Important Update: Upcoming changes to Memrise community-created courses

Welcome to the Forum! Memrise Announcements
635

We have to just face it. Memrise is a small company and they had to make a choice to focus their few resources on something they think is more important. Now, I disagree with their business direction as well as the justifications. If they can’t scale a simple app to handle both simple content creator courses and their grand ideas they are doomed.

Anyway, this language learning system model is new and lots of competitors and free services soon available so most of us have a lot of good choices, so all’s good.

I will stop supporting Memrise, only reason I paid Pro was to help them out as a small company but that does not seem to be on their agenda now to help us back.

5 Likes
636

Why the hell would Ziggy get them users? That thing was f*** ugly and clearly needed launching into space without its helmet. Besides, it’s not like it was a personalisation thing, like on Khan Academy (where I had assumed they got the idea in the first place) where users can’t upload an icon but may choose an avatar that ‘evolves’ with the points accrued.

Well, it’s a dirty word on here now. It must be asterisked for sake of the sensitivities of our genteel readership.

2 Likes
638

Initially I gave Memrise some time to listen to such clear feedback and postpone the deletion of community courses, but it’s clear their minds are made up, so I’m joining the mass #MRexit. It’s regrettable, because I’m halfway through several community language courses that I wish I could complete, but Memrise has made that unfeasible by deleting offline access to them.

Beyond that, though, is the fact that I paid Memrise for a service they promised to provide and now they are still taking my money for the rest of the term but refusing to provide the promised service or return my payment.

Memrise has lots of users for their official courses because they’re the only courses that beginners can see and they also have fancy video trinkets, etc. However, after a year or so, those new users will discover what we all have discovered: Memrise has no official options to further your language education beyond the basic stages. Only the community-based courses do that.

New users haven’t had a chance to discover those (often superior) courses because Memrise has hidden them. However, eventually they will reach the end of what they can learn in Memrise after 1-2 years and be forced to move on. So it will be delayed, but those users will start falling off unless Memrise fixes the problem.

If Memrise is already maintaining all the infrastructure for a Decks, mobile-ready website, wouldn’t it cost them almost nothing to freeze the current version of the app and port it over to Decks so that users can still have an offline app option? No updates required, nothing. Just leave the app as is and make it available to those paying Pro users for as long as it functions.

Seems to me that is the least they could do.

10 Likes
639

There are so many other options, for example just publish the REST APIs for anyone to write cool/better Memrise apps. But it won’t happen, there’s some danger in letting the crowdsourcing innovate and bypass their features.

640

Sad though that comments to your CEO’s blog post are not being published, so questions don’t seem to be what you guys are after.

4 Likes
641

Edited my comment. Thanks

642

I believe, that they believe this to be rather strategic decision, not decision about recourses at all. They are not upfront about their rationale here.

As long as the Decks is not going to be having good enough perspective in terms of monetization and profit, than they would actually promote active competitor.

Cudos to the E Cooke to recognize the need to dedicate some resources for the guys of the nostalgia phase. I feel from his wording that he actually cares to some extent… the thing is, that in his/theirs opinion supporting Decks any more than this might be contraproductive. So that’s where the “painful” decision for them might be.

They sincerely do not see any future in our projects at all … only liability and competition. In such scenario it is actually admirable for them to uphold any resources on it.

If we want them to act positively for Community Courses, then we have to convince them, that they are mistaken about the potential of this platform. Given both the decision they made and wording they used, they really are honestly convinced that this direction has no use and no financial future for them. They act just only in the name of pity and politeness towards us (however unlikely it looks to us). And that can bring their support to us only so far (as long as we don’t compete).

So we have to either convince them, that they believed their own statistics without realizing the context, and there is more to us and this Decks division than meets the eye -> prospect of millions of users obviously. Or we have to keep believing in that and pool our forces elsewhere. (In order to get better features, app, offline etc).

4 Likes
643

…maintaining both kinds of experiences on a single platform creates many difficulties. It slows and complicates our development of new experiences, it holds back our product design, and it can introduce bugs and confusion for learners on our community-created courses.

That makes sense. After one of the recent updates the cards were suddenly super big and I was wondering why. Probably has to do with some new development for the official courses. Still, a separate app for Decks would solve this. The app wouldn’t even need a lot of features and not a lot of future development.

