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Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

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Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#121

Post by drakonka »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #77
Jacobinski wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. It should however be noted that the most active maintainer of AnkiDroid will be joining the new entity: > We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him joi…

anki has so much potential and has such a big and unique audience, it is incomprehensible to me how it has managed to be so neglected. and then now why, of all times, when a solo developer is never more productive, would the lead maintainer cede ownership? the antidote for programming burnout has just been invented, just take it haha

I've been using Anki for a few years and have never experienced it as neglected. There are regular updates and a big community contributing knowledge, add-ins, etc.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#122

Post by tetris11 »

Timpy wrote: post #62

I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting t…

Same for me. I was doing my PhD in another country and was just overwhelmed and disoriented at the sheer scale of information I suddenly had to remember and digest. Anki was on again/off again for me at first, but once I learned to edit and update the cards and add my own, I really began to understand how to boil concepts down into something I could remember, i.e. I could structure it to my own personal chaotic mode of thinking, and I've flourished with it since then

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#123

Post by drakonka »

calpaterson wrote: post #106

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…

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).

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#124

Post by romes »

Timpy wrote: post #62

I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting t…

I think Anki, originally, was for studying Japanese too.

And I recently wrote about making my own Anki Japanese cards in my blog[1]

[1] https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-proje...

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#125

Post by pbmonster »

nickkell wrote: post #114
calpaterson wrote: post #106

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…

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.

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.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#126

Post by watwut »

KPGv2 wrote: post #85
embedding-shape wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key difference is the outside investors, who more times than not has no interest in what's best for users ultimately.

Outside investors want profits. A company with thirty-five employees wants profits. I don't see a meaningful difference.

Owner of the thirty-five employees company wants long term income and sort of security. They usually do not want huge peek in short term followed by death. They are also less comfortable with strategy that has 95% chance of destroying the company and 0.5% chance is earning a lot with 5% in between.

Outside investors are the exact opposite.

Also, smaller owners do not have that billionaire mindset of "any unethical or illegal action goes". It is not like they would be saints, but there is range of personalities and value systems among them. Billionaire became billionaires because not caring about any of that gives them advantage.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#127

Post by colin_jack »

I've started using LLMs to help with card creation, and reviewing historic cards. Its been increasingly successful, I still end up with cards tailored to me, and the card quality has gone up (as I've asked the LLM to look for other views/sources and to do associate research to produce high quality cards).

Having ability to bake some of that into the tool in a configurable way would be ideal, and I hope thats sort of path they go down.

I realise in meantime plugins are an option, but I've found the quality of plugins very mixed.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#128

Post by mister_mort »

romes wrote: post #124
Timpy wrote: post #62

I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting t…

I think Anki, originally, was for studying Japanese too. And I recently wrote about making my own Anki Japanese cards in my blog[1] [1] https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-proje...

You're right about that, Anki is named after the Japanese word for memorisation. (暗記 - あんき "anki")

https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9A%97%E8%A8%98

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#129

Post by calpaterson »

nickkell wrote: post #114
calpaterson wrote: post #106

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…

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.

"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

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#130

Post by bigDinosaur »

teruakohatu wrote: post #118

The best thing that can happen is a fork. There is no way this will make the app worse, at least if you use a phone to do the reviewing. Syncing is sure to become a subscription.

I still haven't quite understood how Anki can apparently be profitable when the web sync with Ankiweb apparently supports an unlimited amount of data (surely some people heavily abuse this - but one never hears about fair use being applied?). Even legit and honest use can mean massive collection sizes since you can have any rich media in an Anki collection.
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