Mark2 -> RE: DuoLingo friends list for spanish-learning (Jul. 4 2017 16:06:24)
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Piwin, I feel the same way about Airbnb, lyft, uber, yelp, home adviser, etc. It seems the new way to get rich is to create a web site designed to get others to do the actual work while the site owners watch the money roll in. Is this the contribution to society of this generation of so called job creators? Nothing to brag about Imo, unless it's the fortune they are raking in. I look forward to the day when the actual providers of the services can contact and profit from the consumer directly. quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin I'll keep it short by just giving you the most obvious aspect of it: you know how you can translate sentences or articles on Duolingo to practice your skills? These all come from actual translation requests from other companies, who pay Duolingo for those translations. Work that otherwise would have gone to professional translators. It's taking their job away in the most literal sense there is. And you guys (who are still learning the language and have no training in translation at all) who are doing this as a learning game are for all intents and purposes working for free while M. Von Ahn and Tim Ferris cash in on your work (a particularly shameless form of exploitation since the latter is then running around selling books telling you how you can work only 4h a week if you do like he does, i.e. get everyone else to do the actual work for you, so you then get to buy his book with the money you don't have but should've got for your work for Duolingo). But this is the world we live in. When you just can't get slaves anymore (bugger), then you slap a nice interface on it and call it "crowdsourcing". Of course, you could then argue that this is just how we've decided the economy should work. If there's demand for it, then they're doing nothing wrong by meeting that demand. And if they've found a workforce that is happy to work for no pay and doesn't care about their intellectual property rights, then they're doing nothing wrong by not paying them. Maybe we find this acceptable as a society. I personally find it loathsome, especially since it comes at the expense of what I value most: quality.
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