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.
-This is so cool and helpful!
-I’m learning so quickly!
-I can share my progress with friends! 🥰
-I’m so obsessed with my streak haha!
-I want to punt this stupid owl into the centre of the sun
Thinking about how #duolingo is just dropping courses for less "commercial" languages for example #esperanto despite their popularity and that these courses are largely built for free by volunteer enthusiasts.
Perhaps there is an opening here for an #opensource platform for building and consuming language courses that can be hosted cheaply and can exist as long as people want them. Doesn't necessarily need to be a straight Duolingo clone.
Was amazed by the #Duolingo “league” that I wound up in yesterday. The leader did 4,280 “XP” (experience points) in ONE DAY. 🤯
To understand why this is amazing, each language lesson in Duolingo is typically worth 10-20 XP. With bonuses and rewards some can get to 40, 50, or 80 XP.
To get to 4,280 requires a HUGE number of lessons and investment of MANY HOURS of time!
A mind-blowing amount of work.. clearly someone is extremely focused on learning a new language! 😲
So does anyone else kinda not like #Duolingo? Like, it’s a nice and easy way to begin #learning a #language and it seems a lot of my friends also use it, the problem is instead of getting real people to do the voices they use text-to speech, which means you often do not get the correct #pronunciation. Like, often you get both a normal speed and a slow speed recordings of the pronunciation to pick from, and the two versions will often use completely different #TTS voices that not only have diffent quality, but also very different #pronunciations despite being the same words or sentences. It seems like the wrong way to learn a language. Also, what is up with the #owl? @actuallyautistic
Whew, there are always challenges in learning a new language, but c'mon! Just learned that in #Japanese the word for 'painting' is the very short, and almost un-hearable micro-syllable 'e.' It totally disappears when used in a sentence.
I'll have to be sure to avoid art galleries when visiting Japan 'cuz I'll never know what people are talking about.
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?
Learning Italian with #Duolingo went to check on a word in #Googletranslate, and it's completely different, so either Duolingo's wrong or Googles AI is rubbish, I suspect the latter.
On our most recent visit to the family in Egypt I just became painfully aware that I’m the only person on the family who doesn’t speak Arabic (though our youngest child only speaks fairly little Arabic he understands a lot more, and the older one speaks it fluently), and that’s just really annoying.
Useful resources [Updated 2023-12-16]
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