[calpaterson]

Longtime anki user here. I think the thing people never appreciate with flashcards is that deck maintenance is real work. And in many cases, it's not work that you can do yourself as a learner of the material: the deck really needs to be created by someone who knows the material.

Commercial decks, where the deck maintainer is paid for his efforts, make a lot of sense.

And I suppose if they are making money out of the ecosystem, it also only makes sense that commercial deck makers make a contribution to the technology that makes it possible. I suppose I would prefer that be a contribution rather than ownership and custody, but I suppose Anki's license terms (it is AGPL3+ - I think without a CLA) prevents them closing it.

So cautiously optimistic

[nickkell]

Is it really beneficial to use a deck created by someone else? I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards - by writing them, thinking about them, and making mental associations with things you already know.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Yes. Absolutely. The biggest data point pushing the affirmative is less Anki itself but the success of products at the forefront of the second wave of spaced repetition apps [1] like Khan Academy. Duolingo, too, but Duolingo gets flak from people for being too Goodhearted by retention for its own good; Khan Academy actually does force feed you enough actual problems to learn some math.

Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.

Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.

[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/the-second-wave-of-spaced-...

[pbmonster]

Just as an example: I learn languages using Anki, and I always do it the same way: I use decks that

* exclusively quiz entire sentences

* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)

* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),

* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card

Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.

[calpaterson]

"I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards"

I would substitute "the material" for "the cards" in this sentence. Making the cards yourself is one way to do that, but it's not always the most time effective - imagine the extra work put onto a medical student having to make the cards for every subject they need to cover. That is what ankihub does and it seems to be very popular

But yeah: downloading the median deck off of ankiweb: very sub-optimal

[lkos]

I would also like to second that. For me, making Anki cards was 50% of the learning.

[motbus3]

No one is appreciating cheap working solution from good folks and prefer to accept the free spy-me stuff going around.

I see lots of people also moving stuff with AI that will clearly be biased and force products down your throat. This might be the end of the internet as we know, but the next thing, although sometimes looks exciting, will be controlled by faceless greedy monsters.

I guess the fact that we all didn't prioritise those small businesses is getting somewhere

[drakonka]

I've found the opposite when using Anki myself. The process of developing the deck is a critical part of learning the material for me. I consume my target language, see something I don't understand, figure out what it means, then put it into the deck - and _then_ practice it. To cut out the whole first part of that chain by using a premade deck eradicates much of the learning process for me (I've tried).

[calpaterson]

Works well in some cases (eg some language learning patterns - but not all) but not in others. And even when you "create your own cards" you're usually using resources from elsewhere - eg native speaker audio on language cards.

A significant number of anki users (eg: medicine, law - others) are working with pre-made decks and if you look at anki's competition - all of them offer pre-made decks as a key part of it. Medics have always used flashcards (many university bookshops sell physical flashcards for medics) and I don't each medical student would benefit from producing, eg, their own anatomy flashcards.