The goal isn’t to compare them, but to emphasize the importance of the community. Everyone is important here.
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The biggest problem I see here is that, what happens when there will be 2 or even 5 approaches per year for new PRs?
Anki is getting bigger from year to year and now imagine more competitors get into the market, the same as AnkiHub.
Let’s say they will also develop a not underwhelming community. Maybe not even competitors but applications which could indeed benefit from a personal PR.
Wouldn’t this slow down the development of Anki drastically? Because if everyone would approach (at a certain size) the Ankitects for an “official” integration into Anki itself, it would always create the task to tailor an individual solution for everyone of those new competitors or applications.
Should we even create a barrier, at which size someone would be allowed to get their own PR?
If this should be the case. Then we need to create strict guidelines as a community, when someone should be allowed to approach for their own PR and even get a “claim” for an individual PR.
Am I allowed to just ask @dae for my own PR with a draft of a few bullet points and I can be sure to get it in 5 months - 8 months integrated into Anki or do I have to write a draft with certain standards for it which has to be approved by several Anki developers beforehand?
These are all question we will have to face if this is going to be a procedure we want to really integrate into Anki itself.
In my honest opinion an open interface would be wayyyyyyy more efficient than a closed PR tailored for individual needs. I mean, the work for the individual PR of AnkiHub could be made into an open interface for the rest.
But hey, Im not a developer. Just my ideas written down.
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I agree they are important, but there needs to be a priority, all important is the same as all unimportant.
For example, suppose the official Anki Damien accidentally spills coffee on his computer and all the AnkiWeb data is lost. (the backup server was also messed up by his kitten, bad luck today!).
In this case, all shared decks, add-ons, unlimited media servers, etc. created by volunteers would be lost. That means without the official Anki server, contributors cannot volunteer, and nor can they accumulate such products.
So in my opinion official Anki is the highest priority, volunteers and other contributors are the next most important. Promoting official Anki cannot be ignored by volunteers and Anki users.
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I have the opposite view on this.
If a third party comparable to Ankihub emerges in the future, they are promoting Anki like Anking, so the number of AnkiMobile buyers will increase considerably.
(or, even if they did not promote Anki, their contributions would naturally increase the number of users by making Anki much more useful.)
If so, the official Anki should be able to use its budget to develop themselves, or financially support volunteer developers who are interested in developing it. (For example, if AnkiDorid’s development is delayed, official Anki should be able to increase support for them)
So I think the development resources for Anki volunteers will increase, not decrease.
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I personally think that Anki (desktop and mobile) would benefit from splitting review and editing into separate applications.
This would make the user interface simpler for those who are just using shared decks and not creating their own notes.
One use case for this would be using Anki within education. In such a scenario having an open interface for educators to collaborate on creating and assigning notes for each user would be ideal, with students only being able to review notes. (There would also be a need for an interface so that educators are able to see users review statistics).
This is a non-trivial potential user base, and so I suspect that in this case Damien’s comment about adaptation or risking alternatives being developed is quite real.
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As the gold standard of learning is to create your very own notes, I am highly sceptical of creating some viewer application.
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For individual learners I agree with you.
But I don’t for the use case presented, as part of an educational program (potentially including tools for teachers to monitor progress, etc). For instance, would we expect younger schoolchildren to create their very own notes?
As I said it will probably be a case of Anki adapting to fit all use cases, or for those where it doesn’t then if there is sufficient demand for that use case they will need to find or build an alternative to Anki.
I believe that educational use of SRS is such a use case where there is sufficient demand.
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I plan to develop something like this later. This function is possible by customizing the add-on Anki leaderboard (you can already do similar things with the group feature), and I recently successfully forked (customized) the leaderboard, so I can technically develop it already.
Discussion on the use of Anki in schools has been in this thread : AnkiForums : Anki in schools
Hi Shige, I’m a big fan of yours, and it seems that you’re quite knowledgeable of Ankihub. So I have a few questions regarding this matter.
- What benefit does the Ankihub integration offer to members of the Anki community, but aren’t subscribers?
- Which features of Ankihub are paid and which aren’t?
- Regarding your Subreddit user comment, I’d like to point out that Reddit is mainly used by English-speaking countries, which are no doubt a huge portion of the entire user base. However, there are still significant numbers of users outside the Reddit community, non-English speakers and English speakers who don’t use Reddit. What can Ankihub offer to attract these people to become potential new users?
- I agree that Dae is the sole owner and has the final say on all subjects regarding Anki. However, I’ve noticed that both in his and your replies, you mentioned the risk of Ankihub users creating their own SRS and app. Is this one of the solutions offered by the Ankihub team, or is it only speculation on what they might do? Cause if it is official, it does sound a bit threatening.
- The Anking subscription price seems quite high from what I can see, what keeps them in the red then? Are there too many students using free scholarship? Did they spend too much on licensing, marketing or others? What is keeping the organization afloat, and even having spare money to sponsor official Anki development?
