As some of you may know I have created a lot of content for the Spanish library. All of it (right now 194 lessons) is original content that I have personally created. I have a lot of collections and I have spent a lot of time and effort to create this content.
The number one content creator in the library (or at least the most used) is or was Vera. She is doing an amazing work for German. Now that I’ve started learning German I really appreciate her content. Sure, there are many other people creating really interesting and exclusive content for the library.
However today I’ve ben greatly disappointed. In the last provider awards list I was surprised to see that suddently someone completely new (two months ago he didn’t even appear in the list) was number one.
I didn’t paid a lot of attention to that provider until today, when I was uploading a new lesson to the Spanish library. Yesterday I was number one (194 lessons) and number two was SpanishLingq with 136 lessons. Today, however, this provider was number 2 with 193 lessons. He has uploaded, just for Spanish, 180 lessons in a day!!!
I was completely surprised because I know how time consuming is creating lessons, so I checked this provider out and I’ve found that in a few months he has created 5929 lessons!!! That’s impossible!! Well, no! He is just copy pasting text and audio from Librivox, saturating the library.
I’ve checked some of this content out and there are several big mistakes. First of all, the “Fábulas de Esopo” (the 180 spanish lessons) are definitely not a Beginner 1 content (which is how he has rate them knowing that beginner content is the most popular in the library) and, the worst and, in my opinion, something completely unacceptable is that some of the lessons are not recorded by Spanish native speakers but by foreign students with a really poor accent and pronunciation.
I’m sorry, but I’m really annoyed and disappointed. Usually in the library, you could find free content like librivox (with no interest for me because you can find it anywere, you don’t need LingQ for that, but I understand some people liked) and original exclusive content created by members. Right now, this interesting content, which in my opinion, was the value of the library, is being buried by these spam lessons. I’m sorry, but I can’t find any other word to describe this kind of low quality lessons.
I’m very disappointed because I’ve done an effort in trying to create a lot of interesting and diverse content for the library and suddently someone who has done… nothing, is getting more points than me and other active providers because he has saturated the library with this ***.
I know technically is not LingQ’s fault, but I think that this should be urgently controlled, both the quality of the lessons and the spamming thing to just get points.
Probably the Exclusive content tag that proposed Vera some time ago or any other way to promote original content as well as giving more points to original content providers should be applied as soon as possible.
But anyway, with this specific case I think that something must be done or we’ll loose most of the LingQ library’s value buried with all this spam.
As for me, right now I’m really frustrated and I’ve lost any motivation to keep on creating content for the Spanish library. I’m sorry for those who like my content, but at least for a while, I’ll stop creating lessons for LingQ.