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
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.
Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn’t OCR
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you’re human, and one word scanned from Google’s book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha
Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn’t want them having access to it
Yeah but this is in the area of unpaid labor. You “had to” solve a captcha in order they let you use another service. You are not visiting a page with the sole purpose of voluntarily solving captchas
This is a bit of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn’t been monetized you can always say ‘yet’
FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn’t get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product
This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.
If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you’re just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.
Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.
Definitely in two minds on Hashicorp’s license change. I understand why they did it, even if I don’t agree. Other for-profit companies were screwing them and the community over by taking, competing, and seldom contributing.
I have heard this point of view and truly don’t understand it. There were companies making money with an open source tool. That’s what some companies do, and the license allowed for that. They weren’t taking; they were using a tool, and providing a service upon it. If anybody is taking, it is Hashicorp from their own community that contributed thousands of hours to their business for free.
And those companies you refer to tried often to push upstream but Hashicorp just refused contribution time after time.
That said I understand it too. Insofar as capital investment demanded the cornering of a market and miscalculated the likelihood of a well backed fork. As a result I think, they probably sealed their fate even if it takes many years. How many people remember Hudson?
Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn’t be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don’t risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.
It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.
Meh Rehat gets a pass in my mind at least. They give back to the community enough. We are never going to get perfect people or groups. Microsoft is a totally different story.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.
In the case of Duolingo, it’s pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.
Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there’s still a copy left to access.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work
The trajectory for many Foss projects is to get the hardest part off the ground with mindshare and initial development. Then after all the hard work it becomes successful, the project is closed and all new features are added into the closed fork.
Technically you still have the original work but within a few years the project is dead except for your personal work because the main fork has a large corporation behind it continuing the development.
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.
Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren’t a robot.
Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn’t OCR
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you’re human, and one word scanned from Google’s book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha
Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn’t want them having access to it
Long live 4chan
Yeah but this is in the area of unpaid labor. You “had to” solve a captcha in order they let you use another service. You are not visiting a page with the sole purpose of voluntarily solving captchas
This is a bit of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn’t been monetized you can always say ‘yet’
FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn’t get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product
This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.
If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you’re just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.
Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.
🤭 LOL @ the name change.
Reminds me of OpenMW for Morrowind being listed as “OpenMicrowave” on the Google app store
And still being removed from the store
They didn’t want people think OpenTF meant they were DownTF.
They totally are DTF, they just didn’t want you asking about it.
deleted by creator
Definitely in two minds on Hashicorp’s license change. I understand why they did it, even if I don’t agree. Other for-profit companies were screwing them and the community over by taking, competing, and seldom contributing.
I have heard this point of view and truly don’t understand it. There were companies making money with an open source tool. That’s what some companies do, and the license allowed for that. They weren’t taking; they were using a tool, and providing a service upon it. If anybody is taking, it is Hashicorp from their own community that contributed thousands of hours to their business for free.
And those companies you refer to tried often to push upstream but Hashicorp just refused contribution time after time.
That said I understand it too. Insofar as capital investment demanded the cornering of a market and miscalculated the likelihood of a well backed fork. As a result I think, they probably sealed their fate even if it takes many years. How many people remember Hudson?
Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn’t be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don’t risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.
It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.
Meh Rehat gets a pass in my mind at least. They give back to the community enough. We are never going to get perfect people or groups. Microsoft is a totally different story.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.
In the case of Duolingo, it’s pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.
Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there’s still a copy left to access.
The trajectory for many Foss projects is to get the hardest part off the ground with mindshare and initial development. Then after all the hard work it becomes successful, the project is closed and all new features are added into the closed fork.
Technically you still have the original work but within a few years the project is dead except for your personal work because the main fork has a large corporation behind it continuing the development.
Oh wow cddb. Completely forgot that was even a thing until just now.