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.
Infosec friends are unanimous: if you're using Chrome, you want to visit chrome://settings/adPrivacy and turn off Ad Topics, Site-Suggested Ads, and Ad Measurement.
IMPORTANT: you must do this for each of your Chrome profiles, since it's not a global setting.
The TL;DR is: Glassdoor now requires your real name and
will add it to older accounts without your consent if they learn it,
and your only option is to delete your account. They do not care that this puts people at risk with their employers. They do not care that this seems to run counter to their own data-privacy policies.
#Glassdoor has pivoted from employer review site to LinkedIn competitor. Now when you log in they require you to enter your employment status, job title, employer, and full name. There's no way to skip these prompts. In addition, if you email their support team and include your name in your email, they will add it to your profile without your knowledge or consent. I just deleted my account. You should consider doing the same.
h/t @rhialto
Ref: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@rhialto/112090738952458213 #privacy#enshittification
Have you ever wanted to start editing #Wikipedia, but got overwhelmed or felt like you didn't know where to start? Every time I encourage people to start editing, I hear that, so I'm trying to help.
Oh look. Just like Reddit, OpenSubtitles is going to limit their API and try and charge people for access. All their subtitles are user submitted and they have the testicles to try and profit from this content which often helps deaf people enjoy movies.
A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.
But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it.
On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process.
Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.
This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).
Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ...
... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.
How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).
And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs?
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
Link to the NCD mod's post about the matter via teddit (aka, reddit doesn't get any value from your visit): https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/14s8l4g/re_the_nastygram_that_umodcodeofconduct_just_sent/...
"Ad blockers are unethical—ads are how they pay to keep the lights on!”
Exactly. It's how THEY pay to keep the lights on. It's not how I pay for anything. I didn't agree to see ads, although I'm ok with some ads; what I definitely didn't do is agree to be tracked and profiled and have arbitrary third-party code running on my computer just so I could read this awful, pointless, SEO-ified shitfest of an article that doesn't come close to answering the question I was googling.
#Enshittification is the process by which a #platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):
On the web interface PayPal just introduced a new dark pattern #enshittification to the transfer-balance-to-bank-account process to trick the user into electing the premium and quite expensive "immediate transfer" option, instead of choosing the free 1-3 day option.
When you initiate a transfer, this is now what shows up:
There we go - the technological #enshittification pandemic has also reached Philips #Hue.
Apparently they weren't making enough money by selling bulbs at $50/70 each. They'll now force you to log in through their app to the bridge too, or all of your bulbs will just stop working.
What this means, among the other things, is that tons of unofficial integrations that have been built over the years (phue being one of them, which I contributed to in the past, and is also used by Platypush to interact with Hue bridges) are also likely to stop working once you upgrade your bridge's firmware. Those integrations leverage the old push-the-pairing-button mechanism to pair with the client, but now in-app authentication through a registered account seems to be a requirement - and I definitely have better things to do with my time than reverse engineer again their shitty authentication flow and push a PR to phue.
Philips Hue (sorry, Signify B.V.; Philips has actually given up on building anything, they're just waiting for everybody who works there to retire) has joined the long wagon of companies that have realized that scooping up as much data as they can from their users (that probably includes at what time you usually wake up and go to sleep, from your bedroom lights patterns, or how often you go to the toilet) and selling it to data brokers provides a much steadier revenue stream than selling actual products that people want (even if those products are already quite pricey). And they don't care if fullfilling their new missions of being a mere data collector rather than a tech company means to literally break overnight the lights in the houses of millions of customers.
Of course, I was kind of prepared for this. I have #Platypush installed on a RPi with a Zigbee dongle and zigbee2mqtt, and it already does the job for a bunch of Hue, Ikea and other cheap Zigbee lights. That's all you need to make your own Zigbee bridge. #HomeAssistant and #OpenHAB are other popular options.
