing some complementary thoughts. I understand how hard it is not to use google when they provide essential services. Regarding maps, I’ve been trying to use openstreetmaps as much as I can, and adding places using streetcomplete, but every now and then, I find myself using google too.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Never ever ever ever ever give your work for free to a startup unless it’s running under an open source model that guarantees even if they do go public, all that work remains openly available to everyone!
Nonprofits FTW
“Our non profit pays the ceo $1,900,000 a year. Yaaay”
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.
I would not do any unpaid work for anything that was not straight up copyleft.
Yea it’s become highly enshittified and actively punishes users that don’t subscribe. Fuckers.
Can’t speak for the entshitification but actively punished unsubscribed users?
I’ve been using it for two months, learning Germans, I just use Firefox in android instead of the app and I get no ads, only 5 failures but I rarely reach that on a daily basis (I don’t want to burnout and I’m pretty sure it’s better for learning to not go too fast) and if I ever reach it, I currently have 1k gems. I’m actually surprised at how little use I’d get out of the subscription.
I used Duo pretty solid for two or three years - ended up subscribing to it.
The benefits were negligible - the biggest thing for me was offline play. I used to do a lot of air travel, so the ability to cover a subject or two was super helpful.
The streak freeze was the only other real “bonus” for those who game a shit about it. I started to get quite protective of it when it reached four figures, but I kicked it into touch when I wasn’t learning much more than vocabulary. Duo is fantastic for getting a foothold on a language, but it only gets you through the first two or three exchanges of a conversation.
I enjoyed my time with the owl though.
I’ve got a subscription, I share it with my wife and a couple friends.
I like that it keeps me practicing daily, but I’m not really getting better very quickly, it’s just nice to keep French vocabulary in my active memory and it helps using my brain in the morning to wake up.
Yeah, I did a good three-quarters of the French course too. I distinctly remember the lessons about plays and stage work being an absolute bastard, not that I’d ever use it in my line of work.
I’ve started watching a bit more French media with the French equivalent of “received pronunciation” - such as watching the FR edition of Euronews or France24, plus watching kids shows like Hey Duggee or Paw Patrol is unusually handy, though it does give you some funny looks if you don’t already have kids!
Unfortunately, there’s no substitute for immersion - even on a short break to Paris, my confidence in using the language shot up from being able to just about converse in the language - but more importantly, getting utterly stuck and failing at something where you have to think a bit faster and get your point across anyway.
I should get back into it really.
You get streak freezes for free now (through quests), relatively often even, I generally get them back in two days if I use both of them in a weekend because I’m busy.
I really considered subscribing until I started using it on Firefox because of the ads, without the ads it’s a great free experience imo
I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.
Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.
I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it’s very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don’t like the direction the company has taken and I don’t want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.
Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.
No, they don’t punish typos, to the point I sometimes have mistakes counted as typos (I distinctly remember typing Schwimmt instead of schwimmst the other day and it said Be careful typos, but counted it right, end up having to check with my gf in those cases)
I don’t know why the experience seems so different between people, maybe it actually is, maybe it’s expectations. All in all it’s free, I don’t forget that and through Firefox android I get a very good experience.
There’s pretty odd because it definitely punishes me for typos in french
It was quite lenient with my error-prone French.
That said, Duo is well known for A/B testing so no doubt we were just using different feature sets.
In my experience the typo-tolerance is not very flexible. I write using Dvarok instead of QWERTY, so the typos I make don’t always follow regular patterns. On my phone I use a swipe keyboard, so sometimes a typo comes out as a different word entirely. No matter what I don’t want to be punished for my mistakes, even if they are real mistakes. I just want to keep on learning without the tool I’m using intentionally trying to make that harder for me.
Sure, the punishment for running out of hearts is they send you to rudimentary prison to repeat disheartening lessons.
I haven’t figured out the heart refresh - do they give you 5 new ones each day?
The ads are loud and awful and start before you can mute them. Can only skip the last few seconds. It’s engineered to be very obnoxious.
They could just have a value added premium but instead they choose to punish.
But good to hear you have managed to mitigate that. Gives me some hope to stick with it, thx.
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DNS based ad blocking my friend. System wide
There’s a loud ad for “Duolingo super” that has a high chance of showing up after every lesson. Also using Firefox with Ublock installed, and it’s still here.
Privacy Badger and ublock origin here, never ever got an ad on Firefox
I’ll try out Privacy Badger. I never got an ad on Firefox except for this one.
