@fullfathomfive this! If only people became aware that's the same for Google Maps, video game mods, etc.

I only contribute to project when the project is legally designed to be a common. Maybe you could find such a project about learning langage? Like, I don't know https://librelingo.app or https://tatoeba.org 🤔

@fullfathomfive I was already mad at how much worse Duolingo's become lately, but this is downright enraging.

@fullfathomfive sorry to hear 😔

@fullfathomfive

Yes, 100%.

"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."

@fullfathomfive So while on this topic - as someone who was just about to start using Duolingo to learn German - does anyone have any recommendations for alternatives?

@fullfathomfive As far as startups go, duolingo sounds like a home run. A successful business built on crowd-sourcing, deception, and greed. What's not to like.

@fullfathomfive do you have an alternative you'd recommend? I've been on Duo for 3 years and have watched it "evolve"

@fullfathomfive

Money quote: "Eventually greed will consume any good intentions."

@fullfathomfive

https://www.languageguide.org

"Language Guide is a 501(c) non-profit organization."

@fullfathomfive
Never, ever, ever give a corporation your labor for free. A corporation is an entity of greed and nothing more. They call it “business decisions” because we’re all accustomed to living within systems that fuck us over. But corporations only take. Even their giving is because someone proved that the giving will eventually lead to more taking.

@fullfathomfive Dealing with a company? Need a contract.

@fullfathomfive

#SITOFOC

Slavery Is The Original Form Of Capitalism
And It Always Everywhere Reverts To Type

@fullfathomfive when I heard about them laying off people and moving to AI I immiediately deleted my account, deleted the app, and requested a refund to my subscription. I got the news literally the day after my subscription went through. Thankfully I was able to get the refund.

@fullfathomfive
I recently ended my pay level at Duo basically because it's recent changes seemed counter to learning the language. The second major change I've seen that had that characteristic. I kept thinking whenever I had a problem, why isn't there some popup to clarify/refresh? Now, w/o pay level, learning seemed intentionally blocked.

Hearts!!?

@fullfathomfive I think its more than capitalism or corporations. Its human nature. Same things happens in coops as well. Not that coops are inhenrently bad, because corporations aren't either.

But no donation or contribution is free. Always make sure to state your ownership, and dont give anything away without getting something of equal value back

There will always be those that are happy to give away, and those that are happy to take. But its in the balance of the two where you stay happy

@fullfathomfive thing is, I already had the idea that duolingo wasn't the best source for learning a language anyways, and really just a big help towards the right direction, nothing more.

was a big fan until now, now i just don't know anymore... i don't trust ai to ever be good at anything, and I don't trust a company who would lay off people for some shitty autocorrect to replace them...

@fullfathomfive

I'm so sorry to read this. It sucks to have your good work misused.

I used Duolingo for several years, and enjoyed so many aspects of it. I deleted the app several months ago because the ads I was seeing set off alarm bells. They were so accurately targeting me that I suspected my privacy was being violated through the microphone or in some other way that I couldn't identify.

@fullfathomfive This enshittification might explain Welsh Duolingo's near-legendary obsession with parsnips

@fullfathomfive Never give anything to "anthropomorphised equity." (I wish I could remember where I first found that epithet.)

Conversely: nothing feels as gratifying as helping another HUMAN BEING.

@fullfathomfive

I am really sorry they have taken advantage of you, and others, like this.

I resisted paying for Duolingo for various reasons, but this confirms all my suspicions.

The loss of the forums is tragic, unforgivable really, all those wonderful posts - gone!

I know it became a bit nasty at times in various ways, but that's a tech/management problem that needed to be solved, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I should probably work on my addiction to Duo?

@fullfathomfive@aus.social awful. I will be letting my subscription lapse when it is up for annual renewal

@fullfathomfive

It is not enough to NOT trust a corporation
Active warfare is needed

eg all those people who work on open source and put their hard work under a GPL ?

the GPL should be modified so that corporations can't use the software without some payment

being passive isn't enough; you win battles by attacking

@fullfathomfive And always remember: The moment a company goes public, they lose all incentive to act ethically, and are in fact contractually and legally OBLIGUED to become an enshittified money mill catering to their shareholders, and only to their shareholders. The day of the IPO, their former customers become the resource to be squeezed so shareholders can have the juice. And they don't want some juice, they want ALL the juice. Always.

Fuck the stockmarket.

@fullfathomfive@aus.social What other app should I use if I want to learn a language?

