We are no longer going to publish any more podcasts (that’s it we’ve said it).
Reasons?
There is no place in the Lingq library for our lessons. The actual rewarding points policy doesn’t encourage us spending 2 or 3 hours per lesson just to get a few points… the same points people get when they make a 10 second lesson or a copy-pasted one. This just doesn’t make any sense (you could call it a joke but we’re not going to).
Besides, because LingQ gives the same value to all kind of lessons (copy&pasted lessons added very quickly to the library or lessons like ours which need hours for each one to create), it makes us get less and less points for our lessons over time. That’s because the same amount of time that takes creating 20 original lessons, you can add to the library 1.000 lessons (copy&pasted lessons) which means the points go to the people who’s added more lessons.
Every podcast we made usually needed:
Some brainstorming to choose the topic we're going to talk about. It’s not always easy to choose a topic that can be interesting.
We often record the podcast more than once, just because we aren’t fully satisfied with the result.
After the recording, we carefully edit the sound file with some software, to get the best sound quality (sound reduction, cleaning and amplification).
After that, we do the transcript. All podcasts are 10-19 min long. This takes lots of time (2-3 hours).
Although it’s been a hard work to make every podcast, it’s always been lots of fun recording them. So if we did get this far (27 lessons) it wasn’t for the points we were getting (obviously!), it was thanks to your encouragement. But we’re burned out now. These podcasts takes lots of time to make, we can’t argue with that.
This is how things work at LingQ, we’re not asking Lingq to do anything, Lingq has already said they won’t change their points policy. It’s just that we’re behaving accordingly.
Thank you all for your support all this time. If we’ve made it this far (up to 27 episodes) it’s because of you all.
Special thanks to Angela, it’s thanks to her that we didn’t stop making the podcasts 4 lessons back. You’re great at transcribing and you’re a wonderful person too. Thank you Angela!
I understand your position. I think that LingQ has to change the whole point system to support and reward your work better. In the moment the system is not fair at all.
Thank you very much for your effort and good work.
I really have enjoyed your lessons very much, they’ve made me laugh and think, and understand a little bit of Spanish culture.
Yes, I know it’s very time consuming to create the lessons, and I think that this is why there really aren’t many conversational lessons in the library. For me, my current level and goals, there is now a big gaping hole in the Spanish library here. I can get audiobooks anywhere, news stories don’t interest me, and I’ve studied all your lessons.
I spent a complete weekend travelling to may parents place, recording, editing and mastering the audio file, transcribing one of them, all of them are some 15 minutes long like Berta and Oscar’s. Initially I received no points except the ones for usage. After Vera alerted me to the fact that my recordings were in fact used for the Lingq podcasts, I contacted Steve and finally received my well deserved points, albeit all in one go inspite of the fact that I had submitted them over a longer period of time. I Iost all my 9000 points three months later. I am really disappointed but maybe my opening statement was a bit harsh, so let me rephrase it:
@Berta and Oscar - Maybe there is a solution here. We were a little slow on the uptake but we have aybee77 asking for more SpanishLingQ type conversational podcasts and you wanting to get paid for your conversational podcasts… How about if we pay you to do these podcasts for SpanishLingQ? We would then own the podcasts, of course, but you would get paid up front. If you are interested, you can contact us at support and we can discuss the details.
@Friedemann - We, unfortunately, have no record of the correspondence regarding your podcasts. You volunteered to send us the correspondence in a previous thread about the same issue http://www.lingq.com/learn/ko/forum/2/10111/?page=2. Steve asked you to send this information as well, which you didn’t. Now you are complaining again. I’m not sure what you want us to do. We always offer a choice to our content providers to receive points or cash. We wouldn’t have treated you differently. The expiration of points has always existed and can hardly be claimed as a surprise. You claim that you had no idea your lessons were being used as LingQ podcasts so… what did you think they were going to be used for? I must say I am confused by the tone of your post and your feeling that you have been wronged somehow. You submitted podcasts for which you were paid. You chose to receive points which expired like all points do. We have lots of other content providers who provide content regularly and are paid regularly. The only thing that may have happened was that there may have been some miscommunication which caused you or us to misunderstand each other. That is why we would like to see the correspondence you said you have. At any rate, if we discuss things rationally, by email and not on the forum, I’m sure we can easily sort out the issues.
I have gone through my old emails from 2009 and I have in fact found an email by Steve in which he did mention the compensation policy for podcasts. It must have slipped below my radar. So I cannot complain there. The main reason why I didn’t get back with you or Steve after the thread mentioned in your post above is because I was really tired of the whole thing. My main beef is the expiration policy and not whether or not I received points for my content (eventually I did receive them so I was in fact compensated). Lingq had made it abundantly clear that the expiration policy is here to stay so I saw no point in arguing any more.
Still, everytime some of our most respected veterans complain about the expiration scheme I cannot help but support them and let them know that I agree with them. I do feel that the point thing creates a lot of frustration here and if good people like our veterans make their voices heard, I think Lingq should listen.
In response to dooo’s question I’d say compensate providers with points that do not expire and which can only be used for Lingq services and are non convertible into cash. I don’t know how many Linqer’s are in it for the money, but I doubt it is the majority of content providers. Using non cashable points the members’ efforts become our currency. I provide content and you tutor me, at a time of my choosing.
@Friedemann - I can understand that it is frustrating when points expire. On the other hand, it is even worse for LingQ (learners and tutors) if people hoard their points which is what they do if there is no incentive to use them. We have explained ourselves many times on this. 90 days is a very long time in which to use up points. We originally planned on having points valid for 30 days and thought we would give people an additional 2 months grace period. Perhaps the 90 day period makes people too complacent and we should shorten the expiration period to 30 days to provide a little more urgency… At any rate, we are never going to remove the expiration of points. That was tried and was a complete failure. We are also not going to introduce a second class of non-expiring points which would confuse an already confusing system both from our developer’s perspective and our users’ perspective. All I can say is that you have 90 days to use your points up and if you’re worried about losing them use them up quickly.
I don’t understand that LingQ is not willing to change the point system in order to prevent such annoyances that hard-working members like Berta and Òscar are facing. The point system is not fair at all. It privileges users with many points (they can get money) and users who create copy & paste content without own effort. Many other users lose their points because they are not ready to write or speak, or cannot find suitable tutors.
@hape - We understand your complaints, and are certainly sympathetic to your personal situation, but this issue has been discussed ad nauseam. Please see Steve’s post about half way down the page on this thread: http://www.lingq.com/learn/ko/forum/3/10482/?page=2
In response to this issue (and on the same thread as posted above), Steve also posted the following:
"As far as the fairness of the content points allocation is concerned, there are two major problems which prevent us from making the system more equitable.
To create a system that allocates points based on effort would be complicated and it is not an area where we want to spend programming resources. Whatever we do, there will be complaints.
It is difficult to pay on a differential scale for lessons that all have the same value, zero. We started out allowing content providers to charge what they wanted for their content. We found that people did not want to pay for content."
Not true.
If the lesson rating system would have been fully established, then the value of lessons can be easily calculated - lesson value is proportional to user satisfaction.
Longer lessons with higher user satisfaction have an higher value.
Just to clarify, the idea of allowing content providers to charge for their lessons is currently under consideration. Such lessons would be excluded from the provider awards points given out each month. This would allow providers to decide how much they feel their content is worth. However, there is nothing saying that such a system would be inherently better than the current one, as other complaints will undoubtedly arise.
