This is the kind of startup I believe and hope will survive when the current tech bubble bursts. They have a real technical solution to a real problem and are making their money by charging people for a service that is worthwhile enough to pay for. They're contributing to humanity in a meaningful way that's worthwhile.
All these social media sites that make their money off advertising or selling user data can all go bankrupt as far as I'm concerned. Their users are coming to their websites for the short-term dopamine rush brought by the novelty of social media interaction: these websites are not different in any meaningful way from drug dealers, and they're costing millions of people happiness and productivity. They sell themselves as communications platforms but in reality, they compromise on privacy and as a result some of the most important forms of communication are hampered by their influence. As developers I think we have an ethical imperative to work for organizations like Duolingo who are pushing humanity forward and not social media companies who are holding humanity back.
Yes, like Youtube, Duolingo has what it takes to function in a capitalistic system. For capitalism to work, you (very grossly) need 3 things: Capital (ships, factories, stamp machines, etc), Laborers (gardeners, secretaries, miners, etc ), and Customers (vinyl collectors, beer drinkers, tourists, etc). Many companies in tech confuse 2 or more of these things as the same. Twitter boasts of it's users, which one thinks of as customers, but those are in fact the capital. Twitter's real customers are who pays to advertize on it. Facebook is just the same, their customers are businesses. That bears repeating, FB is a business-to-business style enterprise.
Youtube, however, is better off. Laborers are the people that upload videos and workers at Youtube, Capital is the servers and all the software and somewhat the content creators, Customers are people watching and businesses trying to advertize. Though it is not as clear cut as a sandwich shop, it makes more sense than Yo or the myriad other tech startups out there that confuse these 3 key groups.
Duolingo is also 'unconfused'. Capital is the language service, website, and software of repetition. Customers are, again, the people using the service and other companies and people trying to get translations. Labor is, again, the people translating and the employees. In lieu of being paid for the translating, the users are 'paid' in the free service provided. Overall, I think it works pretty well, and, according to the OP, so do many other people.
Agreed. I do think YouTube will survive whatever collapses come, because they hold too much of a monopoly on video to fail (something similar goes for Facebook). But their profit model is still that of a social media company.
Well, you don't need a Google account to consume content on YouTube (yet), but without a Facebook account and a decent number of friends, there would be no impulsive need to check your news feed on Facebook.
That was how Facebook used to work but now they're basically an RSS reader, the sources being either your friends published content or anything and anyone else for that matter.
Good call! I had not thought of FB as that, but you are right. I guess the next step for them is to then try to transition into a bank or some other enterprise that tracks and stores value. That usually seems to be the way these things go.
You leverage your facebook profile to gain access to properties, be given permissions or access, and your value is measurable by the input output of your usage.
Travel around the world right now and show either your government identification or a printed copy of your facebook profile and wouldn't it be weird if a young person you meet takes more credibility from that printed page than the validity and authority of your government id?
But are these guys making money from solving the problem. Seems like its a free service and they are balking from chasing the profitability route. From the article
>>>> “The reasoning for this was that, though we could make it a profitable business, we realized we’d quickly become a translations business as we’d have to hire people focused on quality control, sales people, etc. and eventually businesses tend to pay more attention to the parts of the company that are profitable,” a spokesperson told us.
“We are an education company and are here to help bring education to everyone in the world and to make education more effective.”
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Good intentions but does not seem to support your key point or am I mistaken?
> They have a real technical solution to a real problem and are making their money by charging people for a service that is worthwhile enough to pay for.
Are you referring to the $20 English certification? There isn't anything else that they currently ask their users to pay for.
Per the article, the translation service has been mostly ended. CNN are still using it, but they're not taking on new customers for that side of the business.
All these social media sites that make their money off advertising or selling user data can all go bankrupt as far as I'm concerned. Their users are coming to their websites for the short-term dopamine rush brought by the novelty of social media interaction: these websites are not different in any meaningful way from drug dealers, and they're costing millions of people happiness and productivity. They sell themselves as communications platforms but in reality, they compromise on privacy and as a result some of the most important forms of communication are hampered by their influence. As developers I think we have an ethical imperative to work for organizations like Duolingo who are pushing humanity forward and not social media companies who are holding humanity back.