Recent changes to Memrise

[CarlyD]

I'm saddened by the recent changes to Memrise, an online program I've used for years now. The official Memrise website now seems to consist of 7 courses each for 8 languages--Spanish has both Mexican and Spain--and that's it. And I'm hearing that after course 1 or 2 you have to be a paid member to finish them. For the last month or more they've heavily pushed everyone to pay for Memrise Pro--and this is all they get now?

All of the rest of the courses have moved to a "community" website, which they say will be operational "through the end of 2024" and people are being encouraged to move to their courses to other places before they're gone. Among the courses that will be gone are specific textbook chapter by chapter courses, courses based on easy fiction books and courses to study for specific tests. My next language was going to be Slovenian, and Memrise had many many small courses I was looking to start.

People on reddit and other places have been throwing out suggestions as to where they can go instead once all the courses are gone, but no site seems to be comparable.

[Slowpoke]

The enshittification of so many language learning apps is so sad ... one of my favorite resources became genuinely unusable and it sucks so much!

What was it about Memrise that made it so special? I just took a quick read through the Wiki and it seems like Anki could do the trick?

[tiia]

We recently had a topic about memrise and alternatives here.
I also wrote what my personal reasons were to use memrise and not Anki (I had tried that in the past).

Personally I'm using the comunity courses website for now. It works just fine for my purposes. Don't know what will happen at the end of the year. The mylittlewordland (or what the name was) looked maybe interesting. Or Quizlet. Or something else. But definitely something where I'm not just looking at cards.
Maybe I just will stop doing explicit vocabulary learning again. (Because I hardly ever did that in the past anyway.)

[Cainntear]

I think the issue is that a lot of people are getting really wary of commercial services asking people to pay for stuff that they've not paid for.

For example, Duolingo went to great lengths to clear the decks and get rid of unpaid labour before their stock market flotation. They did this by taking a large chunk of their volunteer contributors on as employees and doing major updates of courses. The days of getting paid to provide a platform and then not paying for content are over, and any company who follows that model will find their valuation taking a tanking. Memrise are actually pretty late to act on this, but better late than never!

[Lawyer&Mom]

They also changed their own courses. I declined to renew my membership. It’s a shame, they had a nice platform and I liked their video content.

[Cainntear]

They also changed their own courses. I declined to renew my membership. It’s a shame, they had a nice platform and I liked their video content.

That might suggest that the courses didn't have a good audit trail, so they couldn't really show that they weren't built around free labour.

[Severine]

I think the issue is that a lot of people are getting really wary of commercial services asking people to pay for stuff that they've not paid for.

For example, Duolingo went to great lengths to clear the decks and get rid of unpaid labour before their stock market flotation. They did this by taking a large chunk of their volunteer contributors on as employees and doing major updates of courses. The days of getting paid to provide a platform and then not paying for content are over, and any company who follows that model will find their valuation taking a tanking. Memrise are actually pretty late to act on this, but better late than never!

This is what I was going to say. Reddit has experienced significant blowback on this issue in recent months, leading to much-publicized protests by volunteer moderators.

Personally, I am wary of any free service delivered by a for-profit company. They're paying hosting costs, developer salaries, and a litany of other expenses, and they're eventually going to have to recoup that investment somehow, whether it be by selling user data, serving ads, switching to a paid or freemium model, or selling the entire company to another company that'll do one (or more) of the above.

I'd much rather see a company start out with a viable plan for how they plan to sustainably fund the services they want to deliver. Then, I can buy the software or subscribe to their platform or what have you, and build it into my workflow without worrying that the service will disappear in a couple of years or end up completely transformed by the sudden urgency to generate a profit.

[Lawyer&Mom]

They also changed their own courses. I declined to renew my membership. It’s a shame, they had a nice platform and I liked their video content.

That might suggest that the courses didn't have a good audit trail, so they couldn't really show that they weren't built around free labour.

Their old courses were built around video clips filmed in country with professional actors, so I hope it wasn’t volunteer labor! They switched to a new experience that revolves around YouTube videos and AI chat. Not at all what I was interested in.

[galaxyrocker]

I'd much rather see a company start out with a viable plan for how they plan to sustainably fund the services they want to deliver. Then, I can buy the software or subscribe to their platform or what have you, and build it into my workflow without worrying that the service will disappear in a couple of years or end up completely transformed by the sudden urgency to generate a profit.

Sadly we've become conditioned to things being free. If you don't offer something for free, at least at first, good luck getting an initial userbase. This is one of the biggest harms Duolingo has done to language learning, in my opinion. It's set the expectation for "free", meaning you could develop the best course ever but if it's not free it won't get much traction or talk.

[Tumlare]

Their old courses were built around video clips filmed in country with professional actors, so I hope it wasn’t volunteer labor! They switched to a new experience that revolves around YouTube videos and AI chat. Not at all what I was interested in.

I really enjoyed the old courses (and I was a paid subscriber) but the change to the official courses has turned me off from resubscribing.

Speaking of free labor, they don't seem to pay for those YouTube and TikTok videos. The creators will get views (and, if their channel qualifies, whatever ad revenue YouTube and TikTok pay out for views), but nothing additional from having their content used by Memrise.