20 reasons why Anki isn’t popular
I decided to put together every single reason that I could think of, or that I had heard from someone else. If a reason is not on this list, you are probably the first person who has ever thought of it.
1) Active recall. It forces you to retrieve information, which strengthens memory. But it’s mentally taxing. Mental effort feels uncomfortable and people naturally avoid it. Speaking of which, I recommend reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, he talks a lot about it.
2) Doing flashcards can feel tedious. More importantly, it can feel more tedious relative to, say, reading a book.
3) For short timeframes like 1-3 days (typically right before the exam) cramming can - and most likely will - outperform spaced repetition, since there isn’t a whole lot of time for the spacing effect to take place.
4) Spaced repetition is great for lifelong learning, but most people are not lifelong learners.
5) Anki is far more complex than, say, Duolingo, so it could never compete with Duolingo in terms of the number of active users. An app that is easier to use has a tremendous advantage when it comes to attracting users, regardless of its effectiveness. An app that has a 200 pages manual has lost the popularity race before the it even made it to the starting line.
6) A lot of people want to “pause” Anki to prevent due cards from piling up, but that contradicts the simple fact that even if you can pause an app, you can’t pause forgetting inside your head. So there is a conflict between optimal scheduling and user satisfaction.
7) Reviewing every day requires consistency that a lot of people lack.
8) If you don’t know the difference between recognition (“Have you watched the Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger?”) and recall (“Name a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger”), it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that you know this material better than you actually do.
9) A lot of people think “If I don’t remember something, I can just Google it”. And it’s common even among very intelligent people.
10) Most people don’t even experiment with different learning techniques in the first place. Most people do A not because they have tried A, B, C, D, etc. and made a choice after comparing all available options.
11) No “virality”. A flashcard app that you use alone (unless someone is looking over your shoulder, lol) that doesn’t have any achievements (like Steam) or a leaderboard (add-ons don’t count). That’s about as far as you can get from an app that can go viral on social media.
12) Spaced repetition (SR for short) is not used in schools/colleges, so it’s up to you to integrate SR into your learning routine as opposed to having a routine that already has SR in it.
13) Making your own cards instead of using pre-made cards can itself be an entry barrier.
14) Even if someone is consistent initially, if they keep learning tons of new cards, after a few months they will have to do so many reviews that it will become overwhelming, making them quit.
15) Any reasonably good SR algorithm has some measure of difficulty, and easy cards will be sent further into the future than hard cards. While this is good for efficiency, it means that the user can develop a false sense of “All my material is super mega difficult”, because he sees hard cards much more frequently. So there is a conflict between optimal scheduling and user satisfaction. Again. And the more leeches the user has, the worse this gets.
16) A lot of people feel like flashcards actually disconnect them from the big picture.
17) Using SR in a classroom is nigh impossible. Even if it was, schools aren’t exactly famous for being early adopters of new technologies.
18) The idea that testing is learning (aka retrieval makes memories stronger) rather than them being two distinct things is surprisingly confusing for some people.
19) Most people want to be able speak a second language, few people want to learn a second language. Same goes for programming, drawing, etc. You name it. People want to be able to do X, but not to learn X. This problem isn’t unique to spaced repetition, of course, but I still think it’s worth mentioning.
20) Customizability vs user friendliness. Sadly, Anki devs, and especially Dae, favor power users over the new users. Figuratively speaking, devs are “selling” user friendliness to “buy” customizability. At a very shitty exchange rate. This tradeoff exists everywhere in software engineering, btw. You can’t make software both highly customizable and user friendly at the same time, so you have to find some middle ground. Swing too far in one direction and you’ll end up with The Tyranny of the Marginal User. Swing too far in the other direction and you’ll end up with software so complicated that it needs a 200 pages manual. Aka Anki.