Xmmm wrote:I'm happy to pay $10 a month to the guy that thought up the original idea and enriched to world, and reward the innovator.
LingQ's not really a major innovation, it's just a stepwise evolution. Tools that automatically add mouse-over or click-to-access dictionary lookup have existed for over a decade, and integrating those with audio/video and transcripts has been done before too (e.g. CLILstore, a project a friend of mine did for a European university group).
The idea of picking out texts by what learners know isn't that great a leap -- Kaufmann himself cites Krashen's "i+1" as the motivation for this. I know I myself used to talk about trying to produce something along similar lines (but not limited to this input-only type of teaching and I still hope to one day) and it's great that someone finally made the idea a reality, but it doesn't become his sole property. The point about competition is that it pushes further innovation, and if LingQ's very basic ideas were protected by a patent, then a whole generation of tools that could build on those ideas and further them would be prevented from happening.
LingQ is kind of cool, but it's limited. Don't you want better tools?
Serpent wrote:We allow discussing Unilang here Anyway, I'm okay with them deleting threads if they want, but automatically changing lwt to *** is cowardice imo. And obviously they can't promote lwt by introducing a rule that says you can't discuss lwt on their forum To me the problem is the silencing and keeping the users trapped because they can't take their LingQ's with them.Xmmm wrote:But Serpent was implying that LingQ was somehow unfair to suppress discussion of LWT on the LingQ forum. This to me, is unfair.
To be fair, Google works by association. The last thing you want is the name of your biggest source of competition being in Google's algorithm as being related to you.
(As a side note, I'm a member of a Scottish Gaelic language forum that has the word "translation" in its bad language filter -- it comes up as tr*nsl*t**n. Before we did this we were on page 1 of Google hits for "Gaelic translation" and "Scottish Gaelic translation" and constantly getting tattoo translation requests (including for Irish) -- within weeks of censoring translation, the problem was gone.)
sjintje wrote:I actually find the interface more pleasing than LWT (although it's a while since I looked at LWT) and it somehow just seems more "solid" to use. I also like the word translations offered, which are based on other users' inputs, rather than just a dictionary.
Of course -- LWT was knocked together by the original author just to suit his own needs, so it wasn't really designed to be user friendly, just to get the job done. (Hence the horrible installation process.) I imagine the whole point of the permissive license is so that someone else will pick it up, polish it and make it easier for people to use.
Of course, if one of the forks picks up on the social aspect and adds in file sharing between users, then LingQ's business model will start to look very shaky.
LingQ's main advantage at the moment is not Kaufmann's idea, and not the software platform -- it's the user base. Kaufmann produced something of fairly low intrinsic value and had a bunch of paying customers actually write all the content for him. That gives him inertia, and he seems to be coasting, assuming that what he has is the end goal. It isn't -- it can be improved. If he does that, then he'll stay in the lead. But if people make significantly better tools, LingQ will slowly lose its subscriber base.
But that word -- subscriber -- is what I really dislike about LingQ. $10 a month -- for what? There's practically no ongoing development costs for the site (although I see they've refreshed the site to make it look more like Duolingo... so much for rewarding the innovator!) and there's no cost to add material for existing languages while the community's doing it all for free. There will be probably be issues about adding in features to support new languages, but that's not something that necessarily interests current users, as the languages they're interested in are already there. $120 a year for storing a tiny amount of user data and transmitting a few mp3s... that's expensive. Hell, even just a one-off payment of $120 for one language would seem pretty pricey to me. If you subscribed to LingQ at that price from day one, you'd have paid, what... $900+ by now. That's a lot of money for what they offer.
Now I'm not suggesting that Kaufmann is making a lot of money out of it. He might be, he might not be; but if he isn't, then the business model clearly isn't working -- if you can't make profit at that price point, when can you?!?
If one of the forks can make LWT user-friendly enough to start genuinely interfering with their business, then they might be forced start looking at a more sensible price structure!