Have a friend, who is on his 7th or 8th year of every day using DuoLingo (DL) "learning" German. His German is still terrible. Phrase structure goes all overboard, verbs are not adapted to time, person and whatever else. It is a bit painful to see. People also say that some languages just have terrible lessons on DL. Maybe German is one of those.
I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently classified myself too modestly in the beginning. I feel like the lessons did not teach me much at all and it became a game of quickly pressing things, while suffering through silly ads. It also never makes you actually write characters. Eventually I stopped using it. I think anything other than the most basic Chinese is better learned elsewhere.
An even basic Chinese is better learned from a Chinese-specific app like Lingodeer or HelloChinese.
I tried all three when I was first getting started. I didn't end up going with any of them (I bought a textbook instead - gamification just isn't my jam), but I was at least fairly impressed with Lingodeer and HelloChinese. Both were clearly made with love. And I've met several more advanced learners who got started with them. By contrast, for all its users, I've yet to meet a single person who went with Duolingo and subsequently made it to an intermediate level in Chinese. I'm sure there's someone out there somewhere, but overall it seems that people's success rate with that app is bleak.
The gamification is what made it work for me. I had 2 months to learn some Turkish before a trip and once I realized it was a game I beat everyone else in my cohort every day. When someone would come up on my heels I'd make sure to spend 30-60 extra minutes that day. I still know Turkish better than any other language and I've been immersed in Spanish for 3 years.
I actually really like this take. Despite the fact that most language learners hate on it, Duolingo has great product market fit, and I think it's for this reason. It's in the toilet time distraction/edutainment market as much as it is in the language market
Agreed, and the sad part is the gamification - while helpful for motivation - actively works against learning in other ways. Duolingo clearly doesn't want their lessons to be actually challenging because that would get in the way of the cycle of "just smash out a quick lesson to continue your streak, then get on with your day". Learners need to embrace failure and be encouraged to spend more time with the material, but the company has been steadily and purposely moving away from that over time.
OT - 3b1b did an interesting video on the epidemic modeling [0] that shaped my thinking a bit on the lockdown and caused me to lose a few friends to argue against the prolonged lockdowns.
I believe he used the same technique deployed by major media institutions and health organizations.
Basically the interesting conclusion was unless you apply a very rigorous lockdown (CCP style) the virus ultimately spreads. All you’re doing is spreading the time. As in “flattening the curve”.
As some might recall the initial lockdown was proposed as a way to flatten the curve and allow the medical system to cope better by having a more gradual influx of patients. Which makes me think everyone promoting the initial lockdown understood its limitations and its objectives.
However, for what ever reason “control demolition” of the economy to make Trump lose the election or who knows why it turned into a long term lockdown.
I know this is a controversial topic, but it shouldn’t be. This is a clear case that the science of pandemic modeling suggested one path and for political reasons we were pushed to follow a course that caused a lot of damage, some irreversible, to the society.
Yes, basically everywhere lockdown started as a “flattening the curve” and then at some point became “everyone needs to be kept out of harms way until everyone is vaccinated”.
That isn’t an American experience it was the same almost everywhere lock down was initiated.
So I am not sure it makes sense to blame it on Trump haters.
Curious how many here have actually read this bill?
If you’ve read it and you still support it (as a US citizen) I’m going to be so heartbroken by today’s tech community.
This is authoritarianism in the name of protecting our children.
I understand, TikTok is projected to overtake Alphabet’s and Meta’s video ad revenue [0] and it won’t surprise me if they even lobbied for it.
I just see it as a shortsighted move by these companies not to strongly come against this bill.
With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been reduced to a game.
The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their game pools.
There are lots of educational games or apps around language learning. Nobody is as successful as Duolingo. Or as useful as Duolingo, at least in whatever Duolingo chooses to do.
I don't even think they think being compared to a game is a bad thing. What makes Duolingo the best in its field is the content and the varied exercises with a high quality.
Yes, the gamification is the major positive feature that gets people to stick to it.
But the exercises aren't varied or high quality. Try drilling a particular skill and you'll soon memorize all their sentences, to a degree that it trivializes the practice. Not to mention they're absolutely riddled with errors that strongly imply they don't even run the translations by a native English speaker. Voice exercises with numbers are simply broken in Russian. And all the comments are locked, with many of the complaints ignored.
I never run into those issues. I use about 6 courses, and the English sentences have always been grammatically correct.
There's nothing wrong with memorizing example sentences. Your brain is not a digital memory bank, memorizing is impossible without forming some deeper understanding on the fly.
The cynical me thinks this is also a pre-election (“wish selection”) PR to help promote the case for Gavin Newsom as president.
You can imagine a talking point like “under my leadership, California overtook Germany as the 4th economy in the world…”
The reality is Newsom had almost zero impact on it, his leadership should be judge by the growing homelessness issue we’ve seen in SF and rest of California and not take credit for tech economy.
Yes, solving the homeless problem is a huge and complex challenge, but the country now needs leadership that is able to solve the big challenging problem.
