I don’t suppose this is a democracy but I’d like to add my voice to the mix anyway. I am EXTREMELY apposed to this decision.
Edit: I always felt like I was helping out the community when I added a mem to a word that didn’t have one. It gave me a sense of pride, no matter how small, which was just more motivation to come up with a good one. Now I know I’m the only one who will ever see it? I’m very disappointed with this.
i can only see this as a cost saving decision, when i joined memrise in march 2014 mem’s were a sale’s argument
I realize you are wanting to try to appeal to a wider audience and you don’t want inappropriate mems but can’t you just have this functionality be the default while still allowing us the option of enabling the ability to see all mems as an option?
@BeaTrisy
Please reply…
This seems like a fairly simplistic solution.
Maybe you could allow people to decide if they see the community (which may offend) or only your personal + curated memrise list.
Your plan seems to be removing your service’s selling-points until it can be described accurately as “a worse-anki meets
a worse-duolingo”
What is it you dislike so thoroughly about your own company, that you would go to this length to end it?
Memrise,
I’m trying here. I’m really trying. However, ill conceived decisions like this are making me question that effort.
It’s been almost 1 year since I began creating a large set of courses for people wanting to learn Japanese using your site. You might have noticed it since it’s the most accessed thread on your forums by a factor of four. Literally hundreds of hours has been spent creating, uploading and using those courses. I actively promote this content and by extension your site to others on various social platforms. Why do this when I could spend a week on Anki and have almost the same material?
Now let’s look at the problems
I get that I’m only one user among tens of thousands and one content creator among hundreds and that within only a language among dozens of categories. Still, I’m a patient man. If it’s bothering me it’s bothering other much, much more.
TALK TO YOUR CONTENT CREATORS AND USERS!!!
I get that if you tried to get consensus on everything then nothing would get done. However, removing such a vital tool without warning is the opposite extreme. Memnotes, as people are pointing out, are great because they are shared. It crowd sources notes and explanations that exceed anything one person hope to create. For those that memorized to write THOUSANDS of kanji via Remembering the Kanji website can attest that shared stories (that site’s versions of Memnotes) were vital to that.
You made a horrible decision today. Consider adapting that decision. Here’s some options if you want to still moderate what’s shown:
There are bound to be others to mitigate the problem of user generated items. However, don’t basically torpedo the entire system. Work to improve your site, not destroy it what makes it great.
Apparently, authors can create entire courses with text, audio and images of their liking, but best shield users from the author’s Memnotes. If an author or course contributor wanted to offend, they can do it directly in the course itself.
which could mean only one thing: this “measure/feature/improvement” is not about “offensive content”… as some users already observed above…
This is an absolutely terrible idea. Being able to see other people’s mems and collaboratively share our learning techniques was one of the best and most useful features of the whole system. It was the main thing that made Memrise better than all the other flashcard-based websites and apps.
I never once noticed an offensive mem. However, if they were a problem, why not have a ‘report’ button and recruit a corps of volunteer moderators from longstanding members to root them out? I’m sure there are plenty of people who would have been happy to do this for nothing.
I’m glad I never got around to buying a Pro membership—if I had, I’d be demanding my money back now. It would have been like buying a first-class railcard from a company that subsequently replaced all its trains with trolleybuses.
As it stands, I shall now be on the lookout for a new flashcard website: one like this one used to be two days ago.
Nukemarine’s awesome Japanese courses are what brought me to Memrise (and upgrade to Pro). Please listen to this guy.
Also one request from from me: Would it be possible to add a night mode with a dark theme to the Android app? Often the only time I can study is in the evening so my eyes would be grateful 
I was going to say, no, that would not make any sense as being able to access thousands of community-created courses, and being able to make your own, is or was the main selling point of Memrise and killing our access to those would make about as much sense to the company as shooting itself in the face repeatedly. But now it seems they have number crunchers with no sense running the company so anything can happen.
We can look at the numbers as well: how many active users do the official courses have and how quickly is that growing, versus the community-created ones and draw our own conclusions from there.
Also, this can now be considered a thing of the past. Or maybe it was a reason for the change? Children forced to do something can be counted on to try to sabotage the thing: https://www.memrise.com/teachers/
Perhaps we’ll see some news articles over the coming time: Memrise trying to pivot, but is it killing itself in the process?
I’m sure Memrise will post something, “It’s short for MEMORISE. Nothing to do with mems!”
Also, I’m normally above public shaming, but I know a polyglot who recently started working at Memrise. I can’t believe he’d go along with ignoring the userbase like this.
Thanks for all the work you put into the SGJL courses, I really enjoy them. I really hope memrise will reconsider this decision.
This just indicates that Atikker replied directly from his mail program, it does not mean anything important.
Ah, thanks, I didn’t realize that!
I don’t quite understand the necessity of this measure, just can’t believe that it would take more than 2 hours a week to answer the complaints about inappropriate mems… are things really that bad?
p.s. and yes, the next step logically is to make user-created courses visible only for their creators.
woah! I only have made 15!!
Of course.
In fact, I think that’s the only thing that will make a difference. Well, not just cancel, but quit Memrise.
Otherwise what admins will see is: “Oh, people complain and whine and rant, but they keep coming back and using Memrise because they find it useful. So they will put up with this change. So we can ignore the complaints and whines and rants – they keep using the platform and they keep giving us money.”
Put your money where your mouth is.
I’m always a little amused at people who talk about “being pushed to quit” or “this is the last straw” or “thank goodness for Anki” because I imagine 95% of them will keep using Memrise anyway (after investing so much time in it), so those are empty threats most of the time – and I’m sure management knows that.
I’ve created over 4,000!
Well, yes. If I could easily export my databases and all the Mems I made, I don’t think I’d stick around if this change is truly permanent. It’s not as easy as that though…