Since the sign language courses aren’t structured in the same way as other languages, will they survive the change?
2 Likes
Memrise is the biggest anti-consumer company I’ve ever seen. You guys constantly manage to enrage your most loyal customers and make the weirdest decisions. Looking back over the years, it’s unbelievable how much potential has been wasted - and now this; you’re finally throwing out the window the very thing that made Memrise what it was in the first place. What the heck is going on?
Edit: I’ve read through the other posts in this thread - and now there’s talks of a new MemWorlds website. Another separate website, just like Decks. So here we go again… >_>
13 Likes
I’m too worn out from years of protesting Memrise’s ‘updates’ to type too much this time, but I will echo all of the other comments that have been made here: This is very sad to see (though not entirely surprising, if you’ve been following the company), and I think it’s very likely that this update will finally mark the end of my nearly eight years of using this website.
You can just look at my thoughts from the last time they did this. Most of it’s sadly still applicable.
As to their ‘research’ on mems use, I just wanted to point out that this is the same company who claimed that their ‘Next up’ buttons for courses on the homepage, which tell you what you ‘should’ do next (because you can’t make that decision yourself, I guess) had “a fair bit of engineering” behind them, when it literally just generates a random option for each course every time you load the page.
They’re known liars. And not very good ones, frankly.
I loved Memrise back in the day. I was extremely passionate about it, and I loved the whole community aspect. I’m a usually secluded person, who doesn’t engage in many community endeavors, but the beauty I saw in Memrise sucked me right in, and I wanted to be a part of it all. I wanted to pour my heart into creating content for other users, for your website, Memrise. I was just the kind of person your model is designed to attract, the kind your model relied on. But again and again and again, I have been punished for using your product. I kept pushing through, because I was so invested, both in my time and just emotionally. I wanted to see things turn around, to go back to the way they used to be, but again and again and again, I’ve been disappointed. I just can’t do it anymore. It isn’t healthy. A freaking website should not be causing me this sort of long-term stress.
My use of Memrise has dwindled severely in recent years from what it used to be. I find it to be an upsetting thing to deal with now, to even think about, and I just want to ‘get it over with’ every time I do, and as quickly as I can. Your extraordinary anti-consumer practices made that possible, Memrise. You took an extremely passionate user, and you turned her against you. And I can confidently say, from what I have seen personally from other formerly passionate users I’ve interacted with here (and of course the many posts in this very thread), that I am nowhere near the only such story. I don’t understand you, Memrise. I just don’t understand you.
19 Likes
If anyone from Memrise is still reading this thread, I’m just leaving this here to mention that I just canceled my paid subscription and will, after posting this comment, be deleting the account I have had for several years.
It was a great site, and I really feel like the company has fallen into the “it’s not broken, so let’s break it and give ourselves an excuse to fix it” trap.
Still, nothing lasts forever. Just to be ironic I’ll sign off with a phrase which often turned up in one of my self-created courses: 万物流転。
9 Likes
It’s sad too see you (and some of the other users) go.
This is a bit off-topic but, while I’m very annoyed by the imminent removal of mems, believing that mems will be back as promised, I’m still using Memrise to learn Japanese. Would it be possible to see courses created by deactivated users? The user page of jantelagen1973 is already emptied. 
Dear Memrise, some people are so outraged that they leave. This is not the situation that you’d like to see, is it?
3 Likes
For those of you like me who don’t like the new Dashboard layout, finding it less compact than it should be, this tip from @TinyCaterpillar back in 2017 is still useful.
And thanks for @TinyCaterpillar for bringing my attention to the release notes in Apr 2017 (then reverted here). It’s utterly ridiculous that after the outcry against losing the ability to view mems created by the others, the Memrise team has now come to the conclusion that mems are no longer needed. People could not emphasize enough how much they needed mems back in 2017, and now they have to do it again? What could be more annoying than this? Also, take a look at this poll, in which 96% of the voters wanted mems the way they were. This is the “research” you need, Memrise.
Memrise was so good in its early days, as many people have mentioned. While I do appreciate the efforts put into rolling out new features (“learn with locals” is a particularly nice one), why is it so hard for the company to maintain good old features? It’s spectacular to see so many people having developed a love-hate relationship with a web-based service…
7 Likes
I hate that I keep replying to this thread, but the more I think about the change, the less I understand it. Now, @BenWhately has explained that the temporary removal of mems is necessary for his team to bring about improvements. He’s asked us to trust him that he’ll bring back mems asap. I do believe that Ben, as a co-founder of Memrise, will keep his promise, but I have a few points to make:
-
We may not understand the technicalities involved here, but could anyone in the Memrise team at least try to explain why mems need to be taken down so that the desired changes could happen? Particularly, I understand that the big changes are happening on a separate, in-progress website known as “Memworld”, so why is it necessary to disturb what we have here?
-
I appreciate that Ben is being honest in not promising us the exact date when mems are coming back, but could we at least have an approximation?
-
In the recent days, people have expressed concerns about the future of user-generated courses. This is even a more serious issue than mems and we’re still waiting for a clearer response. Specifically, am I right to say that all language-related courses will survive all the future changes except those that are totally useless (e.g. a course that has only one user who has abandoned it)? Will any courses be left behind just because they’re not popular enough?