I wonder if one reason why there won’t be an app for Decks is that there are still problems with downloading community courses. I tried to download some a few weeks ago and most of them just threw an error message at me and I still can’t use them offline (even after re-installing the app).

a very small proportion of learning on our mobile apps now happens on community-made courses.
after a careful analysis of how and where community-created content is being learned, which is overwhelmingly online.

You removed the ability to search and add community courses in the app several months ago. New users who only use the app won’t even know that these courses exist. You created the condition for this statistics on purpose and now you’re using it to justify this decision. No, this is not a satisfying reason.

I also miss a statement about refunds in this blog post. We were promised in this thread to get a fast reply from the help desk, but all I got was a template message basically saying “we need a bit of time to look into your request, we’ll get back to you after March 18th”. That’s pretty unsatisfying.

7 Likes
644

I still think if their engineers can’t solve problems such as supporting simple custom courses, how could they implement fancy new features without bugs?

2 Likes
645

I’ve been on Memrise since the beta and I’ve been through the ups and downs of the site. I am an advanced learner of Japanese and have learned over 15k words with you site. So thanks for that.

Your site is great for vocabulary grinding - the advanced stuff. But your courses don’t offer advanced vocab at all. I’m fairly certain I’ve only ever used user made courses, right now I’m only actively learning user made courses. I just can’t see anyway in which I’d continue learning on memrise if the community courses go away.

So I’ll probably be one of the people who move over to Decks. But at the same time I’m still concerned as to what Decks will work like.

How does Decks actually work like? Is it just a memrise clone for community made content? Because if so, why make the new site? You get free content made for free with the current set up.

And if it isn’t, how does it work like? Is it supposed to be like Duolingo’s Tinycards? Because if so, please don’t. Tinycards is a terrible platform to learn more than a handful of words/concepts. It’s not good for larger and more advanced courses.

Thanks.

5 Likes
646

You know, at this point I think it’s less of a case of them not knowing what they’re doing and more the problem being that they know exactly what they’re doing. I imagine this disregard for the community courses has been a long time coming, they just needed to spend a while generating the statistics to make it look like a perfectly reasonable decision.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the app will get any better – previous updates have always broken it more than improved it. Still don’t see how hard it would be to have two sections on app, or even two apps. They have one that mostly works – simple as copy paste to do the same thing but for the community courses.

6 Likes
647

I can not tell you the exact date, but it certainly was done much earlier. Say, about two years ago.

3 Likes
648

Similar thing happened to Couchsurfing a few years back.

A few greedy people hi-jacked a community-funded and created website and killed almost everything that was good about it.

Memrise, you’re doing the same.

3 Likes
649

Very disappointed. Please reconsider. Don’t see the logic. Surely you don’t even have to pay for hosting when the content is already downloaded on my phone? It’s like wanton cruelty. Cui bono?

1 Like
650

Well, it was a good fight everyone. I’ll probably try to stomach Decks while I study for my proficiency test, then be done with it. I’ll also actively promote against using Memrise to my friends and colleagues in the future, perhaps others will do the same. They think we are a small community here, but we are all over the world, and we are the people who learn languages to proficiency. We have our groups. Let this company die in this bed.

8 Likes
651

This is what I send them in return, thanks for the link anyway.

_Thank you for finally an official statement. I wanted to wait and see what the actual decision and motivation was before deciding my best course of action. I myself follow language classes every week and the books we use have custom made course on (atm) Memrise to help us learn and study, since I commute whenever I learn the courses I had committed to using the offline mode and bought a year long subscription back in September 2018. _

_Now that I have read the official statement I regret to inform you that I will also cancel my subscription soon as the move to Decks is implemented and will no longer use Memrise and it’s stated wonderful courses of language learning because it doesn’t provide support to the learning method I use during my classes and it doesn’t teach you grammar so I feel that the Memrise official courses are still very limited even though stated otherwise. _

I do feel cheated for committing to buy a year long subscription when 6 months in half the features (and basically the only ones I and many other use) will partly be moved to a free version or simply removed/unavailable. Basically I am able to enjoy Memrise (as I had purchased at the time) for 6 months after which these changes will occur and I will apply for a refund for those last months because had I known these drastic and sudden changes were about to announced at the time of purchase I would’ve bought a shorter and cheaper subscription.

