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
It’s a for-profit company. The monthly subscriptions are so that the company makes money. The subscription gives you some extra features and removes ads. Seems pretty reasonable.
As for the gems, that’s part of the gamification. You get gems just from doing lessons. You can spend gems on cosmetic things or on buying a “streak freeze” that lets you avoid losing your “learn every day” streak if you forget or otherwise can’t use the app one day. Maybe you can buy gems too, I don’t know, but they don’t seem that awful. They’re just nudges to try to keep using the app every day, and if your goal is to learn a language that’s a good thing, right?
IMO gamification is good. Learning a language can be boring, especially when it comes to grammar lessons. Making it more entertaining means you’re more likely to want to do it, so you’re more likely to achieve your goal of learning another language.
Having said that, there is definitely enshittification going on. It used to be that the most of the program was available to people without a subscription, and only a few things were “paywalled”. Now only the main path of the main course is not paywalled. It used to be that if you got bored with the lessons you were doing, you had alternative things you could do. Even the main lesson plan used to have optional paths. Now, unless you’re subscribed the only two options are “stories” or the next lesson in the chain.
It’s a for-profit company. The monthly subscriptions are so that the company makes money. The subscription gives you some extra features and removes ads. Seems pretty reasonable.
As for the gems, that’s part of the gamification. You get gems just from doing lessons. You can spend gems on cosmetic things or on buying a “streak freeze” that lets you avoid losing your “learn every day” streak if you forget or otherwise can’t use the app one day. Maybe you can buy gems too, I don’t know, but they don’t seem that awful. They’re just nudges to try to keep using the app every day, and if your goal is to learn a language that’s a good thing, right?
IMO gamification is good. Learning a language can be boring, especially when it comes to grammar lessons. Making it more entertaining means you’re more likely to want to do it, so you’re more likely to achieve your goal of learning another language.
Having said that, there is definitely enshittification going on. It used to be that the most of the program was available to people without a subscription, and only a few things were “paywalled”. Now only the main path of the main course is not paywalled. It used to be that if you got bored with the lessons you were doing, you had alternative things you could do. Even the main lesson plan used to have optional paths. Now, unless you’re subscribed the only two options are “stories” or the next lesson in the chain.