How to prevent users from misusing Hard? Ideas are welcome

I’d bet money this is going to be the ultimate solution. There’s a reason Netflix moved from a 5-star rating to a thumbs up/down model. People are too inconsistent when there are too many options and the data isn’t as good as a more polarizing 2-option format.

I was using the Auto-Ease add-on for a minute and I think that required you to use just the 2 buttons. Didn’t take long to get used to it and it’s honestly just faster and better. Whatever modest benefit the Hard and Easy buttons are providing probably isn’t worth the risk of people misusing them.

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As I said, these are the official guidelines from the manual, approved by Dae. Again = incorrect or partially correct.

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Yeah, and I disagree with the official guidelines. Not enough to advocate changing them, but I suggest to anyone reading this that if you didn’t know the card as well as you wanted to, hit Again. We’re not doing all this work to be educated guessers.

“Would I bet money that I’m correct?” has always been a useful heuristic for me. If I have an answer in my head, but I wouldn’t bet money on it, I decide before even looking at the back of the card that I’m going to mark it Again, even when it turns out I was right.

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@rich70521 Read this thread: Pass/Fail Grading as Default. Probably the most intense debate happened this year (apart from Load Balancer).

I agree with them. Sometimes I’ll see a card and would think “this is sousa” and then just before the answer I’ll be like “oh no, probably sousaku” then I see the answer is actually “sousa” and I’ll be like “okay I knew it so this is Good”. I do press good on them sometimes but I think I should be pressing Again because this is guesswork.

I double-checked the FSRS guide just in case, and I am also very, very sorry that my definition is too generalized about using the “Hard” button.

I’ll elaborate about my usage on Hard: when my mind took a while to recall the flashcard and got an answer for 5 seconds. I will use Hard and probably say “Okay, I need more time on this probably.” Otherwise, “Again.”

FSRS can adapt to almost any habit, except for one habit: pressing “Hard” instead of “Again” when you forget the information. When you press “Hard”, FSRS assumes you have recalled the information correctly (though with hesitation and a lot of mental effort). If you press “Hard” when you have failed to recall the information, the intervals will be unreasonably high (for all the ratings). So, if you have this habit, please change it and use “Again” when you forget the information.

And I may have understood it when I mentioned that “I need more time with it,” and know that this is a passing grade, even before FSRS became a thing.

If the card is on the first step and you have configured more than one step, the delay will be the average of Again and Good, i.e.,

You are describing another case. It’s not the same as having doubts about the answer.

At the end of the day, we don’t really know what’s really happening with our brains figuring out with Anki.

The problem is people misunderstanding something due to misconceptions that add up with using such feature. For example, users who don’t use the manual don’t know that Hard is a passing grade. But due to how it’s worded, it’s considered a fail.

This thread solving something simple, but hard, because we don’t really know how people work. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s just the wonders of Anki from my experience

Another user who has the same idea as me

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Perhaps there are very few developers who like to develop UI. UI development and backend development (like algorithm) are different jobs and most of Anki important functionality is on the backend, so I think most Anki developers like to develop the backend.

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Yeah, but it’s not like this change is difficult to implement.

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I too think it is easy for frontend developers, but I think difficult for backend developers. Frontend and backend are almost completely different and integrating them is a tricky task.

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I think this is good idea. GUI should be designed in that way that reading manual is not necessary. New user does not install Anki to spend next few hours to read manual.

Even new users will be able to recognize meaning of propose design and solve initial problem of misuse of “hard”.

It should be implemented NOT because this is the best idea but it is first step towards the best idea.

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Do Hard/Easy still even really make sense for newcomers ?

With SM-2, I could understand, it’s how difficulty was altered based on their input.

But with FSRS, difficulty will be computed with or without them.

So if the question is how to make things as intuitive as possible, disabling HARD/EASY by default might be the real solution.

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That will make old users angry, so it’s unlikely to be implemented. Even if they are able to switch back to 4 buttons, the number of angry people and “guys, my buttons suddenly disappeared” will be astronomically high.

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You don’t need to do that at all. The option can remain the same for older installs (I know there’s a way to do it).

Why not just relabel “Again” to “Wrong”?

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Dae said it was initially called “Fail”, but it was seen as too negative and users wanted a more nice word.

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Or maybe something like “(partially) forgotten” / “(partially) incorrect”.

This doesn’t sound negative in my opinion either.