Fun fact, if you want to bypass the hearts system you can go to Duolingo For Schools and create a classroom with only yourself in it. There is zero verification.
It affects the desktop and mobile app. I think it might also hide ads but I’m not 100% sure about that, it’s been awhile since I’ve used it.
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. 🤡
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?
I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
The worst part is that it is preserved, as long as the Discord channel still exists, but is functionally impossible to find. Because search engines can’t index it from the outside, and Discord’s search function is just a dumb literal string matcher.
And that won’t stop all the regulars in the channel from jumping down your throat anyway because you asked a question that was answered 17,782,169 chat messages ago. Didn’t you see it? It’s right there. Nestled in between said regulars posting pictures of their cats, or showing off the latest computer peripheral they just bought, or kibitzing about the weather in whatever towns they live in. Interleaved between six separate conversations that were also going on at that time. I mean, duh!
“Just search!” I did, and all the results I got were you guys likewise jumping down the throats of the last 200 people who asked the question before me.
I thought that Slack was what that use case is for. It’s an acronym that stands for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. I didn’t realize folks were using discord for productivity use cases.
Tons. A special firmware I use for my 3D printer is supported through Discord. All questions and new firmware links are posted there. Even with Slack being “searchable”, unless I am mistaken, it’s not indexed by search engines, right? So when trying to figure something out I would need to search for webpages and then also search Slack right?
I’m all in on Matrix. After hearing the words, “Nobody uses IRC anymore, everyone uses Discord now”, I knew we were in trouble.
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Mozilla is a non profit foundation, the corporation is owned by the non profit and exists for tax reasons only. They’re different than a regular corp.
The NFL was a non-profit until 2015.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit that stopped the free distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Non-profit status doesn’t automatically equal good but Mozilla has been good so far…for the most part. It has had its own controversies.
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Not what I’m referencing.
Oxford originally pledged to give their vaccine away for free but Gates convinced them otherwise.
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Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It’s also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it’s a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.
Fantastic recommendation, thank you
Any suggestions for other languages? German? Italian?
I like to use Anki with some shared card decks: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=german
The learning pattern that Anki has configured by default suites me quite well and the app and the card deck is highly customizable.
Mind you, this is mostly only for learning vocabulary, not for learning grammer.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I’m liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.
Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!
I like that’s it’s more real life, the talking, people, subjects etc. Think I’ll use it for a while, because on duolingo I wasn’t evolving much anymore in German, this goes further up it seems
Just as pushy as duolingo unfortunately in ads and mainly in pushing to and rewarding premium.
Yeah, the adds take up some time, but I still find the overall experience less annoying than I did with Duolingo last time I used it. The push towards human interaction, which Duolingo has actively pushed away from, is also welcome.
I still had the app installed on my iPhone because I wanted to learn a new language a few years back. Just recently checked their App Store page and saw extensive data collection, monthly subscriptions and some kind of “gem” currency. Immediately deleted.
They tried to gamify the process, you use gems to buy an off day for a streak
Nothing against gamification, but when they added lives about two years after they said they never will I lost any and all trust I had in them.
lol learning a new language needs gems. Jesus fucking christ
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I just don’t know how I could ever accomplish anything in my life without the totally benign and helpful motivation provided by Gems™. They’re gamerrific! ^Buy some today.^
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Next is they’ll hide half the sentence unless you pay 5 gems.
It’s a for-profit company. The monthly subscriptions are so that the company makes money. The subscription gives you some extra features and removes ads. Seems pretty reasonable.
As for the gems, that’s part of the gamification. You get gems just from doing lessons. You can spend gems on cosmetic things or on buying a “streak freeze” that lets you avoid losing your “learn every day” streak if you forget or otherwise can’t use the app one day. Maybe you can buy gems too, I don’t know, but they don’t seem that awful. They’re just nudges to try to keep using the app every day, and if your goal is to learn a language that’s a good thing, right?
IMO gamification is good. Learning a language can be boring, especially when it comes to grammar lessons. Making it more entertaining means you’re more likely to want to do it, so you’re more likely to achieve your goal of learning another language.
Having said that, there is definitely enshittification going on. It used to be that the most of the program was available to people without a subscription, and only a few things were “paywalled”. Now only the main path of the main course is not paywalled. It used to be that if you got bored with the lessons you were doing, you had alternative things you could do. Even the main lesson plan used to have optional paths. Now, unless you’re subscribed the only two options are “stories” or the next lesson in the chain.
