Thanks for listening to the feedback. The community mems were one of the main things that help Memrise stand out from alternatives.
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I’ve found it really hard to even visit memrise for months now, due to the bitterness I feel at the massive amount of hatred and contempt they’ve shown for users and course creators. So I have very mixed feelings about seeing them make yet another horrible thoughtless anti-user change without consulting the community first, and then actually undo it after the backlash.
If they’d responded to backlash against other horrible changes in the past several years in this way, memrise would be a much better service today - it was a much better service in the past. But even more, if they’d bothered to learn from their repeated mistakes, including severe ones like this, that they ought to consult the community and let users help guide what they do, they wouldn’t keep getting into this mess. Even if they occasionally fix something after they break it, they keep on breaking and breaking and breaking and not fixing all of it.
Overall, it feels like memrise is cultivating an abusive relationship with users. By occasionally rewarding backlash like this, they give just the minimum positive reinforcement to make some people believe they give a damn about the users here, when they clearly don’t even know how to. What we need is for the user community to organize a new memrise-like service, if enough people have the time and skills to do it. But this abusive relationship makes that less likely to happen, because people keep giving memrise a chance when it so obviously doesn’t deserve it.
I mourn for memrise. I loved memrise. I wish we still had memrise. But it’s gone, and this zombie just keeps leading us on and preventing something better from rising from its ashes.
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Cos - I value your perspective. Nice to see you again.
I don’t think Memrise values community one way or the other. They are focussed on other things. I’m glad that Memrise has responded in this particuluar case by re-instituting crowd-sourced mems, but it’s a one-off. They don’t appear to have any strong commitment to community. In fact, their response expresses a sense of surprise that community exists. I disagree that that amounts to an “abusive relationship.” Kraft makes macaroni and cheese. Memrise makes a learning app. Neither company is community.
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I think that this is a very astute observation, and I agree. Both Ben and Ed have Master’s Degrees in psychology. They know perfectly well what effect their actions have on their users, and how to manipulate them, if they so choose. They know that deceiving their users or ignoring their users’ legitimate questions, in essence giving us the “silent treatment,” is a form of psychological abuse, and a means of control.
The silent treatment is a form of emotional abuse typically employed by people with narcissistic tendencies. It is designed to (1) place the abuser in a position of control; (2) silence the target’s attempts at assertion; (3) avoid conflict resolution/personal responsibility/compromise; or (4) punish the target for a perceived ego slight. Often, the result of the silent treatment is exactly what the person with narcissism wishes to create: a reaction from the target and a sense of control.
The fact that Memrise is a company does not mean that it cannot have an abusive relationship with its customers. Not all abusive relationships are domestic ones. Commercially abusive relationships can also exist, especially when the customers do not have any viable alternatives to dealing with the abusive company.
Selling people a non-refundable subscription, and then fundamentally and materially altering the product delivered, such as removing community mems, is certainly not fair dealing, and I don’t know any other way to describe it, other than abusive.
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cos: I think what you’re saying about disdain for users applies to much of what is on the Internet these days. I don’t know why, whether it’s coders/programmers under pressure to make constant changes, ANY changes, in order to maintain a reason for their continued employment, or whether it’s the switch for many users from desktop to phones causing upheaval, or whether it is that feeling of “I have addicted you to my product and can do what I want,” or whether it’s companies selling to a big buyer and saying, “I scored, who cares what happens to the web site?” For examples of the latter, see the formerly great Digg.com and Myspace. I’m sure anyone on here can think of others. Memrise is about my favorite site on the Internet, so I do hope it’s not heading in that direction. I am happy to see the return of mems, but saddened that it takes the virtual version of massive street protests to get the attention of people who should be more responsive to their most loyal and enthusiastic “citizens.”
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I have a suggestion. Leave the mems visible but make an option so you can’t see the others. Would that solve some problems?
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Well said. It would not bother me tiniest bit if seeing community created mems was an ‘opt-in’ option.