We’ve lost our ability to fix hard problems and we need to do that if we want to have a chance in a more competitive world.
We do know we’ve had mini ice age as a result of "Grand Solar Minimum" [1] (in addition to volcanic activities) which means reducing the solar output does reduce surface heat.
At this point we need to really focus on taking action an approaching this from many facets. As cutting of greenhouse gases alone will not work. It requires the entire globe (at least the G20) countries to invest in such endeavors.
At this point we need to really focus on taking action an approaching this from many facets.
Right now, we're effectively lying about how much action we're taking in just one facet. Adding "many facets" just allows those who fail to make hard choices to hide their bullshit in more places. Only once there are strong controls on carbon emissions could doing other things make sense - not just because carbon emissions are the source of the problem but also if we allow geoenigeering to be done to the standard of "carbon credits" and other worthless hokum, it too will be hokum. We need something - a popular political movement, strong institutions, a coalition leaders, something - that force this stuff 'cause the failure is now and visible.
You should be given the choice to be grandfathered into the version of TOS upon first using that service.
I think with social media where value is derived by ongoing time investment of users, the TOS changes should only be applied after mutual agreement.
When I invest hours into helping to flourish a community, I need to be assured the company holds their side of the contract and not change the terms at any arbitrary time.
I disagree with the notion that you can stop using it, if you don’t agree with the new TOS.
social media is different than let’s say visiting Politico, where I’m just a consumer and not a contributor. Politico doesn’t owe me anything.
When you start contributing and building value under an initial sets of policy and agreements that initial agreement should remain in place until mutually agreed to change it.
I understand that causes some operational headaches, but it’s just cost of running a social media company.
By the same logic, are social media companies somehow obligated to never shutdown as long as they have users?
If not, can they shut down and then only come back for users using non-grandfathered terms?
If so, can they shut down for only users using grandfathered terms?
Aren't we now back to where we started?
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I disagree pretty fundamentally that you have any right to have a company continue to host content for you (which is equivalent to having a right to having a company repeat what you said to anyone who asks - which is clearly a free speech violation) short of them signing a contract with you guaranteeing that.
I agree that as a user it's very frustrating when something you use changes what it is, but I don't see how a social media platform is any different from a bar in that regards. They both derive a lot of their value from their users, it's frustrating for the users of both if they fundamentally change who they are, but it's their right do that anyways.
I just don't think it should be legal for a company to offer to store something for you and then randomly stop storing it for you. As far as I know, if you buy a storage location, even if you stop paying for it the people at the storage facility can't just immediately toss your stuff into the street: there is a legally mandated process by which they have to store things, contact you, and later work with the state to rid themselves of your stuff. The problem for me then becomes one of making sure that the relationship involved feels like the relationship that these people put in their giant pile of click-through legalese. (And if the result of this is that free social networks supported by the potential future promise of ad revenue become impossible to legally build as the insurance required becomes too high, all I can say is "good riddance": the world will be all for the better if these companies have to figure out customer-focused sustainable business models before launching.)
I have recently been getting emails from Photobucket saying that I need to pay for their service now or they will delete my photos. There is no option to download my photos without paying. If I want to access them at all then I must pay.
I don't know what to think about whether this is right or wrong but it sure feels scummy. It also makes my worry about what might happen when bigger internet companies are down on their luck.
> There is no option to download my photos without paying
If I was going to target something here to fix, it would be this. Holding your data hostage feels much more legally suspect than just deciding to no longer run photobucket and deleting your data outright (before, for instance, selling the hard-drives to recoup costs).
In fact, I think the GDPR may already have fixed this for people protected by it? If you have photos you care about you might try sending a GDPR data request and see what happens (even if you're not covered by it, there's no harm in trying).
I'm not sure a bar is the best analogy here though. Yes a bar also derives value from it's users in a way, but a customers value there only really exists for as long as they are in the building. The customer doesn't invest their time and effort in long term value that exists after they leave. There's a moderate community aspect (referrals, recommendations, etc) but not as strongly as social media (or any contribution based site). Feeling a bar owes you something here seems like a stretch unless they solicit donations/volunteers to do a renovation or something.
With social media sites a user is adding content that continues to provide value over time. The user is investing their time, expertise and energy (and often IP as well since some sites claim ownership of contributions), into the site. When they leave, that content often sticks around. It's reasonable for the user to feel that that site owes them something in return.
Legally and realistically I'm not sure how that can be implemented, but the desire there is reasonable and different than a bar.
Sure, a bar isn't a perfect analogy, I used it because it was the first thing that came to mind that got the point across about community building (which seemed to be the main thing the person I was responding to considered to be of value).
Maybe a stronger analogy would be a maker space, since the community building bit is at least as strong as with a bar (maybe stronger), and there's some sort of "content" that you create as well (though unlike on twitter, much of the content is physical property instead of information).
