That’s great! Thank you very much!
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Thank you for pointing this out!! But now that this is out in the open, they might foil us by changing this too!
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You know what is worst, I have sent Tweets to both Ed Cooke and Memrise´s Twitter account. Neither has replied. I feel frustrated, is like talking to the wall, a child of 4 or a plant. Memrise is like living with a Chihuahua dog, it is cute and all but out of the blue it starts doing s#|?. You know that arguing is not an option, since there is no reply from its side and you know probably that if you make the animal understand the same result might come again in the future.
I was once captivated by Memrise simplicity and usage; I love explaining my students that knowledge was like a flower: fragile and beautiful, it required love and time to take care but at the end the pleasure was worth the effort. I loved making the connection between words and flowers, they decay if you don´t take care of them. My students loved Memrise too. They used to compete saying they had the biggest garden.
Nevertheless Memrise has never ever been consistent on what it does. I actually change mobiles due to Memrise: I went from Apple to Android since at the time the Android version was way better. After the app because a Frankestein of flowers/rockets/space/planets/and this ugly thing that evolves I went back to the web base. At least it didn´t have any dumb planets ( BTW I still don´t get the dumb planets idea). Soon I discovered that when typing in Japanese, my answers would get accepted before I click enter, but since I have IME my answer would appear in the next typing exercise. I thought it was a bug, and I grew used to it, now I discover it is a “feature” and it can not be disabled. Ok fine, I just erase my previous answer, no biggy I am a grown up man and can live with that. Then the answers in the bottom. Man! They are spoon feeding you the answer. Where is the challenge now?
I just had a glance of Memrise Beta for a week or two. When it became Memrise 1.0 members went nuts since many features were never ported into the new one. I remember the biggest issue was not been able to talk to users. Then it came a few useful changes like bulk upload which was praised and then it reached its peak to go downhill.
Many have pointed out: Memrise looks to be targeting kids from 5-10 who would forget about it in a week. In the meanwhile, long time users like us are left behind with CHILDISH interfaces. I used to recommend Memrise since it looked professional, I even said: Duolingo? What? GO to Memrise, that is a real company. Now I can say that Memrise is a company whose business assessor must be dumb kids who just left school and are trying to innovate something that is not broken. ( no offence to young kids).
Memrise should either disappear the flowers and planting and watering and mutate into Planets/ Discover and Protect? But you can not have both!
For those of you who are learning Japanese you should try iKnow.jp It is a great site with an amazing app. Everytime they make a change they explain WHY they do it. They answer your doubts and the site runs smoothly.
Memrise you are doom.
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Yes. I never bought into the explanation they gave at the time of making the change, namely that there were people in some parts of the world who were confused by the concept of ‘planting a seed, watering and growing it’. I would like to know just how many parts of the world (that have access to the technology needed to use Memrise) have no understanding of the concept of planting seeds and growing flowers. There can´t be many, if any.
Instead, for the app, they introduced a confused mishmash of space rockets, planets, master spies and undercover missions, and bots… and then, bizarrely, retained the seed planting and watering cycle and imagery for learning new words/phrases which they previously said lots of people didn’t understand. That doesn´t make a lot of sense to me.
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So I want to complain but there won’t be an answer or anyone considering my opinion. So I’m just going to say that I am now going to be looking into Anki.
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IMHO Success should be measured by other things, other than conversion to Pro.
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Continuity - being present every day for a certain amount of time (I have asked for a badge for a 1 year achievement many times before - not to be confused with learning streak on one course).
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Progress through the different levels in a course (eg Memrise Italian 1).
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Progression from the first course-level to the next level of course (eg to Memrise Italian 2 etc) right up to Ievel 7.
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Exploration of other courses.
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Contribution in the Forum - especially helping others when they have problems (thus enhancing the learner’s experience and saving the MemRise team, effort and keeping users interested).
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Longevity - how long they stick with it (it’s not just about the numbers but about staying with the product).
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Recruiting or recommending it to others - (don’t know how they would do that except they could look at Twitter and Facebook links used or by adding a “Recommend to a friend” button).
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Willingness to create courses (with notice taken on popularity).
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Willingness to support existing courses as a Contributor
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Willingness to support abandoned courses that are still popular (what I call Custodian or Curator).
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Number of followers and friends (a form of advertising).
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The creation of Mems for others to use (are we still allowed to do that?).
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The creation of “[Course Forums]” for our courses and willingness to support learners.
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The contribution to official MemRise Language [Course Forums] often saving the team effort in replying.
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Finding and reporting ambiguity or issues (ie proof-reading) official MemRise courses - thus helping the team improve their product by a quality audit.
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Number of years of active participation on both the learning platform and the Forum.
And I might think of other ways.
All these ways, I think, show participation and success far more than a conversion to Pro which might not last.
Cc @lurkmoophy @Lien @BeaTrisy @MemriseMatty @JBorrego @Joshua @MemriseSupport
PS Many thanks for your support or endorsement with your “likes”.
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I totally think that this is what they don’t get. It’s as important to get people to stay, as to get people to go pro once.