Since you took the time to leave such a lengthy response I’m going to reply, although the discussion here is pretty much over.
It’s not the single parts but the culmination of all three points; data harvesting, subscription and paid gems (yes you can buy more). Everyone has to make their own decision but for me it justifies never wanting to have anything to do with a company.
The gems aren’t as predatory as they seem.
They still seem like unnecessary garbage though.
Oh look, theft that’s legally protected because something starts making profit! It’s like the existence of the stock market is the central problem with capitalism, since it’s just an excuse to be a shitty person and is only ever used in that capacity. “fuck you, i get more money this way” is a dumb fucking principle to operate a society on. Antisocial, in fact. Google’s IPO can be directly traced to every single problem the internet (and so, society) has right now.
Capitalism is the problem with capitalism. And It’s not an excuse to be shitty, but the cause itself.
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I saw one interview with the CEO on Reddit and deleted the app. The guy is an absolute nonce.
So we’re still using nonce then?
Yes you can tell by the way he used nonce
Nonce codes are very important for OAuth2 flows
And the product now is traaaash.
I used to use duolingo to learn every language whenever I visited a country, and I can’t use it at all anymore.
As someone who is a current user and unaware of superior options but is curious, what would you recommend?
I’ve been having better luck with Babbel lately since it actually teaches ya stuff rather than throwing vocabulary at ya. I’ve learned more grammar in 2 weeks of Babbel than an entire 10 months learning Dutch on duo
I likes busuu a lot, felt a lot like old Duolingo, but with more relevant lessons. Duo can introduce potentially unhelpful vocabulary and grammar very early on, and now with the crown system every lesson just feels like pedantic repetition, busuu is fun, properly leveled, and has native speakers, with the Chinese course at least.
I’d be curious to hear which language you try and how it turns out for you since I’ve only done Chinese so far.
Never heard of busuu before, but tried it now and am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!
It’s also worth giving a shout-out to LibreLingo, which aims to be an open source version of Duolingo. For now it’s only Spanish though, and as I’m not interested in learning Spanish at the moment I haven’t gotten any real use out of it.
Oh awesome, I appreciate the rec, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
is there a non-shitty alternative to use that anyone could recommend? would be really interested.
I started looking for alternatives when they added the weird character voices and I started noticing inaccurate pronunciation of kanji in my Japanese course. A lot of people on the message boards recommended Memrise, and it’s been great! The official courses contain actual video and audio of native speakers, so I knew for a fact the pronunciation would be correct—even better than the old Duo voices!
There’s also user-generated content, too, some of which might not be accurate, but most of the user courses I’ve found are pretty good. You can even make your own set and publish it.
(I haven’t visited the site in a few months, so I can’t guarantee it’ll be exactly as I found it, but I doubt it has changed much)
And depending on what languages you’re studying, you might be able to find some good ones dedicated to your language if you do some digging. For Spanish, I used SpanishDict, and for Japanese, I used Kanshudo (both are freemium, with more restrictions than Memrise)
My library offers Mango Languages.
Just use anki.
Why would you give away your production value to a capitalist for free?
It’s literally the only power you hold in the labour market, and it’s your own fault if you give it away for nothing.
Yes, how dare you contribute to a community effort.
Wait, isn’t the post you just made doing just that?
You missed the word “capitalist”
If it’s a for profit organization then ask for a salary or don’t help them.
not everyone started as an epic lemmy leftist
DuoLingo imo is kinda crappy anyway. Boring, repetitive, and terrible at teaching listening comprehension.
I can give it credit for getting people interested in language learning in an approachable way, but that’s about it.
I mean this is by the guy who brought us CAPTCHA, are we all that surprised? Same playbook, just a different play. Skim some labor off the top.
And here I am just pissed that Duolingo keeps overhauling their whole program. Like, in less than 2 years time, they’ve had 3 different versions of the website and of course it wipes out all of your progress and approximates where you may be in their new system. Except the latest. The latest update just wipes all your shit out and says “good luck fuckface!” I’ve become less and less a fan of Duo over the last 4 years and yeah, not gonna do the AI thing with it anymore. Sari can go on vacation with my one-eyed dog named Max and eat cheese sandwiches for all I care.
I’m still mad I bought the super duo costume which they then completely removed from the app
Yeah, very annoying to be told a word is “new” when I know it well, and vice-versa be expected to have done whole lessons on other words that I’ve never seen before. That said, not many options for Hungarian, I’ve only seen Drops as an alternative daily app.
