Soon Duolingo will be teaching you phrases like “Down with the imperialist scum!”
imagine being THIS attached to brain rot apps
A point for irony, NGL. ⬆️
If you want to learn a language, Duolingo is pretty much the worst way to do so. Seek out community-created resources for your target language.
Ew but then I have to talk to actual people
/s
Thats /s feels unnecessary honestly. Introversion is on the rise globally.
That’s fair. Though I do think there’s some irony in wanting to learn a new language only to avoid communicating with people who use it (though I do also understand the utility of knowing a language isn’t exclusive to talking directly to people).
This news is brought to you by the company of China 🇨🇳
People are fucking stupid. I don’t think there’s any point in banning TikTok but they’re not wrong when they say it pushes Chinese propaganda and they’re probably not wrong when they say that they’re using it to spy on people.
So angry TikTok users want to make that worse for themselves out of spite?
Idiots.
For most people, the personal consequences of China being able to spy on them are nonexistent. The government that can actually abuse such power against them, e.g. prosecute them for out of state abortions, is the US.
So protesting the US banning an app and trying to force people to use their own spyware social media makes some level of sense.
It’s still obviously better to use privacy preserving and/or federated services, but that’s not something most people know about or understand.
I literally had a friend breaking down over it and I suggested Fediverse alternatives and they looked at me like I had sprouted an extra head.
I even explained that US companies aren’t doing anything materially different than Tiktok (propaganda and spying on people), and they’re all bad. Still looking at me like I’m some kind of maniac.
Everyone bitches about corporations but so few want to actually stop sucking on their fucking teat.
People hate thinking. It blows my mind, but it’s the only thing I know for sure.
Half the population thought the US government was trying to kill them with a vaccine and a face mask while they coughed themselves to death.
You’re absolutely right, people are fucking stupid.
Maybe they were only in it for the propaganda?
I do love that some of the “refugees” (lol) are just moving to an even more Chinese app though. I don’t think it’s all that many but the propaganda pointing toward propaganda is hilarious.
I think a lot more who move will find out that it’s not as simple as spending a few weeks on Duolinguo learning some very basic Chinese to successfully make their way around a Chinese language app with most users also posting in Chinese.
It’s a big reason why I think they’re just falling for more propaganda and why I’m absolutely tickled.
Honestlyyyyy and yet when I speak about actually ethical alternatives, ppl then be like nah cba, too difficult, too much effort or too complicated when it only takes five mins or less to make an account and yet these same god damn ppl expect you to always listen to them.
We honestly truly live in a society.
People only want to make a difference if it only gives them good social points, not actual change or things that enable for them to actually think critically and change their viewpoints.
Feels pretty hopeless tbh esp as this is only the beginning of 2025 as well but hey at least there’s some logical people on here (though you do get the occasional dumbass on lemmy/mbin)
Political content is entirely banned on the app so your assertion that it pushes political propaganda when it refuses to host anything political at all is kind of reactionary fake news.
Who defines what is political content? Who controls it? Since when is all propaganda political?
Is a video talking about China’s terrific business opportunities political? No. Is it propaganda? Yes.
(Also, “political content is entirely banned” = no photos of the tank man or cartoons of Winnie the Pooh.)
Is a video talking about China’s terrific business opportunities political?
Yes it is. And it’s not allowed. Would be banned. I have never seen anything remotely close to what you describe here. :)
I have seen a lot of that on Instagram, though. Instagram has a surprisingly broad tankie community!
Source?
Also… ok boomer. lol
Source of what?
And I’m 47. I’m not even sure what age has to do with this.
Telling people your age in response to a boomer joke is such a xoomer thing to do
Duolingo:
All the women in my office said everyone is moving to Lemonade. They said, “why would we move to another Chinese app? That’s dumb.”
No idea who owns Lemonade but it was interesting to me that they were not interested at all in Rednote.
Lemon8 is owned by the same company as TikTok, they’re literally trading one Chinese app for another anyways.
If you want to drop that bombshell at the office LMAO
Love it. Can’t wait to!
Keep us posted!
Lemonade is an insurance company, yeah, they moving their car insurance ti Lemonade.
It’s actually Lemon8
Is that not also shutting down?
Powered by tictok? What does that mean?
Lemon8 is a social media app owned by Heliophilia Pte. Ltd., a Singaporean company connected to the Chinese internet company ByteDance. It was launched in 2020 and modeled after Xiaohongshu, which was released in 2013.
[…]
The U.S. launch of Lemon8 coincided with scrutiny over ByteDance and TikTok’s operations in the country;
🤷🏼♂️
i knew that damn owl was going to get involved in corporate lobbying at some point
A 216% increase sounds impressive, but probably isn’t because the starting number is very small.
Except Duolingo regularly releases these numbers. In July 2024 it was reported to be slightly above 9m monthly chinese learners…
So quite significant rise.
9m monthly Chinese learners in the USA? That’s pretty crazy.
No that’s global.
That makes more sense. I’d be interested to know the absolute increase in the number of learners in the USA but I guess the point remains that the ban caused some kind of uptick. As someone who’s been learning Mandarin off and on for many years I can only say good luck to them.
Jokes on you I’m using it to learn Spanish.
Jokes on you I’m using it to be disappointed in myself.
Honestly I had that app on my phone for 3 months before I actually started using so I feel you there. It’s not that bad to start off with and it starts super slow. And fuck streaks and notifications and all that shit I just do it when I’m bored instead of scrolling and refreshing pages on my social media of choice.
Big Language works in timescales unimaginable.