Because these changes are sudden; they are announced less than a month before being implemented, and drastic; the courses offered in the Memrise app will be drastically decreased, these courses (soon moved) are the only ones I use and had planned on using and so Memrise itself has become obsolete despite having paid for it for a full year, I feel like my subscription contract has been voided and broken on your side with these changes. The promised courses (this includes the custom ones) and services of Memrise that I had paid for an entire year had been under the assumption that the product and services would remain similar as at the time of purchase. Instead I find myself wondering ‘what the heck did I pay for’ when 6 months on half the product goes missing and becomes available for free anyway.

I wish you good luck with your business, as a customer I feel that I no longer want to be part of Memrise when these changes will be implemented. I will see what purpose Decks could offer however I am not technologically naive and foresee many problems in my situation as when commuting I am dependent on public wifi. A constant requiring internet connected website for me takes away the entire point of learning ‘on-the-go-whenever-wherever’. I am also certain these decisions have been made far before being announced the measly month we users have been given to deal with it and this to me is trust breaking because as you have said so yourself; you try to be clear and transparent in your communication. I feel this has not happened given the time schedule and no longer want to pay for a service which pulls nasty surprises out of its hat without giving proper time of thought to its users before hand because 3 weeks is nearly not long enough and unacceptable in my opinion.

Good night, so long an RIP Memrise.

8 Likes
652

You should empower your community of volunteers with better tools to upload audio and images easier, to make grammar review and with tools aimed for the users so they can give their feedback and flag words with problems. Instead, you choose to kick them to a handicapped web platform. I spent countless hours and money (with premium subscription and scripts) to fix problems that could be easily fixed by memrise and i now i get this big rip off as thanks. Shame on you.

6 Likes
653

Speaking of my own experience, I think there’s a good chance that you’ve misinterpreted some key statistics. With the caveat that I’m not a statistician, and I haven’t seen the stats anyway:

You may have understood that a large part of my learning takes place on the website because I spend a lot of time on the website. It does not. I use the website to add my assigned daily vocabulary words to my courses, because it is not possible to do this via the app. However, the app learning experience is far superior to the website for actually studying. I never study on the website.

Additionally, because there’s no obvious “join course” button, and no way to search for courses on the app, I need to actually start the course on the website and “learn” for a few minutes, in order to join. This skews learning stats towards the website, even though I’m not using the website to learn.

Further, I spend a lot of time searching for courses, as the search function doesn’t work well (so far my biggest gripe about Memrise). This time isn’t included in my website “learning”, is it?

Finally, I’d like to point out that users may come for the introductory courses, but they stay for the community courses. No one is going to pay for Pro for five years to re-learn Spanish 101 over and over again. By splitting off the “advanced” community courses, you leave your Spanish 101 graduates with no obvious place to go. Directing them to a different learning experience in the Decks ghetto won’t impress them. These may be lucrative customers, but they are temporary customers.

I would like to re-iterate my earlier suggestion: Memrise should embrace the fact that its core value-add is elegantly simple, albeit low-growth: A spaced-repetition flashcards app for community courses.

I myself may indeed someday learn another language from scratch, and would consider using Memrise’s curated content for my first steps. But I would consider these products alongside DuoLingo and whatever other products are on the market at that time. Given the fierce competition, I likely would not feel compelled to pay for the service, whichever I choose. And I am not “locked-into” Memrise service because I have used Memrise in the past. Downloading the DuoLingo app is no trouble at all.

In short, I have no hostility towards Memrise at all, and I understand that business is business. But I’m not going to listen to arguments that you are serving me better with this new service. The new service means that you have decided that I am not a valuable customer.

Farewell.

10 Likes
654

I have work experience in a pretty big and trendy company (it was not an IT company, but quite close). For the last 5-6 years it was like: “let’s build a mobile app, let’s build another mobile app, because everybody’s using them, everybody’s leaving desktops and that’s where the future is”.

Kevin, if you are interested I can show you some real quotes by my ex-CEO. And I saw this stat, I know that it’s true. It was encroachment of mobile users, like 50/50 for the last years.

Also, for example, I remember some news about The New York Times. Editors office was urging its journalists to use mobile app, because this is what its users were doing more and more.

So when your chef is telling about “overwhelmingly online learning” (by the way, mobile apps are also online, no?) I’m just wondering what kind of BS it is.

4 Likes
655

Anyone interested on Social Networks → please let’s use hashtag ‪
(#Memrise) #Memrexit
Instead of
#MRexit
(that is tangled with some Mr. Exit)

#Memrexit ! let’s go it go with a memorable Mem!‬

2 Likes