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
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.
Essentially, there’s a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn’t ask questions the ‘right way’ or even ask the ‘right questions’, you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can’t answer a question, then it’s the fault of the asker and not their own.
Why go through the effort if that’s how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it’s more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.
Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it’s also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything ‘just’ their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)
Well modded discord servers for popular topics will have forum channels that behave exactly as you would expect them to. Sure they’re not indexed on search engines, that much is true, but discord isn’t the “blink and you’ll miss it” live chat client that it once was.
It’s why they put the clown face emoji at the end. Discord sucks so hard for finding information. The number of interesting projects that exclusively use Discord for their documentation is astounding and frustrating as hell.
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. 🤡
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
Discord is the same thing as technical slack threads, or IRC chat. People try and use it as a reddit replacement when it really truly is not.
Forget reddit replacement, people try to use it as a wiki/documentation replacement.
Deranged behaviour.
Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.
Essentially, there’s a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn’t ask questions the ‘right way’ or even ask the ‘right questions’, you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can’t answer a question, then it’s the fault of the asker and not their own.
Why go through the effort if that’s how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it’s more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.
Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it’s also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything ‘just’ their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)
Well modded discord servers for popular topics will have forum channels that behave exactly as you would expect them to. Sure they’re not indexed on search engines, that much is true, but discord isn’t the “blink and you’ll miss it” live chat client that it once was.
Why discord? Everything on it will be lost without exception. Fuck discord.
It’s why they put the clown face emoji at the end. Discord sucks so hard for finding information. The number of interesting projects that exclusively use Discord for their documentation is astounding and frustrating as hell.
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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
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.
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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
I’m all in on Matrix. After hearing the words, “Nobody uses IRC anymore, everyone uses Discord now”, I knew we were in trouble.