so that is 1
result : all mems gone
Why? In what way is this a good change for the users?
I’ve been slowly plugging away at Japanese and I NEED mems. I can’t remember a darn thing without them, because the language is so unlike English that I can’t just think “Oh well this looks like it comes from suchandsuch” (e.g. lumière & illuminate). I don’t think I’d be able to remember very much hiragana/katakana without them either, although at least for that I can turn to Tofugu since they have the decency to have their own visual mnemonics.
Implement age restrictions and a downvote/upvote system. Bring back mems and let the community sort them out. There’s 0 community aspect to learning otherwise–even worse than Duolingo, which at least has the comments section for each question built right into the lessons (unlike having a separate forum completely severed from the actual courses that, honestly, is hard to navigate).
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what consumes tremendous capacity is the bringing up to each user of the whole amount of mems of each course the user is taking, storing the liked mems, etc. (How many users did that?)
I am not a programmer, but I do have some databases at my fingertips, which databases are updated completely on a weekly basis usually (in the sense an IT checks the process; at what rate a full refresh is done automatically I dont remember now.) In the busy weeks a full refresh is made automatically every half of an hour and the IT people throw a look themselves every evening (or something similar; our IT is explaining the things to us along these lines ). Ok, ours is a small company not using the cloud, but having its own servers, the whole set, redudancy etc. Imagine what happens with one huge database which gets new entries let’s say every minute and is accessed incessantly by some hundreds of thousands of users or even more… And imagine you have a set of huge databases with interconnected entries (or how the he** do they call that.)
It does make sense, remember that for the last months we were not able to see all the mems for an item, only the first seven (theoretically) and that for the last year or more mems were not shared among courses as they used to be. (Somewhere in these fora you’ll find the complaints refering to this measure - those studying Chinese observed that lack first - you did not have the mems you had in the Hanzi lesson listed also in the pinyin level, or something like that). Not to take into account the disappearance of the image feature for mems 4 years ago…
nonetheless, I want the mems back
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I find it astonishing that Memrise is so silent and no reaction or explanation …
I learned a lot with the mems and I also want them back. I did not understand why people were complaining because I still saw the mems. But I started yesterday a new course and wanted to remember some difficult words using mems, There were NO mems available. That is not the way I can remember. I am a visual person.
I have seen lately a lot of changes and some I REALLY DON’T like. You changed the Dashboard banner. I liked the sun showing day and night. I don’t like the plain purple color, OK, I can live with that change. There were other changes that affects words with 15 or more characters that can’t be typed anymore. I installed a script, so I got around your restriction. I can’t learn if I don’t type or write the word. And more changes that came, too many to list them …,but I won’t accept NO mems. If all the user created mems do not come back I will let my Pro membership run out.
You are a company that only functions if you make revenue. I do believe with that mem stunt you will lose a lot of your Pro payers. But it seems you don’t care. otherwise someone in your company would have already posted something. This is the lousiest Forum user support I have encountered.
I am very frustrated …
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Were the sides of the hexagon supposed to represent different learning features?
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Here is the new topic for the poll
It at the moment has 103 votes. All but one of the users who voted in it want to have the change reverted. Please vote if you haven’t already. And Memrise staff, please look at it and reconsider, or see it as a strong invitation to better explain why you have absolutely no choice in the matter.
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Really?
You are upsetting (and potentially losing good amount of) 99% of your users in order to please 1%.
Quite a descriptive MEM, don’t you think?
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I tried Anki, but it didn’t work.
I could install it, but I couldn’t download from memrise.
Maybe because I’m on W XP?
@IchigoSmof
Here’s the XP version.
https://apps.ankiweb.net/downloads/current/anki-2.0.44-alternate.exe
Let’s look. Do we have a democracy here? Or this project is not for us?
Oh no! What a terrible decision! Mems are a great aid for language learning. You may struggle to remember say, that in Spanish ‘lavar’ means ‘to wash’, but a Mem such as “You wash in the lavatory” connects foreign vocabulary with a familiar English word.
