Words fail me…

I have seen a lot of bad changes to Memrise in the three years that I’ve been using it, but this one really takes the cake. Memrise has finally obliterated its very namesake.

Users don’t always have time to create a mem for -every single item- that they learn on Memrise, and there has often been a treasure trove of helpful mems that have already been created by other users. To think that that community aspect has now been completely severed, due to yet another asinine, poorly planned out decision… It just amazes me. This should be common sense.

I have personally seen only a handful of blatantly offensive or irrelevant mems in the entire time that I’ve been using Memrise. The vast majority of them have been either helpful to me, or ones that I could understand being helpful to someone else. I used to take it upon myself to review the mems of all items in my courses, and prune out the offensive or spammy ones. That feature was removed, without a word from the staff, and now this unbelievably drastic action is being taken (again, with no warning whatsoever) because there isn’t enough moderation? How does this make an ounce of sense?

I have spent a great deal of extra time in creating my courses than I needed to, hand-picking thousands of entries from the wiki, in order to import those valuable mems, for me and anyone else who takes the courses to benefit from. This change has now not only removed all of those mems, but entirely rendered all those extra hours I spent on course creation absolutely meaningless. I could have used bulk-add, but I chose that approach, because mems were a very big deal for me on Memrise.

This isn’t just another gentle push towards the door for me this time; it’s a very forceful shove. You have now taken away a cornerstone in the very reason why I (and I assume many others) use Memrise instead of one of the many other SRS platforms out there, and you guys couldn’t have even had the decency to clue us in. I could have saved a whole lot of time while I was plugging away at building my courses the slow way, if I had known that all of my work was going to be rendered meaningless later. But we’ve never been clued in on really anything in the past three years until after the fact; why should I expect anything different now?

I’ll admit that this is an angry rant, and really, I think this is the only time that I’ve ever posted something like this without sitting on it for a while and thinking it over more. But I am genuinely angry with this change. This utter unwillingness to listen to the thoughts of your dedicated users is just baffling, and really, I have just about had enough.

I’d love to see this decision reversed, and I really suspect that I will be far from the last person to have issues with this. Judging from Memrise’s past policies in listening to their user base though, I really have my doubts.