"There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo... Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company."

never give a corporation your labour for free.

People should have known this from the beginning.

New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.

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!

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. 🤡

This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.

Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.

Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren't directly profiting with ads.

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.

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.

Yea it's become highly enshittified and actively punishes users that don't subscribe. Fuckers.

I'm contributing to openstreetmap because I think there should be a free alternative to Google or Apple maps.

Am I running the risk of having my contributions stolen?

I just wish there were foss alternatives to Duolingo

I saw one interview with the CEO on Reddit and deleted the app. The guy is an absolute nonce.

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.

Any advice for an alternative for Japanese learning? I am on a two week streak and getting ready to give up because it's super repetitive.

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.

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.

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.

Just vote with your dollar, unethical companies always lose market competition ☝️🤓

is there a non-shitty alternative to use that anyone could recommend? would be really interested.

Just use anki.

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 should have that pikachu face meme handy.

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.

This is why agpl exists

I like Babel for Spanish.

Anyone know a good app for learning Nahuatl?

Just an aside, since this is Technology, but Duo and Duolingo are two very different things.

Duo is an authentication software company.

What did Duoling do?

I never thought the capitalists would steal my means of production!

Duolingo is not a destination, it's a journey. And their in-house AI is one step above Anki. I can't believe some people dump duo because it literally got too good.