"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."

I understand that. Unfortunately, though, one has to expect always the worst from Corps, no matter how "good" they appear to be at the beginning.

Poor computer literacy is really biting people in the ass. Quotes like this really stand out to me:

Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company.

Did you not know that they would be able to do this from the start? Or perhaps you knew and were just being extremely naïve? Either way, not being aware of what kinds of control other parties have when you share data with them is something that's all too common these days. I really wish people would consider the ramifications of what companies can do when you give information like this to them.

Like giving your phone number away for no reason. The moment you share it, you give companies all they need to start spamming the shit out of you (or giving it away to other companies that will happily do it instead). How is a concept like this so hard to understand?

While it is true that corporations are terrible and will do anything in the name of profit, what you guys are saying is “they got fucked and it’s their fault.” It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are. They are formed by people who choose to fuck other people over for their own benefit. Fuck off with your victim blaming.

Why do you believe non profits are immune to this? They're still incentivized to produce value. Maybe we just don't mock volunteers for doing a good thing and instead shame the people taking advantage of them?

Or Instagram, Facebook, reddit.... Lemmy. I guess Lemmy isn't a company so we have that going but if it's not your own instance you are technically doing work for someone else.

"If peoples basic needs were met nobody would work!"

People "work" all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of "work." People love saying "I don't want to work," but really what they mean is "I don't want my economic output stolen from me by my employer while what's left is stolen by ever increasing prices with no wage adjustment to compensate."

I would argue the traditional family structure is a micro-socialism state.

All my stuff is under Apache-2.

Oh, there are plenty of counter examples, unfortunately.

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?

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.

I thought that Slack was what that use case is for. It's an acronym that stands for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. I didn't realize folks were using discord for productivity use cases.

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.

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

You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren't a robot.

Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform...

🤭 LOL @ the name change.

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.

Unfortunately I don't know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I'm liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.

Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!

I used Duo pretty solid for two or three years - ended up subscribing to it.

The benefits were negligible - the biggest thing for me was offline play. I used to do a lot of air travel, so the ability to cover a subject or two was super helpful.

The streak freeze was the only other real "bonus" for those who game a shit about it. I started to get quite protective of it when it reached four figures, but I kicked it into touch when I wasn't learning much more than vocabulary. Duo is fantastic for getting a foothold on a language, but it only gets you through the first two or three exchanges of a conversation.

I enjoyed my time with the owl though.

I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.

Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.

I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it's very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don't like the direction the company has taken and I don't want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.

Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.

There's a loud ad for "Duolingo super" that has a high chance of showing up after every lesson. Also using Firefox with Ublock installed, and it's still here.

You're getting a lot of benefit out of running the desktop site with an ad blocker. App users aren't so lucky.

Thanks. I'll continue my small contributions then.

If anyone want to help I can recommend StreetComplete. It's a bit like pokemon go, but you'll help improve the map of the world instead. Only in android now I think.

Is KartaView better in this respect?

So long as you keep acting like one.

They still seem like unnecessary garbage though.

I've been having better luck with Babbel lately since it actually teaches ya stuff rather than throwing vocabulary at ya. I've learned more grammar in 2 weeks of Babbel than an entire 10 months learning Dutch on duo

I likes busuu a lot, felt a lot like old Duolingo, but with more relevant lessons. Duo can introduce potentially unhelpful vocabulary and grammar very early on, and now with the crown system every lesson just feels like pedantic repetition, busuu is fun, properly leveled, and has native speakers, with the Chinese course at least.

I'd be curious to hear which language you try and how it turns out for you since I've only done Chinese so far.

I can't stand the new layout with the crowns and hearts. Like you haven't learned something unless you've repeated it multiple times, it's disheartening to spend ten minutes in a lesson and get a nearly in discernible bump in a progress indicator.

And then the heart system is crazy, like you're only allowed to study if you don't make mistakes. That's negative reinforcement and makes the process of learning much less fun.

I can't really progress at the pace I want to anymore, it feels more like a mandated curriculum that only allows me to learn the way someone else thinks I should at the speed someone else thinks I should, which I don't think helps the learning process either.

Also, they've removed all of the fun shop outfits and items I can buy with those crystals, so you get the crystals for no reason, where you used to be able to dress up duo or, I can't even remember anymore, but there were tons of uses for those crystals. So now I have like 10,000 crystals and I can buy streak freezes exclusively with them?

I don't have fun learning with duo anymore, and there are plenty of apps that allow me to enjoy studying and learning at my own pace, regardless of how many mistakes I make in the process.