Thank you for putting this into words.
Me too, I agree there will be a good replacement for the functions of Memrise that we’ve loved. There are many SRS on the market, perhaps some will add Mems (even if they have to rename them), and overall value User contributions.
It was made clear by the community call last year, that Memrise is guided purely by metrics and ignores the simple fact that in matters related to learning the metrics are inherently skewed.
The number of novices always outweighs the number of experienced learners, simply because everyone starts at the beginning, but not everyone advances past it. From a metrics standpoint, this means that the appeal to newcomers is naturally more important than the needs of long-time users. As a result, we get the dumbing down of the interface and removal of features. This, I think, is the ultimate reason, why so many learning platforms look so much alike and provide so little value for people, who are serious about their studies.
The more depressing part about this trend is that even though it makes it easier for people to pick up learning languages, without the means to advance past a certain stage it also makes it even easier to put the learning down after a little while. In the end, it only increases the dichotomy between beginners and experienced learners, skewing metrics even more and increasing the rate at which tools for advanced users are being removed.
A practical conclusion would be to leave the platform and move on. If you are on this forum, you are in a minority, therefore your opinion doesn’t matter. The reaction to all the latest changes here was unambiguously negative, and it didn’t affect anything in the slightest. Whatever Memrise is doing next, they are not taking your interests into account, so the chances are you wouldn’t like the result.
You’re absolutely right. This is not the first time Memrise goes only after the beginners and sets them up for a failure (because the metrics don’t really lead to helping newbies get anywhere useful).
There are a few things, that have been holding me here.
1.My own course I’ve made and a few other high quality user made courses. Please, das the addon Memrise to Anki work again? I read there were some problems encountered. It would really be awesome to just get my favourite courses (at least the one I spent so much time creating) and go.
2.Nostalgia. I still remember the wonderful Memrise Beta. With the flower analogy (and beautiful simple design), with the mems, with a great system that solved overlaps between courses. I just need to accept this is gone. But at least I am not the only sentimental one, I’ve seen a few more around 
3.Lack of alternatives. This is less and less of an issue with every new alternative. Anki is great and I’ve finally learnt to make typing cards, which removes a huge plus from Memrise. I can finally do it just as easily (almost). Linguno is growing and could be a great opportunity for many people in need of conjugation drills and also vocab by cefr level (it is still just beginning though). Speakly (in spite of technical issues) has a better premade content than Memrise is creating. So do some of the vocab apps by some coursebook publishers (most are bad though. The market is different than it used to be.
You’re right, Memrise couldn’t care less about the learners, who have helped it grow. Time to go. I just hope to find a working addon, I don’t have the time to copy everything myself.
In fact, there just was a development:
http://community.memrise.com/t/how-to-use-memrise2anki/70021/36?u=eltaurus
I’ve seen this message and haven’t understood it at all. . It’s as if you were speaking Mandarin to me So, is the addon working? What is a “dev console”? I save the decks with the .csv ending or the addon, please?
No, the addon still doesn’t work, but there is a new script that at least makes up for some of its functionality. I’ve just finished my own variation of that script, converting it into a Chrome extension.
Please check the thread again, I’ve tried to provide detailed instructions on how to install and use it:
It seems no emails were sent and the only people in the know are those who found this Forum. (And it’s still hard to find.)
I’ve been working on formatting the courses I’ve brought from Memrise to Anki for a while now. If anybody is doing the same, maybe we could collaborate in some way. I’m planning to upload the template for the cards somewhere once I am satisfied with the result. It looks like this at the moment:
I also think I know how to make the collection of mems, which were downloaded when it was still possible, to work with Anki in a way similar to what we had here. So if anyone is willing to implement it, I’d be happy to share the ideas.
After reading all those comments, I understand that the only way to learn with Mems is going to another website.
If someone hear about a language (Chinese) learning website using mems, please let the community know 
Anki has Mems, see @Eltaurus’ answer above yours. However, the real power in Memrise’s mems was that you could use other people’s mems which IMHO is a true learning booster.
AFAIK Anki doesn’t provide any means to see other people’s mems.
And apart from the fundamental concept to have mems provide something that helps stuff to stick better, mems are (sigh, were) also being used to provide an alternative translation which I’ve come across countless times. This is simply due to the fact that non native English speakers learn from English because there’s just so much more (or better) content that teaches from English than from other languages. I recall a 5k French words course that a fellow German took and pretty much 90% of the times when I was wondering about the exact German translation for something, I found a mem by him.
