You can choose to remove yourself from that community ecosystem, but it's not exactly our ethos or why we started on this endeavor.
Actually, it sounds like he is trying to put the community and the product first.
A collaborative learning system works so much better with forced sharing.
The hardest and most time consuming part of using standard SRS software is building your deck.
A collaborative system helps share this load across all users.
If you want privacy choose a different product. For example I don't use GitHub for my projects because I don't want to share them.
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.
> 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.
Learning and remembering are very different processes.
I've had great success sharing cards and decks and haven't found my own cards any more valuable than the cards I've gotten from friends.
If you haven't found your own cards more valuable than cards other people made, you're making cards wrong, and could be remembering them MUCH easier.
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.
See also: https://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm . The rules that are related to what I describe here are 11-14. This is written by the godfather of spaced repetition.
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)