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Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

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Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#131

Post by embedding-shape »

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.

Give it a try to work in both, see what work gets prioritized VS not in each of them. Makes a huge difference, in my experience. Investors are counting on eventually getting paid 10x or nothing, employees generally expect a monthly salary and a Christmas bonus, this massively change what direction they think the company should be on.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#132

Post by calpaterson »

drakonka wrote: post #123
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).

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.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#133

Post by mbanerjeepalmer »

infotainment wrote: post #5

On the plus side, the actually good mobile Anki client, AnkiDroid, remains out of the hands of this potentially questionable new entity. (AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)

Given that push notifications haven't worked in AnkiDroid for years, it doesn't feel good to me?

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#134

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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.

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-...

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#135

Post by david_allison »

dhoe wrote: post #95
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried several times before to install syncserver using those pip instructions, on multiple platforms, without success.

Just as a counterpoint, to avoid people getting the wrong idea about the complexity involved - I use it and it took literally minutes. The most confusing part was that the sync settings in Ankidroid referred to Ankiweb.

Hey, could you put in an issue, especially regarding the pain points, but also including what 'seems unusual': https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android

It's mostly due to time/resource/technical constraints [some of our strings come from a shared backend], but we can do better here, especially if there's now a lot more community interest in the feature.

Pull requests welcome! Do feel free to get in touch on the issue/Discord.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#137

Post by dhoe »

david_allison wrote: post #135
dhoe wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a counterpoint, to avoid people getting the wrong idea about the complexity involved - I use it and it took literally minutes. The most confusing part was that the sync settings in Ankidroid referred to Ankiweb.

Hey, could you put in an issue, especially regarding the pain points, but also including what 'seems unusual': https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android It's mostly due to time/resource/technical constraints [some of our strings come from a shared backend], but we can do better here, especially if there's now a lot more community interest in the feature. Pull requests welcome! Do feel free to get in touch on the issu…

Was about to do that, but it turned out it's already fixed in the current version - so literally the only minor issue I hit on my way to a custom sync server is resolved already :)

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#138

Post by zelphirkalt »

saubeidl wrote: post #92
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there that much of a difference?

Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.

To me it sounds like an incredible speed to learn even 10 Mandarin words per day, let alone 20. So extreme, that I must wonder, what definition of "Mandarin words" and what definition of "learned" you are using, when you are writing that, or, that you are an extreme outlier in terms of memorizing visual information.

For me really learning a word means:

    (1) Knowing how to say it.
    (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
    (3) Still remembering (1) and (2) after at least a month.
    (4) Being able to actually use the word correctly.
Do you really learn 20 words properly under those definitions? If so, then respect. I consider myself to have quite a good memory for visual information, but if I don't try to memorize 20 words as a full-time activity on that day, and write them hundreds of times, I am fairly sure they won't stick for long, maybe not even until the next day. Some obviously will, and some have good explanations why the characters look as they do, but others don't, and feel arbitrarily constructed.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#139

Post by zelphirkalt »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #76
Shank wrote: post #74

The community has been in a deadlock over making FSRS the default ( https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/3616 ), and I wonder if this will lead to some resolution. It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.

Is there that much of a difference?

I think many learners are walking into a trap of thinking, if they just change their SPS algorithm, they will magically learn more. I think they might learn a little bit more, but the biggest effect is simply due to time investment and doing the repetitions. It is good to be able to practice known words less often, obviously, but that can be achieved using a very basic system already.

If changing their SPS or the promises about an SPS motivate the learner, then great, they're putting in the work and time to learn, but I doubt that the effect of changing the SPS is as large as some people claim.

For example I used a tool that supposedly uses FSPS, but it did have a low maximum for the duration you don't have to practice a word, and no way for me to "ban" a word, so that it asks me in 6 months or something, and simple words kept coming back, especially after not learning for a few days. I didn't make much progress using the tool, even though it had FSPS.

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