Terrible! What is the reason why people use Memrise? THE MEM! What did you destroy? THE MEM! Memrise, you see, the users don’t like this idea. I created a couple of hundreds mems only, because I wanna help people, who learn. It think off 10 minutes on some mems, only for create a nice mem! Additionally the Memrise Community could make the ideas for the next update.
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Exactly! One of the courses I’m involved with - Important Words in Greek - has about 23k users, has been around for ever, but probably only has around 20 users who do (or used to) create Mems, myself included. So, presumably, an absolute ton of users rely on other users to provide Mems for them? With that feature gone, I could see a lot of the more passive users just giving up and going elsewhere.
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I imagine Memrise like a naughty child:
“Arbeite nicht bis zum Umfallen! Und vergiss nicht, dich rechtzeitig auf den Schulweg zu machen!”
“JAAAAA, Mamma, klar. Aber vorher muss ich bloß noch was tun.”
Also, ging Memrise in die Schlafkammer und dachte, “wie kann ich alles kaputt zu machen heute?! HMM, weiß ich! No more mems! ja, sehr gerne. ich bin wunderschön. werde ich alles zunichte machen! ooh, Zeit für Schule! Tschüss.”
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Do you wanna see how many mems I have created in the last three years?
Yup, two thousand seven hundred and ten 
I can’t guarantee that they are all good, but some of them were quite popular, although that feature has been removed, too. I can no longer see how many “likes” my most popular mems got 
Oh, and - on memrise’s request - about two years ago, when they made the first set of memrise-created courses, I created a whole bunch of mems for the German courses they made, some of which got a LOT of likes. Seeing as those courses no longer really exist, I deleted those mems, so the total number of mems I have made is more than 2,710.
But the people who were learning German with those courses at the time (around the time of the Syrian refugee crisis, with a lot of people coming into Germany to find a safe haven) might have really appreciated some of those mems…
I guess memrise doesn’t care about that section of the learning population, either???
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Seeing this makes me very sad:
CHOOSE ANOTHER MEM - what a joke that has become…
The only bloody mems I can “choose” from now are the ones I made myself - what kind of choice is that???
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Tag them!!!
There is absolutely NO WAY you guys decided to remove mems to keep people from getting offended. I don’t know what your goals are, but this could have been solved with a simple Enable/Disable mems button. If you guys really think this is a step in the right dirction, I really wonder if you thought this through.
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I don’t think they did, because if they had, they would have gotten rid of the “CHOOSE ANOTHER MEM” suggestion.
Every time I see that, it makes me want to weep and rage and scream 
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In other news, YouTube found some distasteful videos and from now on you can only watch videos you’ve created.
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Seems reasonable 
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Why not just allow users to decide whether or not they want community mems shown to them?
It could easily be added into user settings somewhere and would keep everyone happy.
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This change doesn’t assist learning, it impedes it!
Creating mems requires real brain work, and it’s tiring. I know from experience that my brain can handle learning more items per day when I can choose mems created by other people.
Similarly, sometimes I am able come up with a good mem, and sometimes I can’t. Either way, I like it when some other person has already created something that works for me. I love it when someone has already come up with a better mem than the one I was going to create. Some people are very creative at finding a photo that connects the foreign word to its meaning.
Mems were the thing that made Memrise awesome. You’re taking that away. Are you really going to make Memrise less useful for thousands of users because a few people were offended at a handful of graphic mems? It would be SO much better to make it easy to remove them. (Mems that are lame, not useful, or in a third language can simply be ignored…)
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The more I think about this, the more I come to doubt that the given reason for this change is genuine.
Anyone who’s been frequenting Memrise’s forums for a while now can probably recall a few times where limited resources on Memrise’s end was given as the reason for why a feature couldn’t be implemented, why a feature had to be removed, why a bug couldn’t be fixed in a timely manner, etc. And indeed, I’ve accepted and understood that Memrise is in fact a small company, and can’t be expected to do everything at once. That in itself has never been a deal-breaker for me.
Presumably though, this would have also been the reason for why the mems couldn’t receive (what they saw to be) sufficient moderation. Yet now they’re supposedly going to personally review -all- mems on the entire website? There would be…what? Hundreds of thousands of mems to go through, if not more? With more constantly being made. And we’re expected to believe that this is going to even be on their priority list, when they’re already having trouble finding the time and manpower for other things?
It’s simply not going to happen. That line about being able to see officially selected mems in the initial post might as well not even be there, as far as I’m concerned. At best, I see them going through what happens to be there at the time for the official courses -only-, before losing interest and starting to turn their attention elsewhere. All mems on user-made courses, and any that are made on the official courses after their sweep will just be out of luck.
To me, this makes about as much sense as someone saying, “My house is dirty, but I don’t have time to clean it. So I’m going to bulldoze the entire thing into one big pile, then rebuild it from scratch, so it’s nice and clean.” If you didn’t have time for the cleaning, why are you taking an infinitely more time-consuming route?
I’d be very happy to eat my words on this later, but unless Memrise has recently added a robot to their staff, it’s not going to come even close to fixing the damage that was just done with this change. This new system that they’ve now put in place demands many, many hours to be put into reviewing these mems, not just initially, but continuing into the future too, as more are made. I don’t believe for a second that that’s going to happen, and as a result, Memrise has now lost something that I considered to be absolutely essential in making Memrise what it is…or rather was.
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Came to the forums to find a bug report for why none of the courses I’m taking had Mems today… I /loved/ the user-created Mems that explained the linguistic root of the words. I’m so disappointed. I guess I’ll have to actually look into Anki now.
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the original Memrise does not exist anymore, and that’s
"official". (Memrise did not invent either SRS or flashcards)
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This is the other thing about Memrise. When you make a change that members derail against, you run and hide; you behave like cowards. @Joshua has been posting well-after this thread. He couldn’t pop-in and say, “We’re looking at the feedback”? I’m not a pro-member (and I never will be, more so now than ever), but for the people who are paying you to provide service, taking their money and not providing service is grounds for a lawsuit, like people have mentioned in other threads.
Users are giving you, Memrise, so many opportunities to explain yourself, to behave in a kind, generous manner. TinyCaterpillar and others are correct in claiming you have a history of this. Polyglots are not idiots. It takes years of dedication and the most valuable resource: time, to learn a language. If you’re bamboozling yourself into thinking you can bamboozle us, you’re sorely mistaken.
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Wow. Now I have absolutely no reason to use this website. Thanks.
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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.
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i can only see this as a cost saving decision, when i joined memrise in march 2014 mem’s were a sale’s argument
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