The general advice is that using cards written by others is much less useful than cards you write yourself
As someone who has used SRS on a regular basis for multiple years, I disagree with this. Sure, there are times when my best option is to hand-craft cards for myself, but this is usually a function of there not already existing high quality cards that test me on the things I want to learn. Creating cards is useful for allowing me to focus on exactly the facts that I want to learn; the other times where this is true is when I have a specific model and vocabulary for understanding a field that isn’t standard; there, creating cards allows me to target the specific vocabulary and ontology that is unique to me.
However, often times I want to learn something that doesn’t meet these criteria: things that I can easily think about using a standard ontology and vocabulary, and are common enough subjects that someone has already taken the effort to make a sufficiently high-quality deck. In this case, making my own cards is just a waste of my time (and the time that is wasted isn’t negligible; I’ve spent up to an hour on multiple occasions creating cards for domains that could just as easily been downloaded if I knew of a high quality deck that already existed). I’m using premade decks for learning pronunciation and meanings of Japanese Kanji and for mapping flags to the countries they represent. There are many subjects where I have cards I made myself that I would be just as well off using equally high quality cards made by another person, and others would be well-served using the same cards I made: learning the pronunciation and meanings of Russian words, mapping coordinates to the cities they locate, memorizing poetry, mapping astronomical symbols to the bodies they represent. Even in the case of mathematical definitions and associations, while the cards I use are tailored to me, similar cards could certainly be made that would be suited to a much wider audience, that would be nearly just as useful as the cards I actually use.
I’d estimate about 2/3rds of the cards in my Anki deck are too specific to me to have been mass produced, but the other 1/3rd would be very well justified in having been made with the intention of being able to be used by others, and that ratio could be even higher (maybe up to 2/3rds mass produceable) without causing problems.
As someone who has used SRS on a regular basis for multiple years, I disagree with this. Sure, there are times when my best option is to hand-craft cards for myself, but this is usually a function of there not already existing high quality cards that test me on the things I want to learn. Creating cards is useful for allowing me to focus on exactly the facts that I want to learn; the other times where this is true is when I have a specific model and vocabulary for understanding a field that isn’t standard; there, creating cards allows me to target the specific vocabulary and ontology that is unique to me.
However, often times I want to learn something that doesn’t meet these criteria: things that I can easily think about using a standard ontology and vocabulary, and are common enough subjects that someone has already taken the effort to make a sufficiently high-quality deck. In this case, making my own cards is just a waste of my time (and the time that is wasted isn’t negligible; I’ve spent up to an hour on multiple occasions creating cards for domains that could just as easily been downloaded if I knew of a high quality deck that already existed). I’m using premade decks for learning pronunciation and meanings of Japanese Kanji and for mapping flags to the countries they represent. There are many subjects where I have cards I made myself that I would be just as well off using equally high quality cards made by another person, and others would be well-served using the same cards I made: learning the pronunciation and meanings of Russian words, mapping coordinates to the cities they locate, memorizing poetry, mapping astronomical symbols to the bodies they represent. Even in the case of mathematical definitions and associations, while the cards I use are tailored to me, similar cards could certainly be made that would be suited to a much wider audience, that would be nearly just as useful as the cards I actually use.
I’d estimate about 2/3rds of the cards in my Anki deck are too specific to me to have been mass produced, but the other 1/3rd would be very well justified in having been made with the intention of being able to be used by others, and that ratio could be even higher (maybe up to 2/3rds mass produceable) without causing problems.