But it'll still take me a while to unpair a few tens of Hue devices in my house that are still connected to my Hue bridge (which I purchased a decade ago btw), and reconfigure tens of groups, scenes and automation routines on my self-managed bridge instead.
I used to love being a software engineer, building things and solving problems. Now being an engineer sucks, even as a hobby, and I don't feel anymore like this is what I want to do with my life.
It's not up to me to decide what to build anymore. It's up to Spotify killing their streaming libraries, Twitter or Reddit killing their API, Hue breaking their products if you don't log in through their app, YouTube coming up with ways to break youtube-dl on a daily basis, Google breaking your browser extensions, Red Hat and Docker turning suddenly hostile towards the FOSS community that made their fortunes, Messenger periodically logging out your alternative clients and locking your account, an increasing number of companies who insult the large community of unpaid volunteers that builds against their ecosystems as "free-riders" and make it their business mission to break their implementations, and the list could go on forever.
I'm no longer working with ecosystems built by companies who genuinely want to build good things that people want to use, who treat the community of developers around them as an asset rather than a liability, and even sport "don't be evil" among their core values. I'm working in an industry that continuously takes hostile stances against the FOSS community, unofficial clients, and anything that doesn't fit neatly into the quarterly vision for profitability outlined in the PowerPoint deck of a sociopath product manager with no tech background, and who couldn't care less if they are selling IoT devices or bricks. And I have to dodge these attacks on a daily basis, one line of code at the time, for the hundreds of integrations available in the projects I maintain or contribute to, just to keep things working without losing features overnight.
I wake up the morning thinking "how will tech companies decide to fuck me up today just to get one more byte about me to sell to data brokers, and which activities will I be forced to put aside in order to write some code that fixes the UX-breaking shitshow that one of their greedy managers has decided to put up today in an effort to beef up their quarterly bonus with a +1% uptick in revenue?"
Congratulations, motherfuckers. Your broken business models have broken tech for everyone.
(Of course, if you're not in the US, they've already made the choice for you. Thanks terrible international intellectual property laws!)
Until today, my experience buying #ebooks from Humble Bundle was they were always available unencumbered by #DRM. I have hundreds of #DRMFree#epubs built up over the past decade.
The #PratchettDiscworldHumbleBundle is through #Rakuten#Kobo's ebook shop, and all the books are encumbered by #Adobe and the #AdobeDigitalEdition DRM. There is zero indication that this DRM is included on the bundle page itself. and it explicitly says "Use on Any Device". On the #RakutenKobo page itself, the only indication the file has DRM is some small bottom-text that says "Download Options: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)".
Also, DRM Digital Editions will also "helpfully" install Norton for you as well. It's like the dogshit you just stepped in offered to stab you in the kidney, too.
This is shameful and disgusting from Humble Bundle. I know Humble Bundle got acquired years ago by IGN/Ziff Davis, but they'd avoided the levels of #enshittification to make me stop using them.
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
"Ohai, this is Windows. You may have noticed that I killed all the long-running jobs that you left going overnight and restarted your computer so that I could inject some AI-flavored bullshit you never asked for into your (*) operating system. You're welcome!!!”
(*) “It's not actually yours, of course. The OS now works for our Marketing Department rather than you. kthxbai.”
Afraid of content jobs being taken over by AI? Then write for humans.
Stop padding, stop vamping, stop over-explaining the background, stop putting the answer to the question below the fold, stop click-farming, stop writing for machine indexing, and stop putting a single word anywhere in the piece for any reason other than to make it a better piece of WRITING for HUMANS to read.
If you write for machines, you deserve to be replaced by an #LLM.
OC /r/NonCredibleDefense recieves automated notice from the admins to remove its NSFW designation, or else. Mods respond by messaging the admins a bunch of death and porn.
Link to the NCD mod's post about the matter via teddit (aka, reddit doesn't get any value from your visit): https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/14s8l4g/re_the_nastygram_that_umodcodeofconduct_just_sent/...