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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Actually, every point was right and the data model is terrible. I've been using it for years. The other commenter just mentioned a list of things that the software does do and basically said "isn't that good enough for you" a bunch of times. No, it's not. Anki's concepts of flashcards, and how it stores and manipulates them, are horrible.

It's hard to do many, many things in Anki that should be trivial, impossible to do many, many things that should be possible, and the things you can do involve the types of queries being run over your entire collection that causes the app to slow to a crawl after you add about a dozen decks. And in general: I can adjust far too many things that I don't even care to adjust and probably shouldn't be adjusting, and things that should be trivial to do are impossible.

It's bad. Ankidroid is a little better, but they're also stuck with the data model.

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That’s because the default model is designed for the general user. If you sat down and really worked with the documentation, you would realize you shouldn’t be using decks or collections for management you should be using tags. Decks and collections are a different abstraction for different purposes.

I’m in medical school which has basically mastered Anki. The AnKing deck, used by over a million medical students, has over 35,000 cards, cross-tagged by numerous study resources that exists on a single “deck” which receives regular updates. I regularly run basically instant queries on over 40,000+ cards.

Medical school Anki has basically mastered this workflow and the original commenters complaints are completely wrong/come from a misunderstanding of Anki’s data model.

To be put simply, ignoring subdecks, filtered decks, cards vs notes, etc.: cards can only belong to one deck, but can have multiple tags. What exactly do you want to see differently in the data model?

35,000+ cards? Wow.

Out of curiosity: How does the individual student select the cards they want to study? Using existing tags or their own custom tags I suppose? If they create custom tags, how do they keep their local version of the deck in sync with upstream?

The deck used to just be shared on reddit & such. But for all your questions, there is now a central "upstream" entity called AnkiHub that organizes and maintains updates to cards, syncs, etc. It's a $5/month subscription, but a lot of my friends just subscribe for a month each year to get the updates then unsubscribe.

All cards start suspended by default, and you unsuspend cards usually by tag. For example, lets say you watched a a popular third-party exam prep video from Boards & Beyond on Insulin. You would find the corresponding video has its own tag "tag:#AK\_Step1\_v12::#B&B::08\_Endocrinology::03\_Pancreas::03\_Insulin" which you would unsuspend all the cards for. That's the basic flow, but everyone does things a little differently.

Some people don't watch videos just do review questions from UWorld which are also tagged. Some people manage cards using a mix of tags and decks. Some people search and manually unsuspend cards individually. Some schools cross-tag cards with their lecture. Personally, I use an AI search to unsuspend cards by cross-referencing against a PDF of lecture for the day.

Custom tags can be protected when syncing from upstream: https://community.ankihub.net/t/protecting-fields-and-tags/1...

Thanks, very insightful!

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