You’ve done it again, Memrise!
The buttons showing how many items to review on a spaced repetition website are gone. The progress bars for streaks are gone, with no way to view them, as far as I know, other than to go through a review session, which is a real PITA when you want to confirm that several different goals are done every day. That’s not even going into all of the issues with the ‘next up’ feature, which many users have already pointed out here.
You say you’re clearing clutter, when in reality, the courses are taking up just as much space as before, but now with a whole lot of empty, white nothing on the screen. But hey, we get to push an extra button to do anything now! That’s fun, right?
The way you treat your users has, over the years, steadily gone from annoying, to frustrating, to downright disgusting. Seriously, are you just trolling us at this point? Was this whole website just a prolonged prank to get people invested in learning and building courses with your site, just so that you can repeatedly pull the rug out from under them later, and pretend that it’s an improvement? It’s an uncharacteristically illogical thing for me to seriously consider, but after observing the way this site operates over the past few years, I can’t help but feel this way.
How in the world do you have the gall to say “Today brings another improvement to memrise.com” after the reaction to the last ‘improvement’? You saw it, yes? You know that an enormous amount of users, including many long-time users like myself, are angry, yes? You ignored it, sure, but I suspect you did see it. Is that statement as deliberate a raised middle finger as it seems to be?
Building my courses on Memrise has been an extremely time-consuming and laborious task. I’ve done it because it felt worthwhile; because I felt I was building something that could help me and other interested users for years to come. I’m having more and more trouble convincing myself to bother anymore these days. Maybe this is your goal. Maybe you are just trying to get users like me to ‘take the hint’ and leave, because we’re not wanted anymore. You seem only interested these days in targeting children who want to play a silly game and pretend that they’re learning something serious, throw some money at it, and then eventually lose interest.
I think I am finally at the point where if I see an alternative to Memrise that I’m happy with, I’m jumping ship. The way you treat all of the people using and supporting your site is downright shameful. I’m enormously invested in this site, so I can’t leave right away, but rest assured I’ll be looking. I’m tired of having to reinvent my studying routine at a moment’s notice. I’m tired of randomly starting my days by reading lengthy threads of (understandably) angry posts, just so I know what the hell’s going on. I’m tired of posting things like this myself, only to be ignored. You are not listening to your users. That is a lie. Otherwise you would not be so consistently going in the wrong direction.
(The old) Memrise may have been what jump started my Japanese studies, but my passion for learning Japanese has, for a long while now, been in spite of Memrise, rather than because of it. At this point, I just long to once again have a healthy learning environment, like how Memrise used to feel for me years ago.
The most frustrating part about all of this? You could change it. Right now. You could stop sabotaging your own site. You could, god forbid, roll back these (I have to believe) intentionally horrible changes, and you could start treating your users with anything other than utter contempt… But you’re not going to, are you? I think the best thing I can hope for at this point is for Memrise to eventually self-destruct, and serve as an example to other companies of what not to do. And that makes me very, very sad after spending so much time here…
Side note: I couldn’t help but cynically laugh out loud when I realized that the ‘next up’ seems to be randomized every time I refresh the page. “fair bit of engineering”. Yeah…