I believe that the “popularity” used for ranking courses is currently a simple measure equal to the total number of users a course has ever had - including, typically, the 95%+ of users who try learning a few items and give up (sometimes in disgust!).
A better measure for popularity might be the number of users of a particular course who actually work through at least 5% of a course’s content.
It seems increasingly obvious to me that this is the case. I mean, the founder himself said the other day on a podcast that he tried to sell the “legacy Memrise” (user-generated courses with associated spaced repetition features) to some company but it didn’t work out in the end. Clearly they aren’t interested on it since it doesn’t generate enough business growth. And, if you at where they are directing their efforts, it’s a completely different kind of language learning experience, geared toward very casual users:
https://www.youtube.com/user/memrise/videos
From this perspective, it makes no sense to spend limited resources on maintaining something that is increasingly irrelevant to the company, so I have little faith that the complaints here will be acted upon.
As you know for now mems are not available in lessons, but when we have made good progress in building the new platform we hope to build a feature that meets the same needs as mems but in a way that more users will understand the value of and be able to use more easily because the old solution was not good enough and was used by too few users to justify the effort of building an exact replica. What exact form and name it will take and when that feature will be available we cannot give a precise answer to as it’s still under debate.
Our Youtube videos are produced for marketing, designed to be short, shareable and to reflect what people search for on Google to raise our brand profile, so they are more casual and fun. They do not reflect some radical change in learning approach.
Memworld is a platform where we experiment with ideas, which from the bits you can see encourages people to have live conversations in groups if they want to practice speaking, or to engage in watching foreign language content and hence immerse themselves in a language. I don’t think this is particularly “casual”, it’s a new way to practice and will be tied to the learning platform by the creation of word lists from other sources from these conversations and the media such as youtube videos onto our new platform, which you can then practice using spaced repetition as you do with current courses.
Lastly, clearly Memrise has gone through different phases in our relationship to community created content over the years, the conversation you’re referencing about selling legacy Memrise was I think in 2016, which is a long time ago. Since then we’ve come to better appreciate the breadth and depth community content can give to us all on our language learning journey and right now we are making a significant investment in a new platform to support user created content by making it easier to create courses in different ways and to be accessible on the mobile apps to bring the community created content into a new era.
Features of the new platform are of no relevance to the fate of mems on Memrise. What you are saying about them is in direct contradiction to the official statement on the very top of this thread.
So will they eventually be removed from user pages as well, or would they be accessible in this way as long as the old platform exists?
Can’t you just not select it? I don’t use speed reviews very much either, but I don’t see why having the option there to either use or ignore would be troublesome.
Hi @James_g_memrise , I just tried to “like” your post, but couldn’t and instead got a pop-up box that stated " You are not permitted to view the requested resource".
Do you think this is a random glitch, or I am being blocked from liking your post?
They will be on the profile page for at least 6 months. Beyond that I cannot say exactly what the future of Mems is. Should in some scenario we decide to no longer have them there, then of course we’d provide some export functionality. I am just saying this for reassurance that you won’t have to export every user’s mems one by one, please do not take it as any sign of a plan to delete them. I have heard of no plans to delete them from that page.
I have no idea I’m afraid, let’s hope it’s just a random glitch. And I appreciate the effort.
I haven’t read every post, obviously, and I would expect the folks with complaints to be more vocal, but sill, I haven’t seen a single person say thanks, this update is awesome, or even that it is a tiny bit better than before. Every single post has been a complaint of one sort or another. Can you all consider letting us stick with the previous version for a while while you work on adding back the features that have been taken away? I really think that would be fruitful. For me, number one is difficult words, but also the timer, word counts, percent correct, and lesson time. Mems are important for a lot of people, and eliminating them to make a deadline was probably not the best choice, especially since it was kind of your signature feature. There are plenty of other options out there, and I kind of feel like you are massively blowing this. Let’s take the time to get this right.
Yes, I think it was a glitch, thanks for replying.
I’m guessing you’re in southern England, so your dedication in the middle of the night is much appreciated. Memrise probably doesn’t pay you enough for that 
I support the removal of the timer, which imo could be counter-productive. Sometimes when you can’t recall a word immediately but the word pops up after thinking for, say, half a minute, the “ah-ha” moment will make the word stick. The timer would take away such opportunities. And if you want the excitement of being timed, we still have Speed Review (which I use a lot - Classic Review would cost me too much time given the number of words I’ve learnt here).
I hate the removal of the timer, as well as the total points/percentage correct per review session. It made it more of a challenge, like the original Memrise, which was way more game-like and competitive and fun. These elements allow not just competition with others but with oneself. However, what I would really like to see is for the timer to be an on/off option so that both of us would be happy with this setting.
Shouldn’t the original post be updated in some way then?
Because you should see how
is indeed a
This update is a disaster, I am looking for other sites now.
The problem with the new interface is that all scripts stopped working, features have been taken down… Developers don’t give s shit about the user’s experience. Shame this website went down in terms of quality.
Problems with the new version.
Difficult words - missing original typing. /when a person typed until he didn’t type correctly - for this reason bought the paid version/
New words - learning is tedious (twice - original /easy words 3 attempt to type the word, difficult words - always typing at the end/
Rewiew words - no time limit to write a word, also missing the number of words (which the learner repeats.)
I expect a refund as I bought another product that no longer exists.
It definitely is useful to have new courses listed separately. The number of courses in popular languages is large. To see what new ones are available means taking ages to scroll to the bottom of a long list. I imagine many can’t be bothered to do so and just go for what’s near the top. This can mean that many good courses go unnoticed. When this site started there were few Czech courses and learners went with what was available. Those first courses are now top of the popularity list, but certain of them are very poor. There well may be far superior courses languishing at the bottom of the popularity pile.
What a horrible, ugly, hard to use mess. I don’t understand what this redesign was supposed to accomplish.
Thanks @James_g_memrise
I think I’ve missed something…
Is Memworld going to be in addition to MemRise?
I support the choice to turn off the clock, which has been there for a long time, but not the removal. If they want to make no timer the default, that would be fine too, but the nature of this is that we find a way that works and develop strong patters, so it is jolting to have options taken away that are part of our routine. Plus, there was a pause button, so if you thought you were about to get it, you could pause it.