Duolingo
If fellow companions happen to like the same video, it is a never ending advertising train. Kara Brown explains this dilemma in her article, “Here’s How Much Celebrities Make in the Instagram Product Placement Machine,” how celebrities like Scott Disick and the Kardashians are getting paid as much as $15,000-$25,000 off the bat while we’re stuck advertising for free. Companies want individuals to believe they are just simply roaming the internet freely without any sort of personal data being sold off to third party companies and make us feel as if we are part of something special, but in reality “It’s kind of a barter arrangement: Shadow Workers create valuable content for Facebook in exchange for free social recreation” (Lambert). Additionally,
…show more content…
Well now you can, with an app called Duolingo. This successful app, also created by Luis Von Ahn, has raised as much as $18.3 million in funding. It teaches Spanish and Portuguese speakers English lessons and offers an array of languages—such as Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese—used for English speakers. Just like the ReCAPTCHA program, Duolingo is turning its students into an online workforce. In a section called “immersion,” Duolingo puts their students to the test by translating documents into a whole other language. Alison Griswold mentions in her article titled, “How Luis Von Ahn Turned Countless Hours of Mindless Activity into Something Valuable,” how those documents are originally derived from the websites of CNN and Buzzfeed, “the major media companies [that] have contracted Duolingo as a translation service for their materials.” In immersion, a group of students are required to translate the same sentence and the system then accumulates all results, users then vote on the best translation, and results are finalized and sent to all client media websites. In other words, this site is making their students believe they are translating documents for fun, but in fact are what’s making the company successful in the first place. Students are unknowingly doing the work companies should be paying employees or professional translators to do. Simply because websites know, no person would be willing to do the task for free,
Well now you can, with an app called Duolingo. This successful app, also created by Luis Von Ahn, has raised as much as $18.3 million in funding. It teaches Spanish and Portuguese speakers English lessons and offers an array of languages—such as Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese—used for English speakers. Just like the ReCAPTCHA program, Duolingo is turning its students into an online workforce. In a section called “immersion,” Duolingo puts their students to the test by translating documents into a whole other language. Alison Griswold mentions in her article titled, “How Luis Von Ahn Turned Countless Hours of Mindless Activity into Something Valuable,” how those documents are originally derived from the websites of CNN and Buzzfeed, “the major media companies [that] have contracted Duolingo as a translation service for their materials.” In immersion, a group of students are required to translate the same sentence and the system then accumulates all results, users then vote on the best translation, and results are finalized and sent to all client media websites. In other words, this site is making their students believe they are translating documents for fun, but in fact are what’s making the company successful in the first place. Students are unknowingly doing the work companies should be paying employees or professional translators to do. Simply because websites know, no person would be willing to do the task for free,