It would be unreasonable to expect any language learner to think up Mems for thousands of words. Thus the community shared Mems, and the most helpful ones were voted up. This to me was the whole premise of Memrise.
If Memrise are concerned about inappropriate content in Mems, a proportionate solution could be introduce downvote or report buttons, and delete Mems that receive many negative votes.
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Thank you, but I already have that. It’s importing memrise courses which doesn’t work.
I also already installed “MemriseCourseImporter” and something form GitHub.
I could download shared sets from Anki itself, though.
[Speculation ahead]
The only ‘good’ reason I can think of of why you would do this is to heighten the relative value of the official courses vis a vis the user-created ones, and then the ‘meet-the-natives’ feature, or other future features, which are only available to paying users, nicely convert non-paying users to paying users. But that kind of thinking just doesn’t make sense. The more value you add for your users, the higher the chance your business will survive and thrive. Instead of the situation before where we had hundreds of flowers to choose from and the ability to create our very own, you want to go to a model where we can only choose one, a pretty one I’m sure, but it will feel pretty sparse. And what are we to do after we’ve finished the course?
You’re trying to raise your conversion ratio. That’s smart. But try to do it in a smart way. Doing stupid short-sighted things like this will cost you. Just do what the smart kids do and let your users vote on the quality of courses and mems and mem creators, make a course search thing, improve the SRS, make the course creation process better, make your official courses as good as they can be, and so on. Try to become the best in class so potential (language) learners have no choice but to come to you, no matter if they’re learning Spanish or knitting. Don’t make them frustratedly search for alternatives with nonsense like this until the inferior alternatives aren’t so inferior anymore.
Another good reason for this is if you really got very many very offensive mems, but if that were so you should now be building a better way than this to deal with it and telling us about it.
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Brilliant post, Arete!
You mention all the most important things. Now we just have to hope that we get some response from someone high up at memrise 
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as far as i know paying members don’t see each others mems either, it became worthless for japanese
I just found you on memrise because I remembered you in connection with a Chinese course. I found this information:
You have created FIFTY-SIX courses! WOW!
And thousands of mems…
Almost six thousand five hundred mems!!!
I cannot believe that you can possibly feel happy about the decision outlined at the beginning of this announcement. All those mems you made are presumably also no longer visible for people who come here and choose your courses. How do you feel about that?
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i also wonder what the result of the brexit will be
memrise is british and lots of memrise users are not british
people tend to bd relaxed about the brexit, but we could all be quiet mistaken about it.
it doesn’t look to be a big deal, because after the referendum it was business as usual, but that was because the brexit didn’t happen yet
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Possibly could you make an option? Like you can or can’t see others’? Make the default can’t though…
Since it seems like they’re trying to raise conversion rates with the new Memrise official courses and making community courses difficult to find, why don’t they just hide non approved mems from those courses instead? It doesn’t make sense to break all the existing community courses because a few new users saw something offensive.
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Please change it back! I really loved this app, but without mems, my progress has stalled. The people who contribute them are so clever, they come up with really helpful ideas and give me more details about what things actually mean. I’ve tried coming up with my own since this happened, but it takes me a very long time, especially learning Japanese kanji characters. Honestly, without mems, this is basically just a fancy flash card app. Mems were the best feature. I used to recommend this app to everyone, but now I don’t, because it’s become more hassle than help to me. Instead, all my friends are giving me recommendations to try other apps, so I’m probably going to leave Memrise now. Coz really, without mems, how can you call it "Mem"rise???
And just so you know:
- I have never been offended by a mem
- If I ever saw a mem I didn’t like, I just choose another one!
- Just have a report button, the community here seems really cool, we can catch the bad ones
- Other people’s ideas reinforce my learning, they are stronger than just my own mems!
- You are not helping my “memory superpowers” - you are destroying them with this kryptonite!
I made an account here just to comment and vote for mems to come back, I really believed in this app and want to see it restored, but this is my act of desperation. If you don’t reconsider this terrible decision, I’m sorry, I’m out.
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