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
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
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?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.
Essentially, there’s a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn’t ask questions the ‘right way’ or even ask the ‘right questions’, you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can’t answer a question, then it’s the fault of the asker and not their own.
Why go through the effort if that’s how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it’s more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.
Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it’s also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything ‘just’ their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)
The worst part is that it is preserved, as long as the Discord channel still exists, but is functionally impossible to find. Because search engines can’t index it from the outside, and Discord’s search function is just a dumb literal string matcher.
And that won’t stop all the regulars in the channel from jumping down your throat anyway because you asked a question that was answered 17,782,169 chat messages ago. Didn’t you see it? It’s right there. Nestled in between said regulars posting pictures of their cats, or showing off the latest computer peripheral they just bought, or kibitzing about the weather in whatever towns they live in. Interleaved between six separate conversations that were also going on at that time. I mean, duh!
“Just search!” I did, and all the results I got were you guys likewise jumping down the throats of the last 200 people who asked the question before me.
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.
Tons. A special firmware I use for my 3D printer is supported through Discord. All questions and new firmware links are posted there. Even with Slack being “searchable”, unless I am mistaken, it’s not indexed by search engines, right? So when trying to figure something out I would need to search for webpages and then also search Slack right?
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.
I was specifically referring to the forum like sections. The lack of indexing and internet archive means large swaths of knowledge, timelines, history, and even culture will become dust in the wind.
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
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?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
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.
Forget reddit replacement, people try to use it as a wiki/documentation replacement.
Deranged behaviour.
Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.
Essentially, there’s a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn’t ask questions the ‘right way’ or even ask the ‘right questions’, you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can’t answer a question, then it’s the fault of the asker and not their own.
Why go through the effort if that’s how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it’s more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.
Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it’s also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything ‘just’ their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)
Since when as autism anything to do with this? I’m figuring out but can’t find an answer.
The worst part is that it is preserved, as long as the Discord channel still exists, but is functionally impossible to find. Because search engines can’t index it from the outside, and Discord’s search function is just a dumb literal string matcher.
And that won’t stop all the regulars in the channel from jumping down your throat anyway because you asked a question that was answered 17,782,169 chat messages ago. Didn’t you see it? It’s right there. Nestled in between said regulars posting pictures of their cats, or showing off the latest computer peripheral they just bought, or kibitzing about the weather in whatever towns they live in. Interleaved between six separate conversations that were also going on at that time. I mean, duh!
“Just search!” I did, and all the results I got were you guys likewise jumping down the throats of the last 200 people who asked the question before me.
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.
Tons. A special firmware I use for my 3D printer is supported through Discord. All questions and new firmware links are posted there. Even with Slack being “searchable”, unless I am mistaken, it’s not indexed by search engines, right? So when trying to figure something out I would need to search for webpages and then also search Slack right?
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.
I was specifically referring to the forum like sections. The lack of indexing and internet archive means large swaths of knowledge, timelines, history, and even culture will become dust in the wind.