For example: myself: I took the 1 year membership in june this year, after considering it for a long time. I will not renew it. If many people do it (testing it, paying once, getting p**** off and leaving it), it’s not “sustainable”.
Keeping happy those who already are paying, should be their first goal. Otherwise, the pro-memberships may seem to grow now, but it won’t last. Things will begin to go bad in about a year, when people stop renewing their membership because the Memrise-made courses don’t have enough content and are not updated fast enough.
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The thing is, anyone signing up for Pro recently won’t know how it was a few years ago and may decide what they see has ‘improved’ recently.
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“Hey boss, our customers hate the new change we made and they’re talking about cancelling their paid memberships. I think we should admit all the money we spent on this new feature was a waste and go back to the way things were.”
THAT conversation is never going to happen. My paid membership is up in April. Kiss it good-bye.
Best of luck making your company profitable.
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I just cancelled today. I hope others threatening to do so actually follow suit in order to teach Memrise a lesson.
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One more week and still no answers from Memrise Team.
Hey Memrise, here are a bunch of people trying to provide feedback… can you hear us??? I guess not. Zidgy must be deaf.
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subduing through silence, again…
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Let´s not die this post. I am still waiting for Memrise answer to such a horrendous Frankenstein.
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No sign of any change. They’ve got 8 million-odd regular users, apparently, won an award for innovation earlier this year, 25 members of staff currently and 7 jobs they’re recruiting for. Not one of them is a customer services role, all of them seem to be technical, which is a huge mistake.
As far as they’re concerned, fewer than 200 people have posted on this thread, including multiple posts from the same person, so we can either: 1) bugger off to somewhere else, like Quizlette or Anki; 2) shut up and keep using the service; 3) talk amongst ourselves and keep using the service.
They may yet discover that just because they’ve been in profit for the last year or so and have also recruited lots of new members who are young children, doesn’t mean that that profit will last if their target market remains limited to such young children. Parents will cancel subscriptions when their child gets bored or struggles to get past a beginner or lower-intermediate level by themselves, without the motivation and self-discipline that older, more independent language learners have: after a few months, or a year max., if that’s the length of their subscription, parents will cancel on their children’s behalf.
Their business model is doomed to fail if they focus entirely on hoping young users and their parents forget to cancel the contract until it roles over next time, and more will come along just like them to cover next month’s costs when the original batch do cancel. That is a very sketchy business model that will not last in the long term. Whereas in fact they should make an effort to cultivate the users who made this website so popular: professional linguists, language teachers, and university undergraduates and graduates studying languages. Possibly also A Level students, as I had my part-time job with regular income, bank account and direct debits set up during Sixth Form, but those people will probably be smaller in number than over-18s. The majority of people maye CBA to write on forums but they will vote with their feet and take their money elsewhere.
It’s down to a university acquaintance with pro membership recommending the site to me two years ago for our middle eastern languages degree at Oxford that I have pro membership. I spread the word among students on my course in my year, in the year below, to people on masters courses, to our university academics, and many of those people went on to set up accounts on the basis of my recommendation, some of them also became Pro-members. Each one of us spreading the word, the must-have online account for vocab building, and the people we told who then spread the word themselves to others, are the ones Memrise needs to try to win back the loyalty of. Because there are new first year undergrads and masters students on the beginner language course as of the autumn term that’s just ended, asking for tips from people like me, final-year language students, and I’m not recommending Memrise to those people anymore. Anki and an Excel spreadsheet are less subject to mad updates deleting stuff I’ve cultivated for two years.
@MemriseSupport Memrise: you can do something about this: start communicating with your customers. Hire a customer services representative. Just one who monitors the forums. Is that too much to ask, really? Just one member of staff? Otherwise, you will notice that we will continue to leave your site. My subscription renewal date is in the diary: I’ll cancel just before it rolls over and then it’s over to Anki for me. Unless there’re signs of change, I may not cancel if you start to sort yourselves out. Until then I will continue to tell everyone at Oxford University studying languages who I know (and my word does carry some weight as I’m research staff as well as a student): stay away from Memrise, it’s shockingly bad how you pay up, hear no communication and then they delete features and stay silent on matters like the future of your own vocab banks.
Just my twopennyworth.
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Terrific, thoughtful post, Lydia.
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After working several days with the “improvements” of the last update, I completely agree with the community fellows who say it turned from bad to worse. In my opinion, the changes were made by people who never used themselves memrise for a longer period of time.
My first language is German, and here we have a saying: “Gefährlich wird es, wenn die Dummen fleißig werden” (roughly “we are in troubles when idiots take the initiative”).
Best, Auguste
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Thank you!
Please do not work hard on something no one requested - you screwed up something that was working fine. Even for the courses that I’ve completed, ‘NEXT UP’ up is always ‘Classic review’, no matter how many times I ‘classic review’ it. Please let us know how coercing the user to repeatedly review a course requires a “fair bit of engineering” and how it’s a “carefully picked” session when the session keeps repeating. This improvement is a fair bit of nonsense.
If you want to work hard on something, work on speeding up the web site.
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