@workingclasshistory "emotional women lose sense of fear" is goals honestly

A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.

But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it.

On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process.

Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.

This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).

Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ...

... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.

How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).

And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs?

Do you really get a choice about it?

#enshittification #duolingo #capitalism #AI #LLM #google

@ikt I feel like we're talking past each other, and I'm all out of energy to explain things like what an analogy is, so this is the end of the convo for me. Enjoy Duolingo, I wish you the best.

@ikt

If your primary concern is that a product is "free", and you don't care about the quality of the product, or about a corpus of valuable knowledge disappearing from the web, or about the exploitation of both volunteers and contract workers in the creation of that product, then yeah, I guess it is "amazing".

The way Duolingo was developed initially, it's like Wikipedia suddenly locking all of its information down, shutting out its editors, and replacing its website with an AI app that you can ask questions of while you get served ads.

You have no way of knowing the accuracy of the answers, you can't edit it, you can't search, you can't look at the sources. You just have to trust it. But hey, it's free. Quit complaining.

therapist: Patrick Stewart with hair isn't real, he can't hurt you

Patrick Stewart with hair:

#patrickstewart #startrek #tng #therapy

@ikt

And you and I will have to disagree about the quality of the app. It's very sticky (Duolingo's main metric is now engagement), but IMO it doesn't do much for actually learning a language.

@ikt

Because Duolingo sold itself as a crowd-sourced, semi-open social platform in the beginning, one where we could use Duo's tools to create a course for almost any language (including reviving dying and niche languages). It attracted some of the top language experts in the world who created courses for free.

For some of the smaller languages, those volunteers even donated their voices to the program - for example in the Esperanto course you will hear many sentences read by volunteers.

Then Duolingo changed tack, fired their volunteer workforce and locked them out of their course. The contractors they hired to replace them were often not language experts. Some of them didn't even speak the languages they were working on. All the language experts are gone, because they're expensive.

Many of the smaller languages got no paid workforce at all to replace their volunteer team, because those languages don't make money. Some of the smaller languages haven't had a course update in years and have glaring errors with no one to correct them, because it's not profitable to pay someone to maintain them. A couple that were in the incubator got ditched unceremoniously after 5+ years of work from their teams.

I never "wanted" Duolingo to rely on volunteers, that's how Duolingo built it, with misleading claims about crowd-sourcing and making language learning free and accessible to all ... then they took that free labour and turned it into profit.

More importantly, they hid that knowledge. Now they're using it to create an inferior product by feeding it to an AI, instead of giving it to people to use as it was originally intended.

@tayfonay Not at the moment. All of them seem to be falling prey to the siren song of AI.

@tchauhan And they started it all with a National Science Foundation grant and publicly-funded research. What a con.

https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/nsf-gave-duolingo-its-wings

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

@carnage4life It's pretty clear now why they nuked the forums and then the sentence discussions. They didn't want anyone else getting their hands on all that delicious community-generated data to feed their hungry AI.

@kellogh @carnage4life

They got rid of their translators for those courses a long time ago. They had volunteers create all of the courses for niche languages (eg Esperanto, Irish), then got rid of their entire volunteer workforce. The smaller courses as they are now haven't been maintained or updated in almost five years.

@WIRED Wow what a terrible article.

This another accusatory piece designed to make people feel bad and wrong about their individual decisions when we know that corporations, industry and government are having a far bigger impact on the climate than anything we can do. How we vote is the most significant ecological decision we can make as individuals, but it doesn't even rate a mention here.

And literally your ONLY metric for measuring environmental impact is greenhouse gas emissions. You seem to think that considering things like pollution, radioactive waste and biodiversity in your decision-making counts as "vibes".

me to shepherd caulfield:

#DUFUS #edgyboy #catcherintherye #bookstodon #books #disney

me to shepherd caulfield:

#DUFUS #edgyboy #catcherintherye #bookstodon #books #disney

i'm so disappointed this was never made, it would've been the funniest shit ever.

DUFUS

#DUFUS #catcherintherye #bookstodon #disney #books

I love this piece from Marianne van Dijk's newsletter about Request Blind Spots. It's not just hard to ask for help, sometimes we don't even realise we can.

#psychology #disability #nonviolentcommunication #nvc #askingforhelp #selfcare #selfadvocacy #chronicillness