Angry about the Decks update? How to make your voices heard

You can also leave a Google Maps review (using any Google Account) on their listing:
https://goo.gl/maps/sMUF9uCni3M2

as well as being displayed on Google for any user (or journalist or investor) to see, it will also get emailed directly to someone in Memrise.

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You can also contact their main investors (combined investment 15.5m USD) as follows:

Octopus Ventures:

Contact Email

[email protected]

Phone Number

+442077767968

Korelya Capital:

Contact Email

korelya@korelyacapital dot com

Phone Number
+33142219860

Balderton Capital:

Email Address:
[email protected]

Phone Number:
+442070166800

Avalon Ventures:

Phone Number:
+18583482180

Email Address:
info@avalon-ventures dot com

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“We’re a technology company actively working to improve human consciousness, and to foster authentic engagement across communities.” - Ed Cooke

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If you live in the UK and bought Memrise lifetime, I encourage you to sue Memrise. The cost to file goes from 25 to 115 pounds, depending on how you want to sue for, for an online filing. https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/court-fees

If you live in the EU, you can also sue Memrise through its small claims court.

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This was a great idea and am delighted to seethe reviews coming in on Google Maps! Keep it up everyone!

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Memrise/@51.5184166,-0.0761996,17z/data=!4m7!3m6!1s0x48761cdda5b7b831:0xd59d54fdf20194b4!8m2!3d51.5184166!4d-0.0740109!9m1!1b1

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Sent the following email to the investor addresses:

Hi all,

Suggest this email is passed onto senior management, it will likely be of interest.

Thought I’d let you all know that Memrise, the beneficiary of your pooled investment, is making a catastrophic mistake that is already losing it money.

Yesterday, Memrise announced it was scrapping user-created content and moving it to a browser-platform called Decks with no app and no offline capability.

For many users, the community and user-created content is Memrise’s USP - what differentiates it and makes it unique in a saturated market of language apps. Its proprietary courses work for some, but are of pedestrian quality, limited value, cover limited languages, and have a very low ceiling in terms of learner level. The ability to create custom courses, advanced courses, and courses for niche-languages are what makes Memrise amazing to us. And we as the user base are creating the content free of charge! You’re welcome, Memrise!

The announcement yesterday has been hit by an overwhelmingly negative response from Memrise’s core users. There are already 583 responses to the forum post, most of them damning (Important Update: Upcoming changes to Memrise community-created courses). Search for a positive response, or better, search for needles in a field of haystacks. Users have made it clear that the migration of content to Decks is a deal-breaker, a decision in direct opposition to their customer needs.

Many, including myself, have terminated their Pro memberships and have no intentions of resubscribing unless this disastrous decision is reversed. I dread to think how much Memrise have lost in the last day in terms of subscriptions. Nor do I think this is a disgruntled minority of whingers - if the forum is any measure, there will be more of this to come. A quick glance at the Play Store, App Store, and Google Maps entry show that the public negative reviews in response to this decision are starting to mount.

We are all hoping Memrise see sense and swerve away from quite a terrible idea. We would love to keep using the app as we have always done, and that will not be possible with the proposed Deck migration.

Hope that you will also exert pressure on our behalf - as a business decision, this is an utterly bewildering act of self-harm.

Houssam, user of Memrise since 2014

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If you can, mark Memrise reviews that accurately and damagingly summarize the impact of the Decks update to a user who is considering installing the app as “Helpful” so they show up on the top reviews.

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Great advice, I have done this for all the ones on the Google Play Store :slight_smile:

I see this has been coming for a long time. I wrote this in a review in August 2018! I got no response.

This used to be my go-to app for learning less common languages, like Basque and Georgian. I’ve been a pro member for a few years now. Now they removed the ability to access user created content (free to them!) from the app; you can only get it from the website. Why make it more complicated on purpose?! Why hide the content that was given to them for free, the only content I used? Now it will be a bad, expensive, Duolingo…

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Memrise is willingly handing over a large part of their paying userbase to the competition.
I know there are already several language apps.
But I am seriously considering to develop and publish a payed language app that supports community content.
Maybe call it memfall :wink:
If memrise does not want your money, I will gladly take it.
Anyone interested to join me on this.

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My money is asking to leave my wallet man. I need to use an app to take notes from my own classes.

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A posted the following review in Google PlayStore:

Community made courses are the most valuable thing in this platform, but they won’t be available anymore in the app or offline. Only community created courses can get you to a high level of language proficiency. That means the developers don’t care about the community and get you fluent.

Their answer:

Hi Lucas Heber Mariano dos Santos,
I’m sorry that you are feeling this way, but it is not true that we do not care about the users getting fluent. With more resources focused on our app, I am sure that we will be seeing more growth in the rich content in the app. I hope there’ll be a day you will feel like trying out our app content. Kana

Really that they think i have never tried the official courses and official content? “there’ll be a day…”

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I don’t like to leave negative comments, but I feel that this is going to be a repeat of Ziggy, where a lot of well-meaning hard work was wasted. I have a long, Wi-Fi-less bus journey that is perfect for learning ‘on the go’, but now with no offline mode I don’t see how I will be able to find time. There is so much that Memrise could do to improve their current set-up without making it more difficult for users to seamlessly integrate their learning on Memrise- and community-made courses. I didn’t realise there was supposed to be a difference. Sorry.

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I think editing Memrise’s Wikipedia page to cover the recent changes would be a good idea. An user had already done that, adding some pieces of information, but a more through cover is necessary–without vandalizing the site (I tried to correct some parts in the meantime.).
Everyone can edit the page, no registration needed.

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It sad that leaving bad rating isn’t helping there’s more new 5’s than 1’s.

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The low score reviews are being highlighted in play store because they were marked as useful. New users are getting to see these negatives reviews, though the impact is low in the overall score, still is something…

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  1. Make Pro required to learn with the mobile app

  2. Create two sections of the app and two different sections of the Memrise servers. The first section works for user-created courses. The second works for official courses. The sections work independently.

Many of us pay for Pro and study community courses on the mobile app. We keep our mobile app, you keep your revenue, you gain the ability to move faster with your official courses.

additional discussion here: http://community.memrise.com/t/a-common-sense-proposal/34518

The impact on the overall score on Google Maps is high.

I just posted a scathing review on Google Maps. Please like it so it becomes to the top review.

The app’s free user-created courses are better than the “official” courses, but they’re being booted off the app and into a free platform called “Decks.” If you want to learn a language as a New Year’s resolution and forget about it, you can use Memrise.

At the intermediate-advanced level, for the same language, Memrise’s user-created courses (community content) are more popular than the official courses at the intermediate level. That’s when official courses get announced to Memrise’s users as THE course and when Memrise has a body of language experts to create courses.

Compared to other language-learning apps, the ability to learn languages at the intermediate-advanced level through user-created courses is what made Memrise unique. Other language apps will only ever teach you a basic level of the language. But that higher learning functionality is being migrated to the free app “Decks.” So go use Decks. Don’t pay for Memrise.

I think encouraging people to use Decks and not pay for Memrise will really hurt Memrise’s revenue and long-term prospects.

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I’m sorry, but this is not correct.
There’s no free app Decks (only website) and that’s why so many users are huffing and puffing.

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