Hi u/Primary_Mobile7290
Thanks for the thoughtful comment and for acknowledging various aspects of our business reality.
I understand your point about over-emphasis on cash and business goals, and I do agree with you.
Of course, we need to contend with the economic reality of self-sufficiency. If we cannot pay all of our bills with the subscription revenue we generate, then the whole Memrise endeavor is over. The servers would shut down, and the Community Courses would disappear.
This is the situation we were once in. If we hadn’t changed course, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today…and everyone would be even more upset about it.
Fortunately, we have recently achieved self-sufficiency. This means we can now cover all our bills from the business's revenue without relying on external investments to keep the lights on. This achievement, among other things, allows us to keep Community Courses online in 2024 and beyond if needed.
Now, we can turn our attention to building the tools and a learning experience that users tell us they want - though not the users in this forum, I will concede.
In the seven years before January 1 of this year, we released 3 new languages with very small content dictionaries.
In Q1 of this year, we released 3 new languages with large dictionaries (Arabic, Greek, and Indonesian)
In Q2 of this year we intend to release 6 more. We can do this because of the changes we made to our backend. Changes that aren't compatible with managing the many Community Course dictionaries.
Once we get our new platform a bit more developed and stable, we can revisit the Community Courses issue regarding minority language courses.
In short, without any promises whatsoever, I think there are ways that we will be able to deliver a full Memrise experience to learners of increasingly diverse minority languages. Again, I know that “a full Memrise experience” is not what many people in this forum desire.
At this moment, we must focus on building a technological and financial foundation that can support this aspirational dream, and that requires us to make the poorly communicated decisions we have made that are so frustrating to everyone here.
