Memrise Release Notes - 27 Apr 2017

@knarusk, we’re not happy. Not a single like for the announcement, not a single comment positive about the change and almost 30 likes for @TinyCaterpillar first post and 100 comments and growing about how this is the worst thing ever. I think that’s useful info for you as product manager. What’s next? All user-created courses deleted January 1 2019 to save bandwidth? Who’s to know? Please clue us in to your thinking.

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A post was split to a new topic: Want MEMS back? Please vote in this poll

Well, judging from the mood of the “few comments” in reply to the changes, I wonder what kind of “a lot of feedback” you’ve had. Or perhaps, like with a lot of other feedback, you’ve read it and decide to go the opposite way! Well done.

Don’t forget that you’ve got to where you are today because of, in no small measure, the user base and the propagation by these users.

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is this true or just a silly hoax? can we have some member of the team saying some truthful words about what made memrise memrise? i want my mems back…please, people, vote in the above poll…

https://www.reddit.com/r/memrise/comments/681nxn/in_an_april_27_update_memrise_removes_the_ability/ ;

"retirwen:

I’ll tell you a greater reason why they did this. There was this big bad bug that let anyone edit and delete everyone’s mems. Some trolls exploited the bug because when reviewing some words myself, in a German course, by checking again the mems, i can assure these were edited into a very offensive and disgusting ones.

This was a measure taken because they had no idea how to fix the bug or have no intention to install better features. Or maybe they were in the process of an improvement, who knows, why are they such proudy asses to not tell us the truth."

see also: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/67wu00/fyi_memrise_has_nuked_mems_and_our_learning/ ; there sb. replies: "[–]life036 16 Punkte vor 20 Stunden “Get on the AppStore and kill the ratings for this app; it’s one of the only things devs respond to.”

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This is from two hours ago. So glad you have the same courtesy to respond to us… oh, wait?

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Wow. How are people supposed to “learn how to make good mems” if they have no EXAMPLES of mems from other people?

I’ve been making my own courses (and thus never seeing anyone else’s mems anyway) for years now but this shows just how much Memrise has changed over the years and just how much it doesn’t care about its users — or about anyone’s learning. Add this to the fact that they still after all these years (and I’ve been here for what, 5 years now? 6?) haven’t fixed some extremely basic problems with the site, and that on Anki you can actually change the font size of your flashcards (I’m almost blind, the Memrise phone app has too small font, causing me to learn the words worse) and I’m done.

This summer, if Memrise hasn’t actually improved in any way by then (which judging by the last 3 years of updates, it probably won’t), I’ll be transferring all my courses, at least all the ones I’m personally learning from, to Anki or some other place. We’ll see if I stay there.

By the way, for you people who want a dark Memrise app theme on your phone, just invert your phone colors. It should be in “settings > sight disability” or something like that.

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i’ve got wrong some 15 items hoping for one mem. None, nichts, null, nada, zilch

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It appears Memrise is hiring more and more linguists and polyglots to its team rather than coders or, really, anyone with technical skills, if what “retirwen” said is true.

“The team is onto some really great stuff. How great, I couldn’t possibly tell you yet. That’s top secret. But it got me thinking. In all my months of scouring LinkedIn for language jobs, I hadn’t seen anything like what is going on inside Memrise. Why was that?”

Maybe…could it be…because memrise doesn’t behave like a respected company, doesn’t reply to its users, cowers, steals money? HMMM.

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Well I for one won’t be renewing my pro-membership. This reminds me of Firefox, something that started fantastic but with every update just becomes more and more awful.

I’m predicting the next update will be the complete removal of user created courses because of a lot of “feedback” saying that they’re not good. Then we’re stuck with these god-awful courses created by Memrise staff.

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53 posts were merged into an existing topic: [Off-topic comments from] Memrise Release Notes - 27 Apr 2017

Going to try that out right now!

Someone should corner the market and make this site/app thing of the past.

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I tried the feature where you can switch to another mem, just out of curiosity, and the original never came back, plus there were no more options. My gosh. Who are the people who are testing this stuff and then saying, “Oh, what a great idea”???

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well what else is there to understand from this situation… i wanna see those ofensive mems … i am really curious what was so ofensive about them… i am pissed because i have rec this website and app to so many people …

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memrise now feels like being in a dead mmorpg

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Voting in the poll above isn’t going to change anything, but going to the AppStore and leaving a 1-star review is a genuinely good idea. It would only take a hundred or so people to make a big difference to the rating for the latest release.
If everybody on this thread does that (leaving a review making it clear what the reason is), they are much more likely to take notice.

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As someone learning Mandarin, user created mems were a convenient and helpful way to help me remember and associate the definitions of radicals and hanzi to new vocabulary. I feel like I was able to learn far more effectively with these mems than without and I chose a mem for every new word I came across. Now, as someone who is a bit over half way into HSK5 vocabulary, the only way to do this for the rest of my course and for any theoretical future courses like HSK6 vocabulary is to hand create thousands of mems. To make my own “more personal” and “more powerful” mems than the ones I could have previously spent 20 seconds to find requires:

1.) Searching through a dictionary for each hanzi in a word/Searching through a dictionary for each radical in a hanzi
2.) Choosing a definition that I want to use for each hanzi/Choosing a definition I want to use for each radical
3.) Creating a memorable sentence using those definitions that relates to the new word
4.) Finding an image that corresponds with the sentence I wrote

Then repeating this process about 3 thousand times from now to the end of HSK6.

The time invested into creating all of these mems myself would outweigh the time that the mems would save. With user created mems gone Memrise has solely become a more limited and buggy Anki with an arbitrary level system. This update makes Memrise a less effective tool for many of its most frequent and dedicated users to potentially save little Jimmy from seeing something that might make him uncomfortable during a portion of the 20 minutes he spends on the service before he quits. Any learning software that prioritizes someones feelings over its effectiveness to teach is failing at a fundamental level.

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i’m quite sure that they will also delete the leadrrboards

than what’s the difference with a dumb stack of cards?

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I agree, if I wanted to spend that much time personalizing my study (Which I will agree is more beneficial, but is it worth the time investment?) why wouldn’t I just build my own Anki deck?

Give me one good reason to use Memrise over Anki…

The only real differences between Memrise and Anki at the moment are; if Anki decides to push out a terrible update to their program; I am not forced to install it, Anki is completely free, and Anki doesn’t give you hints at the answer through multiple choice.

Seriously…can anyone think of a good reason for me not to go and install Anki right now?

I took a break from Memrise to go learn from another program for awhile, but after seeing this change, after my program runs out of lessons, I am guessing I won’t be coming back. Even if they do add the mems back; I am still going to have to weigh the risks vs rewards, as many have pointed out they might decide to gut another part of the website, which would be devastating if I had any REAL time invested. Consumer confidence in a product is a terrible thing to lose when your product forces down updates.

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40 votes (so far) to bring back mems, ZERO to keep this update. LISTEN TO YOUR USERS MEMRISE!

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