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
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.
If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.
If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).
That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.
If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.
If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).