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?
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?
Edits I make to Memrise courses are seen by all
There’s a forum to discuss the courses directly
The Memnote feature allows users to provide extended assistance
Now let’s look at the problems
No more shared Memnotes. Destroys the hours of work I spent uploading 1200 Memnotes for users of my Kanji courses
Loading audio clips is still manual meaning I have to spend 5 hours uploading clips for a 500 item vocabulary/sentence course.
Columns are fixed meaning no reorganization without destroying what’s already uploaded
Cannot bulk update meaning adding a column with new information or editing an existing column would be tedious after creation.
No direct link to the discussion forum.
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:
course creator and contributor Memnotes are visible
member memnotes are visible
membership can opt in to see all
people followed Memnotes are visible
must manually click “make visible” on each individual Memnote
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
I don’t think this is a good idea, I don’t think that we should “threaten” memrise : / I mean, I am not telling you not to cancel your membership, but just do it, don’t threaten memrise