@fullfathomfive I wouldn't just say that about corporations - anything large enough to be organised as a company - LLC, LTD, PLG, no matter how small. The answer should always be "fuck you, pay me".

I have known many people who helped these groups, no matter what they were doing, the same pattern played out. Take whatever they could, destroy the people doing it, and repeat. Greed and the chase for numbers (attendees, users, engagement) always destroyed it. None can be trusted.

@fullfathomfive

Similiar how donating free time contributing to Google Maps is a bad idea when OpenStreetMap exists.

@fullfathomfive Such a shame.

@fullfathomfive Corporations can be owned by good people, and run by good people, and have the best of intentions, and genuinely believe and mean that they are doing the absolute best things possible, and keeping up with morals and standards and all good will.

But will the next owners, or board of directors, agree with that once it is against their fiscal incentives? Not only do you have to know that this company is good, but that everyone in charge will remain good.

Fuck corporations.

@fullfathomfive Looking forward to my future as a very human and very effective #ESL instructor.

@fullfathomfive
Unfortunately that's a hard lesson but as you said never build a community of volunteers based on a company's platform. It's always a matter of time that they will exploit it for financial gains.

Unless they're a non-profit like @signalapp

@fullfathomfive I watched a Ted talk with the founder of Duolingo. He seemed genuine but obviously sold out.

@fullfathomfive
Before contributing (specially for free) to any project, read the license!
That's why I sometimes contribute to #Wikipedia and I never contributed to #duolingo...

@fullfathomfive @Gargron And it's why, in another area, I'm not contributing anymore to Waze, and contributing only to @openstreetmap 👍

@fullfathomfive @smallcircles

The Duolingo story doesn't surprise me. I couldn't justify DONATING my 'content' to the glory (and obscene ROI) of walled gardens owned by billionaires demonstrably incapable of even imagining 'content' (cf metaverse or xitter) haplessly spending billions on AI vainly hoping their machines will be clever on their behalf.

And yet, to date, I have not convinced anyone to follow suit! Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Musk, these are their MCU heroes.

@fullfathomfive I'm sorry this happened to you. Duolingo has gone downhill and I've stopped using it.

@fullfathomfive

Right !

@fullfathomfive

1.) never trust a corporation.

2.) contracts with corporations are only worth so much the paper they are written on as long they are in the interest of said corporations. (Yes, they will break them, they do have their attorneys on retainer and huge legal departments, not using them would be wasting money, so if the contract makes no sense to BigCorp, they'll just break it. Fines, etc usually do not get them.)

@fullfathomfive ALL CORPORATIONS behave similarly. They #Whitewash, and #Greenwash, and #Healthwash so you believe they have your best interests and the good of all at heart. You have to remember #CorporationsAreNotHuman.

@fullfathomfive i loved the idea of DuoLingo's mission.

That's the other message: "non-profits" often change their minds and go public. or in some cases, keep a non-profit but move the core business to public. they will sometimes spin this as funding the non-profit, but the fact that they could use the money to fund the non-profit is cover for all the checks the execs are cashing.

there's no safe space, I think.

and, as with so many things, I really don't know what the answer is.

@fullfathomfive This is the biggest reason I quit Duolingo a year ago. There was a translation in the Chinese lessons that was so convoluted and ridiculous that I and every other user who got that far wrote to complain about. I got pinged almost every day from someone else getting to "My toothbrushing habit is three times a day." Over a year went by and not one person noticed the hundreds of comments saying "I was stuck on this for a week"? Users had to make their lessons legible for them.

@fullfathomfive Never give *anyone* your labour for free!

@fullfathomfive This reminds me of writing book reviews for a new online community and bookseller in the 90s called ‘Amazon’…

@fullfathomfive First of all, thank you to you & everyone else that volunteered your time & effort to helping the language learning communities around the world! Merci beaucoup pour votre aide!! I've benefitted to a certain extent by paying for a Duolingo Family account but I don't think I will renew my subscription! There are plenty of other ways to learn (free & paid for) & there have been some good recommendations posted here. I may curate & post a list of my own one day. Thanks again!

@fullfathomfive this happened to a lot of people, from a lot of companies. It’s a painful lesson to be careful when contributing to any platform: in private platforms, your contributions will most likely be used for shareholder value, not in the betterment of humanity

Wikipedia is a bastion for this, i hope it never falls

@fullfathomfive thanks for the insights. I did not know anything about the community driven part. Right from the beginning I thought it is just a ‚normal‘ company.

