My Memrise Pro expired recently, and I wasn’t going to renew it. I never cared much about the Pro features; I would only renew Pro as a way of financially supporting Memrise - but I’ve been so upset and disappointed with Memrise in the past year and a half that I didn’t feel like doing that.
And suddenly, out of the blue comes this new community site, solving two of the biggest problems users on the old forums of complained about: We now have search, and private messaging. These are exactly the kind of core features Memrise has been neglecting since fall 2014 in favor of annoying flashy stuff and poorly thought out UI tweaks.
So is this is a sign that Memrise is turning over a new leaf, and going back to the fundamentals? Will they start work on supporting course creators and shoring up the core functionality of memrise? If so, I should probably renew Pro, as a vote of confidence.
Or is this just an outlier? Is Memrise going to go back to the fluff, and to slowly wrecking the service, and neglect fixing long-known bugs and adding features that users really want and ask for? What do you think?
(Especially if “you” work for Memrise and can shed some light on its direction this year)
Nah. I think you’re off the mark. I’m probably off the mark too but here is my view:
The only way we can see what Memrise is thinking unfortunately, because it does not communicate the majority of the time, is through its updates and its behaviour. There we can see at least 3 things: 1) trying to reduce maintenance and server cost, 2) trying to make the product more appealing, 3) ignoring the forums and users except as a way to address bugs. A 4th would be that it probably has a small and perhaps not that competent team as it breaks things often and then does not fix them, and does not communicate. You can understand the majority of what it is doing if you use these lenses. And most of it, except the lack of communication, makes perfect sense – whatever thinking gave rise to the lack of communication is wrong; you can think about the different negative effects that has and if those outweigh the positives.
This forum, as likely as not, was borne of someone thinking, after spending way too much time putting out a fire: fuck this shit, there has to be a better way, looking for cheap and easily implementable alternatives, and finding this discourse.org thing. That it has search and private messaging and badges and a way to appoint moderators is a happy coincidence. This new forum does present an easy opportunity though to better sift the deluge of posts from users for addressing bugs, which one assumes Memrise would want to be able to do now, feedback, which one hopes Memrise would like to look at now and then [maybe in the feedback section add a way to sort by number of likes?], and giving the users a more functional forum experience.
This new forum allows Memrise more control and less time spent managing the thing; it can delete posts and ban users easily, it can appoint moderators to deal with the majority of the housework, and it can easily change things around if something isn’t working. This is perfectly in line with past behaviour.
If Memrise wants to keep user engagement optimal, it should comment regularly on major bugs in the bugs section, and occasionally on highly upvoted User Wishes (even if to say: we can’t or won’t do that because…). And if it ever did have a change of heart about now actually incorporating user wishes somewhat reliably in its product, having a better organized section for that is nice.
A question I would have for Memrise is: is the housework mostly done? You’ve seemed to have changed the underlying stuff that makes Memrise work (is that right?), is that finished or when do you see that being finished?
Sadly, the impression I’m getting from Memrise’s responses (and lack of responses) on this and various other posts on the forum is, the answer is “no”. Memrise is still sliding downward, still doesn’t realize it, and has no real plans to engage with the user community or care about our interests and needs. They’ll continue to develop their own ideas, in private, about what’s good or bad and what works or doesn’t, and they’ll continue to steadfastly believe they’re right, without paying any attention to what their users think.
I will keep up my PRO subscription as I feel it is money well spent to support what seems a unique experience of sharing knowledge.
I am surprised that given a forum to express yourself, a status as a recognized user, you still feel the need for acknowledgment and individual response to your very specific questions and uncertainties that maybe Memrise is on a path and it is not your chosen one.
They want our feedback on their actions, they have made the decisions on the way they want to go, they rely on us to choose maybe the ins and outs on the way. Help pave the way.
If you agree on the Experience, you can help to shape it but you can not choose its course. That’s fair enough no?
Focus on your preferred aspects of the Experience and try to use your voice to express it. Don’t start by knocking the process. Let’s focus our energy on this process not on knocking it.
I think you misjudged why I reacted the way I did. It had nothing to do with acknowledgments. It had to do with responses that explain, directly, that memrise is shutting down the old forum and uservoice, will lose all of the past user requests and suggestions made in those places, and very explicitly does not intend to look at user feedback or suggestions here on this new forum.
If you agree on the Experience, you can help to shape it but you can not choose its course. That’s fair enough no?
That’s vague enough to sound reasonable, but based on what I’ve seen so far on a few discussions here, Memrise doesn’t want anyone from the web to “help shape” anything. In the meantime they show no signs of setting up any alternative non-web method for users to do so, either, so really they just mean “user ideas are not welcome, we don’t need them, we don’t want to see them”.