These volunteers didn't think about it in these terms.
They gave away their work for free to help people learn languages, and for a long time Duolingo seemed like the best platform for that.

Starting your own platform is much more difficult than contributing to an existing one that seems to be operated with some amount of goodwill...

but what if they give you cool digital gems

Seriously. I don't know what outcome people expected. Duolingo is not a non-profit, or a community project like Anki. I hope everybody who is surprised by this is receptive to the lesson.

I would not do any unpaid work for anything that was not straight up copyleft.

Nonprofits FTW

But then how would spez ever be able to take Reddit public?!

People who keep trying to do Socialism in a Capitalist system are doomed to fail, because Socialism produces enormous surpluses and Capitalists love to just gobble that shit up.

Make sure to put anything you want public under the correct license. If a platform doesn't support CC or GPL or MIT, then leave.

EDIT: Or Apache, or IDGAF, of course. ;) But what I would really want is a license that forces your content to remain free, even if used in something else. Basically copyleft: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html

This baffles me. We've seen time and time again that for-profit will fuck you over any chance they get over a dollar if they must, and people still volunteers for them.

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?

Why discord? Everything on it will be lost without exception. Fuck discord.

Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?

This is a bit of "no true Scotsman" fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn't been monetized you can always say 'yet'

FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn't get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product

Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.

Can't speak for the entshitification but actively punished unsubscribed users?

I've been using it for two months, learning Germans, I just use Firefox in android instead of the app and I get no ads, only 5 failures but I rarely reach that on a daily basis (I don't want to burnout and I'm pretty sure it's better for learning to not go too fast) and if I ever reach it, I currently have 1k gems. I'm actually surprised at how little use I'd get out of the subscription.

They exist, but they often lack the front end polish and they never get the kind of publicity enjoyed by their for-profit peers.

10,000 sentences and OpenWords are others to consider.

OSM is run by a foundation - https://www.openstreetmap.org/about

This makes it a lot more difficult to cock it up compared to a shareholder run company.

Not really , they use the Open Data Commons Open Database License which means it can be used commercial but they have to release changes under the same license.

They tried to gamify the process, you use gems to buy an off day for a streak

A friend of mine moved to Japan about 10 years ago and has spent a lot of time solo developing his site, Kanpeki Study, for efficiently learning Japanese kanji and vocabulary in bitesize, daily chunks. I'd be doing all his effort a massive disservice if I didn't mention it - hopefully turns out to be a good fit for you 😄.

As someone who is a current user and unaware of superior options but is curious, what would you recommend?