@fullfathomfive OMG.. this is a horrible experience for you and devastating for ppl like me that believed in what Duo was trying to do. I was on it daily for 6mths brushing up my dismal Spanish and so happy it worked. What a shame good intentions behind this project went so sour. Capitalism. The scourge of our times.

I left incidentally bc of the constant ads (and also the babyish use of animals: the horse likes wearing the new yellow shoes. )

@fullfathomfive
Especially when the quality is getting lower now they are using LLMs rather than human translators and teachers.
I've a number of error screenshots , any point in reporting them?

I paid for a course, what am I getting for that over the free users? If it's ad-free, I'm happy with that.

@fullfathomfive I've contributed a lot to Google maps. I would like to contribute to open street maps but I think it's less intuitive. I definitely have to read to figure out how.

@fullfathomfive
My rule is to only contribute to open source copyleft products, such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap.
This way, your contributions stay open source, and other products using this data must be open source too.
Else, some companies can — and will — use your work and sell it back to you with a proprietary license.

@fullfathomfive And it's use for free gets more cumbersome with relentless exhortations to buy premium features.

@fullfathomfive
I'm not proficient enough in any other language to have donated labor. Lucky me. But I contributed a lot to pre-Amazon IMDB (and even pre-enshittification Amazon era IMDB), so I know the feeling. Now IMDB is so clogged with ads that it's barely usable. If I want to look up movies, I use Wikipedia (and contribute), and IMDB only in desperation.

1/

@fullfathomfive #bluesky

@fullfathomfive i did not know that!

@fullfathomfive thank you for this post. I am on the other side but somehow yet still on the same; as an avid languague learner for almost a decade, I could profit so much from the lesson notes, the forums, and the community in general, and it helped tons to learn a language! But today Duolingo is just an empty shell.

@fullfathomfive The same exact thing happened with the original wunderground.com which was fed by a network of thousands of global weather station volunteer operators, they had a free and open weather api, then a corporation bought it, everything was shutdown for public access, and that was it for true free open weather apis.

It's always this way, if the organization is not free and open by its charter, this WILL happen. Thus @Mastodon @Codeberg Corporations MUST do this as for profit entities.

@fullfathomfive is there a good open source/crowd sourced alternative? I want to get back to language learning but would prefer a community option if possible.

@fullfathomfive @paul4kant Apparently, there seems to be an initiative to start again open-source. But I presume your hundreds of hours will be "lost".
https://ruhr.social/@wortezimmer/111722577594606676

@fullfathomfive

We all need a new kind of Boston tea party.

https://youtu.be/ahlm6gIsBzo

@fullfathomfive I feel like you could take out "DuoLingo" and substitute the name of almost any big tech company today, and the message would be the same. Hugs...

@fullfathomfive For those like me who are also upset and disillusioned, you can delete your Duolingo account by logging in in a web browser, then go to https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/ and scroll to the bottom. There's a great big red button labelled 'erase personal data'. You will then need to confirm the deletion via an e-mail that they'll send you.

@fullfathomfive did you miss this? https://blog.duolingo.com/ending-honoring-our-volunteer-contributor-program-2/

basically the corporation has become big enough that it doesn't rely on volunteers because it makes enough money to pay people to do the work, this is a good thing... why would you want a profitable business to rely on volunteers?

this has been pretty clear for years as they've phased out the "community" in every way possible so they can focus on making a great app

@fullfathomfive I just requested Duolingo to delete my account. I learned on Duolingo since December 2016.

#duolingo #ai

@fullfathomfive @so_treu Oof, yeah, you're reminding me of the way CDDB (which let your computer figure out what CD you were playing/ripping) was "enclosed" around the turn of the millennium.

@fullfathomfive 😢 😞 but anyway, I want to say thank you! ❤️ You have done a good thing.
I am learning french for free yet.

@fullfathomfive Yeah, just seeing this today. Immediately deleted Duolingo, I’ve been using it to learn new languages (and practice those I already am fluent in so I don’t get rusty) for years, but this is awful.

@fullfathomfive@aus.social big companies and government want ditch humans for AI. which was not good idea.

Also, workers will replace by AI in the future..

@fullfathomfive I'd heard bad things were happening, but not about AI. That sucks so bad. I'm very glad I cancelled my subscription in December.

@fullfathomfive oh that’s so sad. Not surprising.

