It's not that we don't support or respect privacy, but that everything we do is to foster a positive environment of collaboration to minimize content creation redundancy and build morale.
You can choose to remove yourself from that community ecosystem, but it's not exactly our ethos or why we started on this endeavor.
You're attempting to own the user's learning experience. Rather than attempting to build something which puts the user first, your product puts you, the owners, first. And when you say words that don't mean anything like, "it's not that we don't support or respect privacy" when you just made it very clear that you do not, it just insults the people who were listening and trying to give you the benefit of the doubt in the first place. You should have just owned up to the fact that you do not believe in user privacy rather than try to patronize those who are taking the time to read your posts.
>The hardest and most time consuming part of using standard SRS software is building your deck.
This is because that's the initial learning phase. You can't just download a spaced repetition deck and run it though any program and learn it in any meaningful sense. The cards I need to create to learn a concept will be totally different than the cards you create and so on.
Connecting your cards to the relevant nodes in your personal semantic network isn't just the most effective way to learn, it's the only way human brains encode information. If you're not doing this purposefully, you're just trying to glue someone else's relevant retrieval cues into your own semantic network.
There are other ways the comment parent's site could avoid this, but inevitably in my experience this leads to FALSE learning, where you have very sparse retrieval cues, basically limited to what you see on the screen in the learning app. This gives you a feeling of progress, because you really can recall the information in the app, but very little practical use.
> This is because that's the initial learning phase.
> The cards I need to create to learn a concept will be totally different than the cards you create and so on.
I don't use SRS software to learn a concept. I use it to remember concepts I already know. As such creating the cards is just tedium.
For example, I used to do a lot of 3-6 month contracts, and one contract might be all backend Java, and then the next might be all Javascript, and then the third might be in Rails + Javascript.
SRS software allowed me to stay "fresh", at an advanced level, on around 6-8 languages and platforms despite not using them for long periods of time.
Ugh. s/learn/remember/ for your use case then. The cards you need to remember a concept will be totally different than the cards I need to remember a concept and so on. Creating the cards isn't "tedium", it's reinforcing the concepts you decide you need to be reinforced while presumably not things that you definitely know and will never forget because you initially overlearned (this is a technical term) them.
The way you remember is you take your recall context, extract all the recall cues, and associate out from those concepts until you hit the target memory. Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but it's basically a graph breadth first search. To make things easy to remember, you have to link them to as many other nodes as possible, and you have to link them to nodes that are strongly linked to the rest of your semantic network.
So, the best cards you can make are cards that refer to concepts, internal to you, that are highly associated. What I try to do is encapsulate the statement that originally made me understand the idea, which is usually a metaphor or analogy for another concept I've deeply overlearned. Then I make a few other cards that elaborate on the concept to get away from the metaphorical link and into the specifics.
Thank you for sharing this before. I had seen it before but rather ironically forgotten what it was called and where to find it! :) This time I remembered to bookmark it.
I'm also going to lend my opinion: I agree entirely. If you don't find your own flashcards better than other people's flashcards, you aren't making the right connections or you aren't using mnemonics to aid learning. Personal ones work better a supermajority of the time (unless someone has a particularly clever mnemonic that resonates well with you)
My concern is systems (software or otherwise) that do not treat the user as an equal or a superior. Systems that do not follow the goldern rule: "treat others how you want to be treated." Being able to read the source code is great, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether the system is going to resepect and serve its users.
> Systems that do not follow the goldern rule: "treat others how you want to be treated"
This is a good first-approximation to an ethical system, but ultimately fails in many areas of the real world. I would prefer that the systems that provide me with food do so without demanding that I pay them money, but that is in direct conflict with the need to pay people to do the work to create and maintain that system.
I would prefer that there exists a system where I can store flashcards for studying various things and that that system not charge me money. That is in conflict with the need to pay people to create and maintain that system. One way to resolve that conflict is to only require payment for some features of the system.
You are misrepresenting my thesis by saying that respect and equality would mean that the user expects charity. It's about how you would expect and want to be treated if you were a user of the system. A company that provides you with food isn't necessarily trying to own your eating experience. A company that provides you with physical flash cards isn't trying to own your learning experience. It's very clear from their business model that they are not trying to sell a product that enables and empowers people to learn better and easier, but instead are seeking to own the learning experience of the user by giving away the tools for free. These are completely different models, so comparing their model to giving away free food is an unfair representation.
Additionally, do not give them credit for providing a paid privacy system. Their paid privacy system is not private. The admins still have access. Other companies have shown that they are able to share and sell this information with impunity. The past has also proven that these companies have no responsibility to adequately protect this data from attackers.
The owner presented their product as a better Anki. Anki is a product that you download. You are the only person who has access to the flash cards you create. You own and control your own creations. This is not a better version of Anki if you are forced to give away control of your own content so that others may profit off of it.
The business model here is not to sell you a better wrench, but to give you a better wrench in exchange for everything you create with it.
I could be ok with this, if the author was just honest about it. But instead the author is adamant that they are just selling you a better wrench. So because the creators are clearly not interested in being straight forward, because they use double-talk to try to placate people and hide their true business model, fuck them. And fuck anyone who's going to treat their users in ways they would never treat themselves.
Sorry that was so long. I appreciate you taking the time to read my previous rant and type up a response. I would love to continue this discussion.
edit: you are the same person who brought up the github argument. My argument there is that git can be used completely independently of github. In this case, github completely owns and controls the use of git. "They own the wrench".
