I trust you, but I totally understand why people feel so insecure. I felt the same way until receiving the recently reassuring responses and more detailed explanations (mainly given in and after the Zoom meeting). I could never imagine I’d be so concerned about a website that I check out this forum every day (before December I wasn’t active here), because Memrise broke its promise to make mems available in Beta, with the completely unjustifiable reason that “few people use them”. Some people, especially those old loyal users who had been here for years voicing their opinions and experiencing how Memrise shifted its focus from providing a sharing platform to developing official content, lamented that Memrise might render community courses unusable or get rid of them altogether some day. I couldn’t help but believed that they had a reason.
Yes, this is what we’ve been longing for for years. I hope Memrise will remain responsive as they are in the recent days.
We are not building a new website from scratch. That is a misunderstanding. We are evolving a new system from the old, and some features of the old system need to be removed in order for that to happen.
Of course you don’t. But any company caring about their customers would simply make a copy of the original and work on that instead. Where’s the problem with that?
It’s impossibly expensive to do that and wouldn’t serve any users well - we wouldn’t have the resources to support that kind of project and that wouldn’t work out for anyone.
It’s not correct to speak about “caring for our customers” as though our customer base is one group. We have different sets of customers, all of whom we care about and try to serve, but to do that we need to balance sometimes conflicting needs.
By far the largest group are the group that are served by the new system we are building. This group is largely not represented on this forum, because they are using the mobile product, Memrise-made courses and these forums don’t serve a particular use for them. However these forums do represent an important group - a group that are largely using our old product - and as I’ve said we are also keen to maintain functionality for this group wherever we can. We need to balance these needs.
The shift in approach that we are making now is that rather than prioritising making sure we don’t lose functionality for users of the old product while we build the new product (which means we move very slowly and anyway has not always been possible as I’m sure you will be quick to remind me), we are prioritising building for the larger group of users first. We will still try to avoid breaking things for the old users if we can do so without slowing down progress, as I’ve said many times, but our priority is to serve the largest part of our customer base as well as possible as fast as possible.
So this is not about “caring about customers” vs “not caring about customers”. This is about prioritising the needs of the majority of our customers more heavily than we have been vs the needs of a smaller group of customers who are using our old product.
It is a difficult choice, and one that we have not taken lightly. I also know it is not one that many people here are likely to like in the short term. However i do believe that because this is the route that will result in most financial strength for Memrise as a company, it is ultimately the route that serves users of the old product best as well - the more resources Memrise as a whole has, the more likely we are to be able to invest in products that serve smaller niche groups of users.
So why did you close Decks down? Now you are doing more or less the same thing as with Decks, separating two groups of users, but also removing one of the features which no one knows when it will come back (if ever).
How can they not use Memrise made courses? You removed user made courses from the phone app. Before you removed the user-made courses, I would see hundreds of new users join my course everyday.
Remote learning, stay at home schooling, increase use of computers for children and desktop e-learning and you (Memrise) have no marketing or effort put into anything on the website continue to go backwards in removing functionality. Smart phone market is heavily saturated and gimmicky language apps (yours included, because lets face it … you don’t really learn a language on a phone) are a dime and a dozen. I feel like you guys are missing a huge chance to invest and take part in a new emerging market. In fact, the old Memrise was actually mostly already set to harvest the benefit of the new emerging learning landscape.
That’s quite interesting to read. Despite the fact that I’ve been a consultant dealing with software architecture and development for more than 20 years I suppose I should never say never and should better not make any assumptions. That said, I simply fail to see why anyone would want to go large-scale for a product under development, but, then again, I probably simply don’t have all the information.
Again, there’s a gigantic question mark on my forehead. I’m using the Memrise app around 80% of the time. And I’m working on both (a few) Memrise and (mostly) community courses. If you would have said that you’re focusing on younger people or those who don’t want any customization or even language learners as opposed to other types of courses (flowers, birds, geography, etc.), I would’ve understood, but what you’re writing there just doesn’t make any sense.
Well, I sure do hope that you won’t have to find out that you are left with neither money nor customers one day.
You really did have a great product, and you still do - even despite of features that were taken away and with all the bugs around (their number constantly increasing instead of sinking). But what I’ve had to witness over the last 4+ years is the one most incredible example of a company which slowly but steadily seems to tear their product apart and enrage their customers.
In the beginning, I used to be convinced that you don’t make enough money with the product (with too few paying customers) to fix bugs and develop new features. Then I thought your product might have grown too fast, with the code-base being, well, sub-optimal, so that fixes are hard or even next to impossible. Then I thought that you might not t find enough developers and also, even worse, you lose them as the individuals’ work-load got too high, a.s.f.
Maybe it’s even you, being the Chief Strategy Officer, who might be mainly if not solely responsible for all the pain (sorry for the exaggeration) that many of us have gone through over the years. Oh well.
That quite simply does not make sense. Let’s outline two potential approaches here.
The current Memrise is left as the live site, while the new Memworld is developed in the background. Memworld can be developed freely, without needing to ensure that at every step of development it remains functional and accessible for users using it. Memrise can stay active without any service disruptions or changes in functionality until Memworld is finished and ready for a proper release.
