tdrp

I've always been curious as to how Giphy/other GIF providers are allowed to monetize on what is basically often snippets of copyrighted material.

Our app uses the Giphy API. Not having animated GIFs meant a few of our users would eventually leave or move to platforms that do have them.

After about a year of usage, we've been relatively happy with it. Our app is PG so we need to make sure all the GIFs sent are completely PG (otherwise users blame us rather than Giphy). Not sure if your API already has the tech to do this. Giphy was pretty good at it, and we only once got a report of a porn-like GIF.

That said:

a. Yes. FB SDK was already relatively sneakier than we had expected and we would have done away with it a while ago if we didn't have so many users "signed in with facebook"

b. I assume it's just a regular HTTP request but you probably want to have Kotlin/Swift/etc

c. We might move to it IF it turned out that the privacy issue was actually real and not just our own assumption.

I completed Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese on Duolingo (as in level 5/gold completed) and feel like I know the equivalent of at best a 3-month one-hour-a-week type entry level class.

The stuff that works better for me are actually online classes (for example Coursera has 6-part HSK Mandarin classes) since they are well structured, they have lots of video with natives speaking, and they deal with relatively useful topics. Duolingo taught me to say things like "the book was eaten by the yellow horse" before I could even ask someone how old they were.

That said, I feel like they've been going in the right direction by adding things like duolingo stories. If they expand those and add more interactive stuff it could get more interesting.

I got my first call in Chinese a couple of days after I applied for for my visa to China so I assumed it was legit and related initially (e.g. they want more documents or something). Fortunately I don't speak Mandarin so once I tracked down my coworker and asked him to translate he told me it was a known scam.

Not sure if that's what happened but as a B2C company we also don't acknowledge any feature or idea requests, and have strong ToS language against submitting any unsolicited ideas. Our CS staff generally deletes/archives them without reading them if they can tell by the title.

The problem we had was that a lot of users submit ideas we've already had or were already working on (I mean if we've been working on a project for 5+ years do they really think this idea didn't cross our mind), but then some of them think they are entitled to a little something for it.

One of them tried to demand some kind of reward once they saw the feature had been implemented (even though we were working on it well before they even mentioned it and it wasn't a groundbreaking change or anything), raised hell like she had been cheated posting screenshots of her unanswered e-mail, and even claimed to get a patent attorney to help her. Fortunately that feature was present in a bunch of other apps so it doesn't look like it went anywhere. I suspect if we had said "We have passed this along" then our situation would be much worse.

Basically with Duolingo's userbase size I am sure they have at least some malicious users.