Duolingo is free to students and has no advertising. Instead, the company sells their homework to media companys as a kind of crowd-sourced translation project. Companies like BuzzFeed supply their articles to DuoLingo, which in turn assigns those articles to their students to translate as part of a lesson plan. The students work is then collated, proofed, and then sent back to BuzzFeed for publication. The arrangement offers benefits to all sides, but those benefits are of such disparate values that its impossible to see the system as anything but exploitive. In many cases you can learn more about a company by looking at the expenses theyre willing to pay than by looking at the thing they claim to be selling. In assigning its translation work to unpaid students, BuzzFeed is acknowledging how little value there is in its content.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 03:59:14 +0000
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