I know that moderating the mems is time-consuming business, but surely there should be a some kind of flagging system, even though I acknowledge that it would be vunerable for abuse, unless there was some kind of time-out system that a user could flag only a certain amount of mems in some specific time frame.
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I love mems.
I think many posters on this thread think that offensive mems are only a problem if seen by children, or that adults who are offended by some sexy mems would simply choose to opt out of seeing mems entirely.
I think you guys are missing the problem. It’s not cool to come across racist or sexist or homophobic or violent mems while learning. I want that to be extremely rare.
I know that Memrise isn’t going to pay staff to screen millions of mems. And even if they did that, moderators might catch nudity and stuff but a young intern in a hurry might not have the training/background to recognize that a reported mem is based on antisemitism or homophobia or something.
If you are an experienced Memrise user and you are saying that you’ve never been offended by a mem (this was said a lot on the other threads), you’re kind of saying that you personally either don’t mind racism etc, or you are oblivious. Stop that.
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What if pubic mem-creation is a privilege that users earn at different levels by learning words? You’d still have problems with kids taking fake courses to hack the privilege, but something like that would reduce the amount of crap that needs moderation.
@BeaTrisy - would Memrise like community input on this issue or is your team addressing this as a software/AI task?
If I start getting offended every time I see or hear something I don’t like, my life may become really hard and this does not only concern my memrise experience 
I do mind racism etc., but maybe it is worth considering that different people may understand (or misunderstand) such things differently, and that everyone is entitled to have an opinion, not just me… There are some mems which I feel like flagging, but most of the times it is enough to shrug them off imho. I don’t think that trying to make the world sterile is the best idea.
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not trueI
just haven’t seen any inappropriate mem
i don’t know why i haven’t seen any
but it means you have just been insulting me
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Yeah I really wish we could have them on the many Memrise language courses. I don’t think they realize how helpful mems are on courses like Japanese where you have to not only memorize a new writing system, but then the words they create. It’s unfair to expect me to have to make my own mems when there are literally no others to help me.
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I saw such mems, but rather seldom. Accent on seldom, very seldom. I’d flag any time probably even mems (a la romzez) containing nothing but a half-naked woman as memory support for 好or some other easy stuff … I’d be also not very amused to see too many naked men serving as mems 
, although, let me think…depends on how fit they are …
but from here to accuse 98% of all memrise users of racism, this is a bit far- fetched, to say the least… (maybe you should reconsider … no naked men/women but guns drones ok?)
you forgot about community created courses…
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But I didn’t accuse users of necessarily being racist. I said they were oblivious. Are you not familiar with the meaning of that word? The above replies are consistent with that word.
And here’s the thing; nobody gets to vote on what is offensive to somebody else. It isn’t decided democratically. It is quite common for a majority group to not perceive how something might be disrespectful or offensive to a minority group. If it isn’t part of your history, you are quite likely to be unaware in some cases. That doesn’t mean you are bad. It just means you don’t know.
Everyone is oblivious to different things. If I try hard enough I can find offense in anything. If in that mindset I get to decide on the fate of a million mems I am going to see a million offensive mems. That’s not what we want.
Let’s say I find cars or modern consumer goods offensive. Environmental awareness is growing so that’s not such a ridiculous position to take. How should I deal with the mems on this site that feature them then?
Let’s say I am also from a country like Saudi Arabia and find no offense in something you might find racist or sexist. How do you envision us both using the site?
The only way I can think of now to deal with this is to vote on mems. The more upvotes the less likely it is the mem is offensive to a majority of people, the more downvotes the more likely it is.
To ground the discussion, perhaps you can share some mems that you find offensive in some way?
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i find big cars offensive
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I really appreciate that for once Memrise actually listened to pushback against a bad decision, but we still need to bring back auto-ignore and proper course forums.
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nevertheless, i noticed today there was a tick box under the mem which allowed me to not use mem’s, at least for that course
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