This seems to be a scaling issue for all of these online language/SRS learning systems. Every single one of them scales and then starts dialing back/deleting/hiding all of the user-generated content that helped the platform get to where it is today.
Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering discussions and explanations for so many various languages. From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to Memrise).
Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their Beta testing years).
Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid) volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary) across all existing courses at that time.
Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale moderation becomes a massive issue.
At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of one of the bus tour shirts!
The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-generated content is inevitable after a certain point.
Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering discussions and explanations for so many various languages. From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to Memrise).
Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their Beta testing years).
Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid) volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary) across all existing courses at that time.
Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale moderation becomes a massive issue.
At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of one of the bus tour shirts!
The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-generated content is inevitable after a certain point.