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.
@fullfathomfive I wouldn't just say that about corporations - anything large enough to be organised as a company - LLC, LTD, PLG, no matter how small. The answer should always be "fuck you, pay me".
I have known many people who helped these groups, no matter what they were doing, the same pattern played out. Take whatever they could, destroy the people doing it, and repeat. Greed and the chase for numbers (attendees, users, engagement) always destroyed it. None can be trusted.
@philpem @fullfathomfive
Sadly in this system any success is eventually going to be monetised. What might have been fairer is to recognise and reward those individuals contributions in some meaningful way.
But: reading all these points I'm thinking back to when you made those contributions. I have done the same over the years in different places. At the time, you had the same intentions as Duo to be part of a community that improved access to language learning. You gained personally from that contribution, as did the community. That hasn't been taken away, has it?
In that sense unless there was an explicit agreement and you made those contributions in the expectation that nobody would ever monetise it, it's not "free labour that was exploited", is it? It still feels shitty, and we definitely need to call that out.
@davoloid @fullfathomfive The whole point of a social contract is so there doesn't need to be a written one for everything, but if that's the world we live in, so untrusting and willing to abuse and take advantage of others' hard work and enthusiasm -- then perhaps it's better for everyone if we do have to have long written contracts for everything.
The lawyers will certainly love the extra business.
@davoloid @fullfathomfive The problem with those organisations is the leaders turned around and wiped out all evidence they could of the people who built things, and pretended it was all their own work.
We were supposed to be working as an equal-equity team until someone decided there needed to be a "chairman" and "directors", who were all the Chairman's friends, and that the only people who should get any credit were them.
And then when we did complain, the response was to slander us publicly.