You might reach a conclusion that you should have GDPR like data-rights as a result of that analogy, but I don't think it materially affects any of the conclusions I'm arguing in the post about investment of time and energy not giving you the right to continued service.
it is simply balance of power between parties like all human affairs
if you want to improve it - work to increase accountability (so more liars and cheaters get caught) & accessibility (so young and fresh minds have opportunity) and these two things together benefit new competitors over abusive incumbents, and society as a whole
Or how about another different (maybe controversial take) -
Archetypal TOS
If you run a bank, unless you're doing something incredibly sketchy, your TOS will very closely resemble Bank B.
If you run a social media company, unless you're doing something incredibly sketchy, your TOS will very closely resemble social media company B.
ETC
How about we all agree that the archetypal TOS for any given archetype should be readable by someone with a 9th grade education or below and if you deviate from those terms, you must clearly explain why you are so different and special.
Idk, I just think we should start coming up with more clever solutions.
This doesn't even visit the idea of completely inverting the social media / banking / blah blah whatever industry onto its head by allowing any general user complete control over data / finances, but obviously that would have huge benefits if we can tackle the usability problem for average Joe.
Hmm. I would also very much like to have something like this. But on the other hand, we already have something like that, it's just called law and contracts(and more specifically TOS) already specify what is different than in the law (like e.g. which court to use etc.
So if there were archetypal contracts and they would be balanced or even slightly favor users, there would just be longer TOS to counter them and every company will have the same boilerplate again.
So in that case this archetype will have to come from the industry or politics will have to force them to do something like this. This will then also have (at least) the following side-effects:
1. Lawyers of companies teaming up and tightening their TOS even more
2. Unclarified effects on the participating companies if parts of the common TOS get invalidated/overturned by a court decision
3. Since companies (are maybe forced to) work together, there is the risk of a cartel, since <agreeing on contract conditions to be the same across an industry> is pretty much the definition of a cartel.
To take care of all of that, legislation needs to be first-class and I can't see that happening.
This is probably not super controversial, especially here. But, I need to point out TOS changes are currently only applied after mutual agreement. You agree by continuing to use the service (that may be a controversial statement here, but not really elsewhere). I would disagree with the implicit statement that Twitter owes any of its users anything, or at least that if Twitter does, so does Politico.
This is an interesting idea, but it feels like it would be just about impossible to enforce. It would would also mean violations of terms that were added to take care of bad actors later wouldn't apply to earlier offenders, which would leave the "reason for the rule" still able to engage with the platform in the same manner. It seems like a bit more than a headache, from what I can tell.
Sure, that would be nice, but the system is not set up in a way such that ethics and generosity are driving factors in the decision making process of corporate executives. Whatever _should_ be is just a fantasy.
> I disagree with the notion that you can stop using it, if you don’t agree with the new TOS.
What is there to disagree with? You have the choice to use your small bit of leverage and withhold your data and content contributions if you don't like the trade-offs of the deal being proffered.
> I understand that causes some operational headaches, but it’s just cost of running a social media company.
The operation cost is nothing compared to the legal liability. From the point of view of the social media company the risk and lack of flexibility downsides far, far outweigh any possible good-will upside to be gained from users.
> What is there to disagree with? You have the choice to use your small bit of leverage and withhold your data and content contributions if you don't like the trade-offs of the deal being proffered.
I think this would be fair if the company were forced to delete your data and never be able to use it again if you no longer agreed to the ToS.
The advantage of a company and its TOS is that new standards can be establish quickly and innovation can happen. The social networks of old and the Fediverse faded into the background because maintaining old standards becomes an obstacle to innovation.
Keep a copy of each version in a database. Store the version number in user account. Allow a link to see the version you agreed to, and a link to see the latest. Click OK to update to the latest and set that version number in your account.
I don't think implementing a version control on TOS is particularly problematic - I think the business side of it is a way bigger problem - every user has agreed to different rules. Sounds like a nightmare for moderation, litigation, and decision making.
IANAL but I think you are probably subject to both versions of the TOS. You granted them a license to the content you posted under the old TOS, and those terms are still valid. Future content grants them a license under the new terms.
I'm assuming the TOS you originally agreed to had a clause that is something like "we can unilaterally change this." So, you could I guess check the TOS when you are making an account, and only use sites that don't have a clause like this. Likely this will significantly reduce you selection of social media sites... this just seems to me to indicate that investing too much effort into improving social media communities is not a worthwhile endeavor (or, maybe you find it to be a fun hobby, so just do it for fun and don't expect any payback).
Realistically most sites want to exploit people like you.
This is why it is in your best interest to pull people from social media to your own stuff like a blog and email news letter. In the current world they can do what they want.
I understand the users perspective but this will definitely add a lot of cost because it will require maintaining different data processing pipelines.
Suddenly, Twitter will have backward compatibility issues at hand. I think, "if you don't like our new ToS we will delete your account, here is your data have a nice day" is a fair approach because at no point Twitter signed SLA with their users.
What if the ToS change is to curb abuse? Can users just opt-out and continue their abuse?
What if the abuse is costing Twitter significant money? I see language about decompiling. Do they have to continue providing service to companies who may be exploiting loopholes in the ToS?
Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.
Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).
If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.
I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.