[kazinator]

Anki has some poor defaults for some parameters, which will cause you to be needlessly inundated with reviews.

Tweaking the parameters may just be a 1% improvement in terms of learning and retention. Perhaps even no improvement at all.

Where the improvement is seen is in the use of your time.

[zozbot234]

> Anki has some poor defaults for some parameters, which will cause you to be needlessly inundated with reviews.

The problem is that people incorrectly assume that they must "do something" about missed reviews. That's just not how it works; in fact, Anki will give you extra credit for recalling a card beyond the expected forgetting time, so working with a backlog of cards to review is a lot easier than it sounds.

The whole idea is that once the expected forgetting time for those "review" cards has been pushed far in the future, that's the best time to learn new, more challenging content. It works very well in my experience.

Where reducing the amount of reviews may well be justified is for cards that are "nice to have", but that you don't actually care about remembering. That's also the only sorts of cards for which "leech" protection makes sense, and that's a lot closer to a poor default in my view.

[kazinator]

There are multiple problems. One is that if you have a card with a nice long interval, and you happen to lapse on it, the interval is trimmed to a very short value, by default.