We’re now officially scheduling removal of mems for Monday 5th September 2022.
For the original announcement for this decision and further information on the rationale behind this change, please refer to the linked topic below:
Here are answers to some of the questions you may have about this change.
What will change for me?
We’re removing the ability to view, create and edit mems across all our platforms, with the following deadlines:
Mems will be fully retired on the website (i.e. from your profile page) on Monday 5 September
Mems on the Android and iOS apps will be fully removed in the following few weeks. We’ll update this thread once that happens.
How can I save my mems and until when?
You can still save your mems until Monday 5 September 2022, with the following method:
How will you replace the benefits of mems?
We’re committed to building a rich, intuitive and effective product that is supported by our pedagogic principles. We are hard at work on a set of new features and experiences that we believe will help you “encode memories richly” as mems were doing. Please stay tuned for more updates in the next few months.
How can I leave feedback on this change?
We’ve been regularly reviewing feedback on the previous thread and across all our channels, and we plan to keep doing that. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them here on this thread. As previously confirmed, although this decision is final, please rest assured that we’ll monitor and review all feedback you share with us.
I did think you guys had changed your mind and realized that removing Mems takes away your unique selling point.
Well, it seems you listen to neither your user-base nor any good advice.
Why you still want any feedback from your users flabbergasts me - it hasn’t made any difference in the almost five years I’ve been using your system.
Oh, and kudos for leaving your users less than a week. I suppose you didn’t mind sending out emails to all users which means that only the small portion that is active on the forum had a chance to utilize the script made by @Eltaurus. Needless to say that the script (that you should have provided!) doesn’t work anymore after your latest changes on the web. But you guys probably didn’t care to read about that either.
Well thank you so much for your generous permission to scream into the void.
It’s obvious to anyone with eyeballs that you have not added or improved anything. You have, up to this point, solely removed features. You couldn’t even come up with one item for your “what you get instead” section. Not one.
This sounds permanent, which would be a BIG change from what you were talking about months ago. At the time, you were saying that mems would be removed for some unspecified period of time but you’d try to eventually bring them back, and you wouldn’t actually delete the existing mems, just make them inaccessible. The implication of this post is that you’ve fully decided to dump mems and have no plans to try to restore them in the future. As horrible as the plan you shared in the past was, this is at least an order of magnitude worse. Is this actually what you’re doing?
Also, as I mentioned in a different thread Do you guys still make and use mems? - #24 by cos mems are actually a very significant part of the course content for the Hebrew course I made. By removing them, you’re effectively eviscerating my course content. Which I spent literally hundreds of hours making.
Wait, so images which are part of the course are going away too? But the map course I use has still worked since Mems were removed…? Or maybe we are talking about two different things?
After watching this mess unfold over the past several months, it’s unreal to me that you’re even talking about building the infrastructure that can support a three order of magnitude leap in the content the Memrise infrastructure can handle, as your posting demands. What on earth are you thinking?
I have zero confidence that you can deliver “a rich, intuitive and effective product” when you have shown yourselves to be incapable of maintaining the existing one.
Hi all, thanks for your comments. I’d like to clarify a few points as I appreciate some of the previous messages were ambiguous:
All mems will be backed up and although you won’t be able to access them from Monday onwards, please rest assured that they won’t be deleted from our database. So this is still true:
We still have no confirmation that we’ll reintroduce mems, give learners a way to access them, nor do we have a replacement plan for them. If and when any of this happens, it’s not going to be before 18+ months’ time - but realistically longer than that. We’re aware that Ben’s comment made it sound like we had a short(er)-term plan for them, but as he confirmed, we had and still have no timeline. Sorry for any confusion around this.
Our position on why we have to remove mems hasn’t changed since our last thread in December: mems have been an important tool for your learning and a core part of the Memrise history, however they are difficult and expensive to keep supporting within the new learning experience we’re building, and they’re no longer providing the right pedagogical value in their form.
As we speak, the team are hard at work building and improving features that support our pedagogical principles, to help you: (1) Learn words and sentences, (2) Immerse you in videos and audio experiences, and (3) Communicate with fellow humans with no fear of making mistakes.
Sunsetting mems is necessary to allow us to spend time and resources to deliver on the above goals instead, which will concretely help us achieve our mission: help everyone effectively learn a language.
I appreciate all this might not be a good enough justification for you, but at least I hope this message gives you a clear-cut explanation and expectations.
Regarding images in courses, this is a different functionality separate from mems, and it’s still working on your courses.
We haven’t built support for image-based courses in the new experience, and currently can’t confirm if or when that will happen. We’ll have more updates in the next few months.
Thanks for your posts and trying to clarify your latest thinking.
Regarding images in courses, … and it’s still working on your courses.
We haven’t built support for image-based courses in the new experience
If I read your last message correctly, map courses (for instance) still work, but the new system you are working on does not plan to include images - so several hundred image related courses will go.
I can’t even access all of my mems now so I assume they won’t be backed up properly either.
I did’t make that many mems but certainly more than are showing now. I specifically remember making several mems back when we could add pictures and that I put effort in, that have already gone missing some time ago.
In my profile it currently says 3 pages of mems. Page 1 has text mems, page 2 is empty, page 3 has only two of my older mems with pictures.
