To be honest, their own content is not even close to standing on it’s own if they got rid of user created courses. Simply adding gimmick features like grammar-bot does not do anything to entice a serious learner outside of grandma or a 10 year old kid. But I don’t care about that anyway. I like the ability to make my own course and learn my own way. Which Memrise does best. Not allowing other people to use your courses from the app is pretty telling where they want to go from here. So with that said… I suggest reading the next paragraph.
If you want to really send them a message. I suggest going to the app store on either apple or google and giving them a 1 star rating. Believe it or not, that hurts them more than cancelling your subscription. Even better, uninstall the app too. I say this as a developer myself. This really hurts. Your subscription fee which lets guess only less than 10% here pay, only pays for their electric bill maybe. Uninstalling the app and giving them a one star rating hurts their salaries.
Nah, that is basically how the entire internet has unfolded. It’s all about profit eventually.
For example, eBay was built on small sellers, but at a certain point eBay switched their focus to large-scale vendors. Or take Uber - independent drivers are building the company, but Uber’s plan will be to replace them with self-driving cars at the first opportunity. Even social media sites like Facebook - it may have seemed like the popularity was driven by individuals sharing their own user-created content (status, videos, conversations), but look at your feed now and see how much is advertisements or click-bait?
Who needs serious learners when you can get the more income from 10 year old kids? All you need is to trick them into buying pro somehow, the sooner the better.
Tbh, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. When you try and search for new courses it comes up with a message that suggests that it’s only temporary, plus, it’s not just user created courses, you can’t start some Memrise created courses either (for example, earlier I couldn’t start any Dutch but Dutch 1). You can still access and do the ones you’ve already started, it’s just searching for new ones where you get the message.
This is the message in full:
“It only looks like there aren’t any courses for that.
The courses are here, you just can’t see them… Yet.
Your time will come, young learner, when all will be revealed.
But for now, go explore a bit more.
We’ll meet again.”
very nice message, however, I for example speak from the experience of features gone in the last 5 years. And of destructive disimprovements (auto-accept, anagrams instead of learning, direct course fora gone etctetcetc etc)
That passive-aggressive and taunting message could be just another psychology “experiment” that they are perpetrating on their users, perhaps to gather statistics about what they do next, when their progress is frustrated. How does that message give the frustrated user any actionable information or in any way help them to fulfill their learning goals or requirements? And do you remember their infamous “experiment” that limited some app users to just ten minutes of learning every four hours, with the message, “Come back later, we’re sleeping?”
Moreover, in a thread about no longer being able to search for user-created courses, Beatrisy responded dryly that user-created courses are still available on the web site.
Notice that she didn’t say that the disappearance from the app is only temporary.
Tbh, I don’t think it’s as deep as that. The message basically up front says that the courses will be back in a bit, they’re just doing something at the moment. And in that message, I think it was more her just address one thing instead of hinting that the app, and then the site, will lose the user created courses altogether. For me it points to them changing something with how the courses on the app and searching for them works (whether that change be good or bad tho idk) rather than getting rid of them full stop.
I disagree, because you’ll also notice that their message doesn’t advise the frustrated app user that there are hundreds of additional courses available to them on the web site, if they are interested in them.
When considered along with everything else they’ve done, this indicates to me a very deliberate intention to deprecate and eventually remove the user-created courses completely, and charge for the upper levels of their own courses.
With all due respect, I personally think your reading to far into it. I mean, surely if that was their intentions then she wouldn’t have replied like that, instead she would have more likely dodged the question completely and instead took the time to advertise that you can access most of the memrise created courses on the app, while not mention user created ones.
I think the reason she didn’t advertise the “hundreds of additional courses available to them on the web site” is because she most probably assume that a user on Memrise, asking about user created courses most probably already knew that there was a lot of them on the site, as I most probably would if it was me replying.
Of course, I could be wrong and Memrise could be being hella shifty, which would suck, but I really can’t see it that way.
I was highlighting the fact that their passive-aggressive message in the app itself doesn’t advise the frustrated app users about all of the other user-created courses available to them on the web site. There is no reason to assume that app users know that there are many more courses available to them on the web site.
I agree with you to an extent that many exclusively app-using members may not realize that all the courses are still readily available on the website, however I think it’s safe to assume that they would most probably check.
It just doesn’t add up for me, the app mentions and hints towards the website multiple times on the download page, so it’s safe to assume that anyone who just has the app at least knows the website version exists, and then in the message it’s self it explicitly states that the other courses are still there. Therefore, imho at least, hinting that they’re still available on the site to anyone who doesn’t use both.
Also, for me there’s just too much in the message you get hinting to the courses still being there and that we can’t see them yet that it doesn’t make sense that it’s a step towards getting rid of the altogether. I’ll admit that the message is very… ominous, and not really clear at all about what they’re are doing, but I just really don’t think that all the hints about the user created courses being missing temporarily is pointing towards a shut down of user creativity. I don’t know what they could be doing, but that’s my personal take on it.
The quality of the official courses aside (I haven’t tried any of them, so I can’t judge them), let’s not forget that many languages and other topics do not have an official course at all.
I don’t know how large a portion of the total users this is, but if Memrise gave up user-created contents, all these people would have to look elsewhere. (Including people who study a mix of “supported” and “unsupported” languages.)
Not long ago I would say that this would be a massive change for Memrise, going from universal to specialized, and that they couldn’t be seriously thinking about such a thing. After the last few updates, I’m not so sure about anything anymore.
The most dangerous part is that AFAIK there is no way to download a backup of your own courses. I spent many hundreds of hours creating courses here, and that labor is essentially stolen now. Even if a good memrise alternative were created elsewhere (none exist now), I’d have to start from scratch. I can’t even independently recreate the several thousand audio samples I got a friend to record for my Hebrew course.
Everyone should have left memrise when they forced you to buy a pro membership to use features they DID NOT PRODUCE. Now they made a huge profit from the pro membership buys so why do they care if you leave now they already made a 6000x ROI since it cost them absolutly nothing. This is pure greed on memrise’s part and I hope karma gets them for all the materials they stole from good hearted people just to gain a profit. This was a long plan in the making and typical ponzi scam. Build a community and gain their trust the screw them over.
There is a way, sort of. If you decide to move to Anki, there is an importer add-on that lets you import whole Memrise courses to Anki. Including media and even your review schedules. I have tested it and it works, the audio is there. Making good use of it would require better knowledge of Anki, though, and I haven’t got that far yet.
until now) on this exporting courses to anki