I’d very much like to move away from Memrise. As tremendously good their original idea and concept was, they a) have continuously disassembled their own product and have b) been incapable to develop anything new with the required diligence - all new concepts have been carried out sloppily, to put it nicely. And, sadly, their official courses’ content confirms that sloppiness just as well.
I’ve simply lost my faith that whatever they come up with next will make anything better. But I simply haven’t found anything that runs on Android, provides community courses, (community) mems, a community network, a means to create your own or amend other folks’ existing courses and that doesn’t look like a children’s toy which is why I’m still using Memrise.
Memrise, if you’re still listening – this is why your data-driven approach to product development is failing so spectacularly. Data and analytics are never going to tell you this story, but as the many comments on this forum show, it’s not an uncommon one.
Sadly, you’ve fallen into a classic trap that kills a lot of tech companies, but the part that makes it especially tragic is the number of people trying unsuccessfully to pull you out of it.
Yes, Olaf breaks down exactly why I still use Memrise, and will jump ship at the first sight of something that fills this need and includes some sort of notes/mem-esque feature (and can be used on a computer without Admin capabilities, such as a work or library computer) (even if it’s Memrise itself that makes this change). Ideally it would be a site that doesn’t tell you it’s probably going to blow up at any second so you’re probably wasting your time contributing anything to it, but that would just be a bonus at this point.
I must confess to some schadenfreude over seeing the trickle of people who aren’t on the website every day or week or month slowly realizing they lost all their work and coming here and tell Memrise off. I only wonder how many astonished emails are and will be exchanged with Support from people who think something’s just buggy or broken, and then get told what’s really what. I don’t for one second think that this forum reflects more than a tiny percent of all the people who are and will be furious about this move, and am sure that the reputational hit, the destruction of trust, just gets bigger every day.
The is no method that would work uniformly well for any deck and any language, but, with a bit of javascript, Anki cards can be configured to display mems from kanjikoohii site, for example, or from some other similar platfrom.
While that is cool in itself, it probably is quite tedious to setup and doesn’t allow users to share their mems “out of the box”, so I doubt that it would work without further development on the Anki side.
I did a bit of research on Anki yesterday. It seems that Anki has been around almost 20y now, and it’s completely open source, pretty cool! I didn’t find anything about the original developer or the team that is working on Anki now, quite strange.
I also do think that Anki is very powerful, but also pretty much convoluted, and its appearance mirrors those ~20 years. Last but not least eco-system is decentralized, with AnkiWeb and AnkiDroid and the such and there doesn’t seem to be a fixed team. I’m really torn …
Years ago, I thought the plan to put Community Courses on another platform (Decks) was a sad move, as people would not find them.
However it has been hard now for people to find them (and this Forum) unless you search diligently on the web rather than on the App.
How good it would have been if they had created Decks as a frozen MemRise in the initial era of the pastural landscape, Mems and linked Forums etc.
Any chance of ressurecting the old MemRise/ Decks and moving Community Courses there?
I wish somebody managed to scrape the mems before they were gone. They probably could have been re-hosted and implemented with a user-script.
They said they still have them on the backend, so even if memrise allowed us to download them now it could still work. 
I was only commenting on the ability to see other’s mems, which can be helpful by itself and is not that hard, provided there exist a collection of mems suitable for one’s purposes. Creation and uploading of the mems would be significantly harder to implement and require some external server to store all the community mems, but it can be realized as its own thing without modifying Anki itself. Of course, if one were to use AnkiWeb to store this data, the respective functionality must be added to the core of the code, which is even more serious task (although, considering that Anki is open-source, is not completely impossible).
As far as I know, all versions of Anki except AnkiDroid are supported by a single guy (albeit with a help of community commits). His name is Damien Elmes and he is quite active on Anki forums and its subreddit, so it’s not hard to get in touch.
Maybe I am misinterpreting what you mean, but the system is centralized. AnkiWeb is the site that is used to store all the data online: decks, addons, personal study information. It serves as a basis. All other things - desktop Anki, AnkiDroid, Anki Mobile - are just client applications for different operating systems and can all be linked to each other through the AnkiWeb account.
We have some of the mems stored here:
Of course, it’s just a small fraction of everything that was available on the site, but maybe you’ll make some use of it.
Its pretty absurd that they would go through all the trouble of creating such an advanced community forum and then fail to listen to their diehard users who freely create innovative courses for them.
If only we could pull together enough disappointed users from these threads to crowdfund building something as good as the 2012 version of memrise…
