Yeah, that’s an offer a man can’t refuse.

woo, shiny. my preciousss

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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?

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.

I mean, I do that for me. If I’m going to a road I want the name and address to be right. I use g maps a ton.

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?

Sure, the punishment for running out of hearts is they send you to rudimentary prison to repeat disheartening lessons.

I haven’t figured out the heart refresh - do they give you 5 new ones each day?

The ads are loud and awful and start before you can mute them. Can only skip the last few seconds. It’s engineered to be very obnoxious.

They could just have a value added premium but instead they choose to punish.

But good to hear you have managed to mitigate that. Gives me some hope to stick with it, thx.

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.

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.

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.

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Fun fact, if you want to bypass the hearts system you can go to Duolingo For Schools and create a classroom with only yourself in it. There is zero verification.

It affects the desktop and mobile app. I think it might also hide ads but I’m not 100% sure about that, it’s been awhile since I’ve used it.

Gems? I’m out.

Oh, there are plenty of counter examples, unfortunately.

“Our non profit pays the ceo $1,900,000 a year. Yaaay”

♥️

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’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 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.

Lier. Anki is limitless.

Next is they’ll hide half the sentence unless you pay 5 gems.

That sounds hilarious.

But then you remember that people had been trying to learn a single language through their entire lives in ancient Rome, Egypt etc. We are indeed lucky to have gems gamifying the process.

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Nothing against gamification, but when they added lives about two years after they said they never will I lost any and all trust I had in them.

They still seem like unnecessary garbage though.

Since you took the time to leave such a lengthy response I’m going to reply, although the discussion here is pretty much over.

It’s not the single parts but the culmination of all three points; data harvesting, subscription and paid gems (yes you can buy more). Everyone has to make their own decision but for me it justifies never wanting to have anything to do with a company.

You missed the word “capitalist”

If it’s a for profit organization then ask for a salary or don’t help them.

I wasn’t aware that Lemmy is a for-profit enterprise.

Plus, my getting use out of a product and simply by doing so helping the company make money (say by increasing engagement or such), is extremely different to somebody going out of their way to produce work for that company in a way that doesn’t directly benefit the producer at all.

Put another way - Am I helping keep my local supermarket in business simply by shopping there? Sure. Would I offer my free time to help clean their store?

Hell. No.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000232

It’s why they put the clown face emoji at the end. Discord sucks so hard for finding information. The number of interesting projects that exclusively use Discord for their documentation is astounding and frustrating as hell.

mIRC for the win.

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 like to use Anki with some shared card decks: ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=german

The learning pattern that Anki has configured by default suites me quite well and the app and the card deck is highly customizable.

Mind you, this is mostly only for learning vocabulary, not for learning grammer.

Man, that site looks slick as hell. Props to your buddy, if it teaches half as good as it looks he’s gonna have wild success! Someone I know was talking about learning Japanese in the last few days so I sent 'em the link. If they enjoy it, I might just buy them a belated Christmas gift of a lifetime account. Cheers for the tip 🙌

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.

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

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.

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.

I guess that’s the difference between normal people and capitalists.

“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.

Yeah dude, leaving a review for a gig worker is totally the same thing as volunteering for a for-profit corporations.

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?

Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The Open Database License (ODbL) is a copyleft license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others.ODbL is published by Open Data Commons, which is part of Open Knowledge Foundation.The ODbL was created with the goal of allowing users to share their data freely without worrying about problems relating to copyright or ownership. It allows users to freely use the data in the database, including in other databases; edit existing data in the database; and add new data to the database. The license establishes the rights of users of the database, as well as the correct procedure for attributing credit where credit is due for the data, and how to make changes or improvements in the data, thus simplifying the sharing and comparison of data.

^article^ ^|^ ^about^

OSM is the best kind of Open Source.

It CAN be used in commercial products, but any contributions to OSM from those commercial enterprises is still open, so you end up with commercial users contributing to the open system.

I’m in charge of GIS for a city that uses and contributes to OSM and QGIS.

So long as you keep acting like one.

Nonce codes are very important for OAuth2 flows

Yes you can tell by the way he used nonce