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
Oh, I’m aware. Thank you for the link, though: It’s interesting seeing people talk about Mozilla Pocket 5 months ago, saying user data doesn’t leave Mozilla.
And now, thanks to a new subsidiary, it can:
Browsing history, search history, information regarding an individual’s interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement, and online viewing activities)… Information is Sold and/or Shared [to]… Advertising partners
Thanks for the correction, I did not know that. But just to be clear, it was not the vaccines themselves that were going to be given away for free, but the intellectual property rights for the vaccine development (without which they cannot be manufactured). Oxford wanted to give it away so countries could make their own, but Gates – who is a known IP tyrant – convinced them not to do so. Edited my comment, and thanks again.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000232
Oh, I’m aware. Thank you for the link, though: It’s interesting seeing people talk about Mozilla Pocket 5 months ago, saying user data doesn’t leave Mozilla.
And now, thanks to a new subsidiary, it can:
Source: Mozilla
Well fuck, I guess enshittification is universal. The only safe space is community foss/libre projects I guess
And only as safe as the audit it gets
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.
That originated from a satire site and has been debunked.See below.Not what I’m referencing.
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/
Oxford originally pledged to give their vaccine away for free but Gates convinced them otherwise.
Thanks for the correction, I did not know that. But just to be clear, it was not the vaccines themselves that were going to be given away for free, but the intellectual property rights for the vaccine development (without which they cannot be manufactured). Oxford wanted to give it away so countries could make their own, but Gates – who is a known IP tyrant – convinced them not to do so. Edited my comment, and thanks again.
Correct. I should have gone into more detail. Cheers!