The live site is gradually modified from the Memrise it currently is into the Memworld it’s planned to be. Development must accordingly be done slowly and cautiously in order to ensure that updates bringing the site closer to Memworld won’t break any functionality in the live site that people are using. The live site will regularly see changes in design over time as updates are pushed that alter the UI and remove features people have been using, until such time as another update is pushed that can bring them back without breaking more things, if ever.
It simply doesn’t make sense for you to pursue process 2 here instead of 1, it creates vastly more work for yourselves that slows down development while disrupting the service for people using it. You keep saying it’s necessary but you haven’t given any reasoning whatsoever that would actually indicate why you are taking this nonsensical path towards development. I can only imagine that you think that if users see Memrise go for a year without updates to make the UI worse and break functionality that you believe users will consider the service abandoned and will move elsewhere.
In the last weeks I’ve tried about 30+ flashcard apps (Android) and websites. Few of them are good, but not as good as it can be.
Here are advantages of Memrise:
user friendly interface
an out-of-the-box product
mobile apps
community courses for every taste
a tool to make your own courses (not predetermined by a database)
During the call you’ve been saying that you have to move fast because of the competition in this field. But old Memrise is still on the top despite 6-7 years of disregard, despite “improvements” and dismantling of some features, despite adding such nonsense as a built-in alarm-clock. It’s a problem to find a substitute which would satisfy listed above requirements.
The question is: what Memrise could have been if you dedicated your resources on improving community side of it?
You have plans to abandon old Memrise completely. OK. But why don’t you improve it at first and abandon later? Like fix old bugs, build a few features and custom settings we’ve been asking for, maybe bring back one thing or another.
This way you’ll make a step forward, attract new users (there’s still a great demand for flashcard apps), and good old Memrise will survive for another 5-7 years. You’ll have another revenue stream, everyone will be happy. After some time you decide what to do with it.
BTW, speaking of different users. I’m bloody sure that despite being noisy, feisty and squeamish users of this community are more loyal to you than overwhelming majority of the one-timers of the official courses.
Where is your “silent majority”? Why this forum no one support your decision? Keep Lying. You always find a way for your decision.
It is about money, neither people, nor balance nor customer care. Because of money, so you delete all user-created content, so you delete all contribution by the community for your new cash-cow.
If you really care about your customer, make a one year plan, decent time, provide solution to release and transfer all the user-created stuff to an open source community / other platform, not delete it.
Dont you know you only give 1 month (Nov 26, 2021 - Dec 31, 2021) for the community before delete everything? Dont you know ppl need 12 weeks to recovery from COVID? But everything gone within 5 weeks after your one-sided statement. Is it law & order from a tyrant?
Where is your care? Where is the “silent majority” support your decision?
Stop your fake statement, it make people puke.
We know you’re lying, you know you’re lying, you know that we know you’re lying, we also know that you know that we know you’re lying, but you still lie.
Ray you are mistaken, we are not deleting community content. There are absolutely no plans to do that.
In future posts please adopt a less aggressive tone, we understand you are angry about what you thought was happening, but there is no need for personal attacks on staff member or anyone in this community or the use of unpleasant imagery.
Mems will not be visible in learning sessions on the website for now.
They will still be in our database and your mems will be accessible from your user profile, and other users’ mems will be available from their profile
I am apologize, Memrise is not lying. It is doublespeak, spinning, and structural violence.
The turth of what Memrise going to do is erasing all Mems created by the user from the internet with a dress-up statement from Memrise “they will still be in our database, but not visible, for now”
"they will still be in our database" May I ask what the Mems supposed to be and intended to be when they created by the user? They are created to help and assist in the learning session for user themselves and the others. Peoples contribute their innovation for the community, helping each other to learn, to understand new things.
"not visible" Yes, maybe you are not delete anything, but you hide them from the public, you remove the access between peoples, you deprive others their effective way to learn, you destroy the community, you trample the intention, you ruin the idea.
And “for now”. So, how long? where is the schedule? any planning? how they come back? and when?? Yet, you only allowed 5 weeks after your one-sided statement. And you also didn’t provide any backup solution until Dec 9, 3 weeks before everything being removed.
Thanks. You always find a way for your decision. As I said: “Comment to be received, Decision to be unchanged, Mems to be deleted.”
Many of your changes in the apps and in the desktop version have been made on the quiet. It’s an amazing difference with other projects where developers are happy to announce an introduction of a feature or to inform users about fixing a bug.
It’s not the case with Memrise. Not every, but many changes are made surreptitiously, there’s no release notes for them. Does not matter if these changes are good or bad, big or small, result is the same. It’s like you don’t want them to be publicly discussed, like you are not happy you made them and you are not taking pride in your work.
Ben, I’ve read a transcript of your discussion with cos about changes in 2015-16 when users were kept in the dark about your novelties. Users are getting more than distrustful, but you are making the same mistake again and again, even after 6-7 years.
Is there any chance your will communicate with users about such changes?