12 Likes
Ever since memrise decided to completely abandon the original garden theme and concept around 2015-2016 (even after promising on their old ideas page that they would make the garden more prominent and with more kinds of flowers… some will remember) it’s been in free fall.
Making the site slower and blander with every redesign, as well as making everything more complicated (need two clicks for what used to be one, less information shown at a glance on the dashboard, removing the courses page to have everything on the dashboard, etc.), feature removal (autoignore, autogrow…), removing the titles (membryo, meminence, memperor…) and creating a boring ranking system, a bad badge system, a bad app, the space theme, Ziggy, the yellow theme, creating problems for the users (example: Courses suddenly requiring either hyphens or even strict typing), removing the bio in user profiles, unimproved premium features, need of userscripts to make up for lack of customization, Decks…
And now this. Can’t say it’s surprising, but it’s always sad and disappointing. What could be and what is. Such poor communication and disregard for the userbase.
I will just share some screenshots to reminisce. If only.
18 Likes
The “pinned courses” and “ready for watering” sections look really nice and useful. Just why, why were they removed??
I like how they mentioned “over 200 languages” were available, referring to the great variety of user-generated courses, which is what makes Memrise so unique and outstanding. This is the single most appealing feature of this website. Now, on the current welcoming page, there’s not a single mention of the UGCs. Only “23 languages” are available now.
While I appreciate that the Memrise team has worked very hard to create the official courses and wants to promote them, why not mention the UGCs, making the website even more attractive (official courses for 23 languages AND thousands of UGCs for hundreds of languages AND the ability to create your own courses!!)? Where else could people learn Haitian Creole, and Pitjantjatjara, and Blissymbolics, and American Sign Language, and Japanese words of a specific manga, and Japanese with Burmese as the source language, just to name a few gems out of the thousands? Learning a “mainstream” language like French? The UGCs could take you from bonjour to the most advanced and specialized vocabularies! Oh, and I forgot to mention the non-language courses for all kinds of things there are to memorise! Do you not see the unlimited potential there is in Memrise with UGCs?
And, when will you fix the apps so that UGCs are searchable within them???
19 Likes
(Sigh) Now there’s a trip down memory lane…
Man, how I miss that old Memrise. So much more sensible and inviting.
16 Likes
Thanks @TinyCaterpillar and @Kaimi. You have both set it out more eloquently than I could have done.
6 Likes
What I really hate is that the memrise learning sessions are split up, so instead of finishing a word in the same session, you have do another one. This takes almost double time to finish my homework, and I really hate the fact it now takes over AN HOUR do to 20 words.
Please make an option along the lines of “Complete word in same session” to speed things up!
4 Likes
You could go to Settings > Learning, and increase your “words per learning session”.
1 Like
Oh wow, this brought back memories!
2 Likes
Wow, I love learning about really unique courses. It’s true that you can learn anything on memrise. It’s such a beautiful idea, memrise created this platform, but the course creators and editors gave life to it. If they remove the UGCs memrise will finally die. These courses should be backed up to some open source software such as anki. I’m already backing up my favorites. I hope they reconsider, but it doesn’t look good.
6 Likes
That old garden design is a trip back to when Memrise actually had a functional and aesthetically pleasing design. Amazing how they made it worse and worse since then.
And on the note of needing usercripts for the sake of customisation features that aren’t provided, that’s another thing. I’ve made multiple requests over the years for different font options for Memrise, particularly, serif fonts for Japanese (which are immensely helpful as they show stroke order that helps you identify and remember the radicals in kanji, which aren’t shown in sans-serif fonts), and I’ve seen it come up on these forums a number of times, along with external solutions that have been broken by site updates a number of times. Has Memrise seen fit to introduce that simple feature after all these years? No, of course not, they’d rather completely redesign the site for the nth time instead.
11 Likes
Wow, I like the garden thing. The colors are way easier on the eyes. And why would you get rid of the pinned courses feature, seriously? I would love that!
I’m so confused by everything that is happening around here.
7 Likes
So completely true. What Memrise has now is something utterly unique - why in the world would they kill that in favor of yet another cookie cutter Rosetta Stone knockoff?
8 Likes
Can I quickly come back to the mems, please?
@James_g_memrise, @BenWhately: in every → user’s settings, there is a → Download Personal Data button at the bottom.
The last time I had all my data assembled was during March 2020, but I presume you haven’t changed it since then.
I just looked at my old file and these are the categories that are found in the file:
- Profile Information
- Username History
- Other data
- Attribution
- Learning Sessions
- Subscribed Courses
- User Sessions
- Learned Items
In case you guys still insist on removing mems, couldn’t you at least include them in the personal data file?
I have created less than 140 mems myself, i. e. I usually get along fine with mems created by other users rather than having to create my own, so those wouldn’t be there anymore of course. But preserving my own ones would at least mean I don’t lose all my own mems. And I could still go through them (which I do sometimes).
It would of course be necessary for you guys to either keep mems in your databases (which probably doesn’t make all too much sense as you could then just leave them in the web & apps as well!), or include enough data in the personal data file to allow them to be (bulk-) imported once you bring them back.
Lastly, let me express that I sincerely do hope this thread doesn’t develop the way similar threads did so many times, where there was a lot of participation from you, the Memrise staff, at the beginning, which sadly declined very quickly!
6 Likes