@fullfathomfive this is why I'm committed to keeping https://zipcaptions.app free of any corporate or VC involvement. Some things other to belong to everyone, especially when they've been instrumental in building it, they ought to own it. #freeSoftware

@fullfathomfive
The invention that lead to modern capitalism is separation of ownership and operations. Even if you fully trust whomever operates a company, the ownership can change anytime and all prior trust may be gone.
@laubblaeser

#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism

@fullfathomfive Hence why I have a staunch policy against free work. If you do not pay in cash then do not expect any work from me. I make all my charitable donations with organizations that I choose to donate to but I will not work for anyone for free. I also do all my charitable works in person so as to ensure that the people I’m supporting are actually getting whatever I donate (no online events with organizations that have shady practices and or immoral/unethical policies).

@fullfathomfive {{{ hugs }}} Very sorry this is happening to us

@fullfathomfive
This is the lesson of capitalism.

@fullfathomfive Thank you for sharing that! I've been trying to build an open source language learning platform - much more narrowly focused than Duolingo, but with advantages that it doesn't have. If a few people spent hundreds of hours with it, it could really be a valuable resource!

https://grieve-smith.com/blog/languagelab/

@fullfathomfive , After one year on Duo and dodging adverts and rubbish I find that it's designed to string you along as long as possible, ie no info on grammar bar what you figure yourself is a major shortcoming to learn a language properly within a shorter amount of time.
I'm glad there are suggestions in the thread for open source language learning, I will definitely check these out.
Thank you for your major effort to help people learn new languages.
It is a huge foundation for peace & love.

@fullfathomfive Yes, best to only contribute to open source stuff. That way even if it collapses or goes bad someone can fork it and continue it elsewhere. And even better if it's an open standard that it can easily be exported/incorporated somewhere else.

@fullfathomfive check #LibreLingo out:

https://github.com/LibreLingo/LibreLingo

LibreLingo's mission is to create a modern language-learning platform that is owned by the community of its users. All software is licensed under AGPLv3, which guarantees the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software. Course authors are encouraged to release their courses with free licenses.

@fullfathomfive

so here is where I have an honest question : how did they ensnare you? What did you think you were doing? Because I remember watching all that BS go down and opting out, and warning people who were like, nah you are crazy paranoid. But I was the teeniest minority, and just like they didnt get me, I did not get why people donated their time and energy to training someone else's content farm, ad tech, AI in development.

So honestly --what sucked you and everyone else in?

@fullfathomfive only opensource projects cat get free time. After using duelinguo, I started an small app to help me learn deutsch (and the nightmare declinations), I will publish at some moment. It's really sad what happens with duolinguo.

@fullfathomfive Hey! Thanks to DuoLingo, I know the every day Finnsh words for "wizard", "shaman", "viking" and "I am a bear", but not "yes", "no" or "thank you".
I won't hear a word against them!

@fullfathomfive I provided similar free work on a different language site. Later, monetization placed my work behind a pay-wall. When I created the content, it was available for general access.

Another reason to support open-source solutions.

@fullfathomfive unfortunately that's so true. In fact it is a small minority of people with greedy, selfish intentions that's poisoning "the whole".
We have to keep reminding ourselves that there are many around us and everywhere who are acting and thinking in positive ways. And: I realize we must fight more: by telling such sad experiences, including names. By cooperating with people of good will. By buying from those we want to stay around. By sharing positive stories etc. etc. (500 char lim

@fullfathomfive

I would suggest that what you really learned was to ALWAYS "License" your contributions to any crowd-sourced project under CC-BY-SA, the #FSF #GPL or #AGPL, or some other #Creative_Commons or strong #Copyleft license.

Again: "License" your contributions - do not "ASSIGN" your copyright to any project. It's a common technique used by tricksters to steal your intellectual property for their own diabolical, ulterior motives like you just described

#tallship #FOSS #crooks

⛵

.

@fullfathomfive

Best minimise ALL contact with the corporate world. Use public services, local small businesses, open source, commonly-owned and co-operatively produced software, etc, non-profit-owned media, buy secondhand, repair and re-use, grow your own, etc, etc...

@fullfathomfive yeah, the first example i got bitten by this was CDDB. Happily used to contribute CD track listings until oh look, we're commercial now and all your data belong to us. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controversy)

@fullfathomfive That's really disappointing and sad, but thank you for sharing.

@fullfathomfive We have been burned over and over, which is why we're playing with self-hosted solutions of things. We contribute out of good will, and then someone else makes billions from that work. Facebook, Twitter, Waze. It encourages people like me to play with PhotoPrism, Nextcloud and other tools, to move away from the trillion dollar companies like Apple. Duolingo is one project, of many.

@fullfathomfive ☹️☹️☹️☹️ Duolingo genuinely is an amazing resource. I’m really sad it’s not true to its origins any more.