- I believe that Brayan didn’t mean to discredit Dae’s contribution to Anki, but Anki, as a non-profit driven product, is vastly different from a commercial product, and tiptoeing between the line is a very dangerous move. I’ve seen enough passion projects start to go downhill after company involvements. What stops the next company from offering critical functions and plugging themselves in afterward?
I hope these questions aren’t too harsh, I have no intent of starting an argument, if there are questions you find uncomfortable answering, please feel free to ignore.
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Hello Yougnut, thanks for the mention.
If medical students become more popular with Anki, it could increase AnkiMobile’s revenue and make AnkiWeb’s servers more useful.
Server costs cannot be supported by volunteers or donations.
For example, I think the monthly donation for AnkiDorid, which has 10 million downloads, was about $2000. (maybe)
I think there are paid and free decks, and students without money can apply for a scholarship and it will be free.
They were trying to create a deck for Anki tutorials, so maybe in the future something like that will be available for free to general Anki users.
In my country, medical students can speak English, so they use and refer to Anking’s resources.
Besides that, Anking (Ankihub) is developing a desktop Anki, providing free add-ons and repairing add-ons.
Those are just speculations.
For example, the Migaku organization that develops add-ons for language learning has its own SRS, they have been popular with language learners for years.
And if commercial companies and developers are highly developed, they don’t need to rely on Anki for anything, so it is common for them to create their own apps and SRSs.
I do not know if they are currently in the red or not, those info are from their comments and discussions on Reddit a few years ago.
In my opinion, add-ons like Ankihub, where tens of thousands of people use the servers, are quite expensive to maintain in terms of labor.
They hire professional programmers and answer user queries in their community.
However, they are medical professionals, so I think it is relatively easy for them to collect donations, and medical students learn ethics in the first place, so their volunteerism is quite high.
I think AnkiDorid is a completely non-profit project, but in my opinion the official Anki is not a non-profit, they are a general company that sells AnkiMobile for $25.
These revenues are used to develop the Anki Desktop and provide free servers.
So I do not see Anki as a volunteer-driven non-profit organization, but as a general company providing a service for volunteers to participate.
(However, since Anki is an educational program, so I think it is more non-profit than general companies.)
In my opinion volunteers need not worry about Anki’s decline, Anki and the Spaced Repetition algorithms are all open source so they can be freely copied to create new programs for new volunteers.
I think it is common practice for developers to do so if they are dissatisfied with Anki, and since Anki is open source, I think it is encouraged.
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Thanks for the thorough explanation, greatly appreciate it !
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Teachers will require an integrated tool for reviewing statistics and assigning new cards, which I would expect to be a custom application outside of Anki.
Anki was designed as a system for motivated individual users to study using SRS. That is only a subset of the potential user base for SRS.
Broadening Anki’s applicability to other users requires it to evolve to a more open architecture, which is where decisions like this matter.
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That seems very different from what I want to develop.
There are already several such projects for educators using Anki, but they are all closed source and use their own servers that compete with Anki, and they are not compatible with Anki. So I think that projects outside of Anki do not need development support from the Anki community.
I think you misunderstand my point, which is that similar to the hooks for addins Anki could provide interfaces for external tools for specific types of user. One such interface is that originally discussed on this thread.
You’ve also confirmed my point that in the absence of adapting to users needs and providing such interfaces a competitor system is very likely to be developed and be adopted.
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Hmmm I may have misread something, I apologize.
In my opinion, it would be sufficient to consider such the interface when it is actually requested by a third party development organization. So far to my knowledge, there are no volunteer developers, third-party organizations, or educational organizations that require the same interface as this Ankihub.
$5/month can’t be described as high.
A lot of people benefit from the scholarship program (I do customer support with the AnkiHub team so I know that for sure).
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Thanks for the input, Abdo.
The subscription price of the recently infamous competitor, Ankiapp, is roughly $30/year in my region (compared to Ankihub’s $55/year with discount), though I’m not too familiar with what its premium offer. However, you’re right that the $5/month itself isn’t too atrocious.
Thank you for helping out all those who can’t afford it ! I checked out the request page but couldn’t see the details without having a Ankihub account. May I suggest making the description more clear (for example, you need a .edu email, medical school enrollment proof, etc) for people who can potentially benefit from your program but are still hesitant to create an account?
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Looks like the first step into a road bringing to freemium and the likes. Really really really hope to be wrong.
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I completely agree that ideally all for-profit organizations should be excluded, and all services should be completely free, not freemium.
However, realistically that is not possible, almost all volunteer Anki developers attempts to work long-term by relying solely on donations and praise have failed.
I wonder if software complexity is the actual cause of financial and time burden and if simplifying it from the start (and keeping it that way) could prevent these issues. Anki alone juggles between multiple languages (Svelte, Python, Rust…) built on a delicate foundation of libraries themselves. I worry about Anki’s future, finding but solace in regular backups and the fact SQLite is future proof itself. But if one day I’m confronted with making a choice in the case of Anki demise it will be a painful day. Even though I have the data right there.
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