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.
