@ale_c Hold the phone. Is the “new experience” going to supplement or replace the current one?
Put another way, it seems if you’re now saying that all of the people who have invested their time and focus into image-based courses may actually lose all of that content in the future as well?
They’re totally going to delete all the user-made courses sooner rather than later anyway, we all see that now, right? This appears beyond inevitable to me at this point, despite what a deathwish move it would be. As Memrise stands now (with user courses), I have a reason to continue using it multiple times a day despite completing all the Memrise-official German courses ages ago. If that were all this site had had to offer, I would have been done with it in two or three months total, and would have forgotten about it shortly thereafter. I never would have signed up for a pro membership, let alone twice. Right now, there is an–for all intents and purposes–endless supply of knowledge here. I can learn HTML and the world map AND study German beyond the rudimentary courses provided by Memrise. It’s great. Frustratingly, it seems more and more like they want to take a place that nurtures curiosity and exploration and turn it into Slightly Better Duolingo where everyone learns the same thing in the same fashion, with a beginning, middle, and END because I guess the idea is that planned obsolescence is supposed to work with knowledge now too or something? That products have to constantly change even if it’s to their detriment? It’s really sad and incredibly frustrating, and I really hope someone has the wherewithal and technical skills to recreate this elsewhere before all this content vanishes into a black hole, pleasepleaseplease .
Capitalism always eats itself in the end. Be sure to back up all your courses, friends.
Please forgive the soapbox, I just needed to get that out so that I can start dealing with it as well. And I hope someone recreates this website format elsewhere. Apparently 60 million people think it’s fine the way it is.
@DW7 @cachedout I’m definitely not saying that simply because it hasn’t been discussed yet. Yes, the plan is to eventually migrate all learners onto the new experience, but the format community-created courses will take there simply hasn’t been decided yet.
Please rest assured that all your courses, regardless of whether they have images or not, will keep working on the “classic” Memrise website.
Thanks for spotting this. This was actually a very recent issue where not all mems were showing properly (but they were still there on our side). Our team has now fixed this so you should be able to see all your mems again. Let me know if you keep having issues.
@ale_c Thanks for the reply and for the transparency.
I would urge you to reflect on the fact that you’re currently selling subscriptions that are, in part, based on an offering of content such as image-based courses. People are investing time in learning, and others are investing time in creating those courses (which, again, you are earning money from).
At the same time, you seem to also telling us that the future of those courses remains, at best, uncertain because Memrise has launched this effort without sufficient planning as to the future of that content.
I appreciate that from your perspective, this change might be many months down the road, but the people who are investing in those courses are making those investments today – not eighteen months from now. Please consider making a decision here in the very-near-future and sticking to it. Thanks.
Why did you ever introduce Mems in the first place as you obviously consider them worthless in the learning process?
But you will obviously include audio and video clips in your language courses, so images should actually be as easy.
i could not see my mems for months… today i can see them again, and realized, for the 1000th time;
removing mems is one of the worst moves of team Memrise, if not the worst idea of all times, and, for f* sake, you did have plenty of destructive ideas until now…
I hope when time comes people will en masse oppose this useless BS called Memworld.
I have already expressed my opinion on this topic in the past. I will not repeat everything, besides how disappointing that is …
Surely you don’t expect any of use to “rest assured” about anything at this point. Your company’s word appears to be as good as Monopoly money anymore, and even if your only concern is (pretty clearly) the bottom line, the sort of thing being taken for granted, customer loyalty and basic respect for us as more than numbers, actually does still matter. The millions of hours of people’s own time and labor (that they often paid you for the privilege of expending) that you’re willing to just blow up like trash? Wow. That’s…pretty freakin’ brazen to act like anyone is irrational to expect more of the same.
And sorry you are on the receiving end of this frustration. It’s just so maddening that no one else seems to give a rat’s enough to even respond, especially from a company with a history of being so comprehensively built up and supported by its users. It’s just such a bad look.
That is absolutely not true. As I already said recently on this very thread, I spent a lot of time creating mems as part of my Hebrew course, and they are a core part of the course itself, not supplementary material. That course ceases “working” as soon as mems are no longer accessible.
We’ll this is incredibly disappointing.
I hadn’t used Memrise for a while but I had continued to recommend it to people while raving about how great the ‘mem’ feature was.
Upon returning to the app after moving to a new country, I was confused about why the mem option was no longer showing. I figured it’s because my premium membership had lapsed and the feature must have now been restricted for premium members only.
I almost purchased a lifetime subscription because I loved the app so much in the past, I still remember words thanks to mems that other users had created, and I found the user-developed courses were a wonderful supplement to support my learning!
I’m glad I came on here to check whether mems actually still exist.
I won’t be purchasing any subscriptions or recommending the app to anyone anymore. Not only is it no longer worth my time or money (or that of my friends/coworkers), but I have no desire to support a company that clearly does not listen to its users.
I’m quite devastated about this, given I had such a high opinion of the company and the app, but I suppose that’s the world we live in. Plenty of other language learning apps that I could spend money on instead.
I’d like to thank whoever originally introduced mems and allowed us to have the great experience that we had.
If that’s the same person who decided to remove them, I hope you will reflect on whether you have made the right decision and if this may be the ultimate downfall of what was once such a wonderful creation that you had built.
If someone else has taken over and made this decision…please get in the bin. Lol.
I canceled my yearly subscription and won’t be returning until Mems are brought back.
All the mems I had written down over the years are gone. Of course, I only found out about it now. No warning, nothing. Now Memrise has no meaning for me. What similar applications can you recommend?
There are too many of those, so it would probably depend on what exactly you are looking for.
I, for one, would not stop recommending Anki, which I switched to after abandoning Memrise. It gives you full control over what you want to put on your cards - mems, notes, videos, links to websites and dictionaries, whatever - and how to display all of this data.
It comes with a downside of being a bit overwhelming and unintuitive at the start, but this phase passes quite quickly once you start using the app.
Also, being a free piece of software, it has a great community, and there are guides, forum discussions, and youtube tutorials on pretty much every common question. Since I managed to replicate all essential Memrise functionality, I can offer help with that to anyone interested as well.
yes. someone needs to find a way to scrape all the decent courses and make them available somewhere else in a way that the community creation aspect can live on. I’m really regretting paying for a membership now that it’s clear where they’re heading. I used to recommend memories to so many people. That ended when they started with all these changes a few years back.
Many of us have just lost all trust in the platform at this point, and until we see that your organization (not you- its obvious you’re listening), we’ll fully expect one day to see all the courses we’ve created which we’ve put millions of collective hours into to vanish. If that happens you’ll lose a lot of paying customers including me, a former diehard promoter.
btw, I also recently opted to not buy the lifetime subscription because of these kinds of changes, which will really make it harder to learn mandarin where memes are incredibly useful. Very sad to see memrise betraying its core users like this. Please pass our sentiments along if your bosses won’t fire you for it. Cause it feels like the new bosses are just a bunch of cold VC investors. Did they take a bunch of VC money, cause it doesn’t feel like Ben is still the one in charge as of several years ago.