Oh, that’s my deck! To be honest, I made it because:
A) You have the option to refresh the deck’s progress, which will indicate that you have learned a certain number of words for this piece of media as a result of other decks. I think this is a cool feature, especially since I like to feel comfortable with the things I use for immersion.
B) I love the game!
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Calling it Postmortem first is wild 
Honestly, I think it’s really cool that you made a tool to make Bunpro work as how you want to use it. But I think it’s a failure on the team’s part that you had to do it in the first place.
I would say that’s a big problem overall with how I use Bunpro. Needs to be more opinionated.
Okami really is an amazing game. Thank you for your contributions. 
It was a mistake that was corrected. I used postmortem in the definition of “critique” rather than failure.
The fact that we can have a conversation and I can push back hard on the forums and share my opinion is worthy of praise by the users and the Bunpro staff. I think all of us just want the best product possible at the end of the day.
I know my opinions aren’t always popular, but I will always share them regardless.
I worked over ten years in a brutal startup environment that went from less than 100 customers to a publicly traded company. When you have cut your teeth for that long, you develop a sixth sense for unusual design choices.
I think the issue needs to be looked at from a top-down perspective.
What I have observed is foundational issues overall with Bunpro. Where there are solutions to problems that are based on shaky foundations. (I apologize, as this is far exceeding the original intent of this thread, which was to show how many are using Community Decks)
Have you made an account and see what the onboarding process is like? I railed on them hard about the excessive modal box use (over 30!) and they did change it…but in an unsatisfactory manner. (10 modal boxes now is an improvement, I guess.)
The original intent of this site was to learn Japanese grammar. A very much needed niche in the Japanese learning community. Bunpro very quickly earned a lifetime subscription when I saw they went from N5-N1 in terms of grammar points. I don’t even think a website went this far in terms of content.
Then once the N5-N1 grammar points were added, the amount of refinement and polish (moat building) went on the back burner and overall Bunpro had no idea what they wanted to to. So, they added vocab. They added different language options for Japanese learners. They did things that are considered “naive” mistakes when expanding a business. Not saying that there is no value for those features, of course. It’s a matter of when you should do it.
I made a comment on another thread about Bunpro becoming a sharp knife and morphing into a Swiss Army tool that does nothing (does everything, but in a mediocre fashion). I think this is what we are seeing.
Remember there was talks of a conjugation tool? If you don’t, that’s fine as that was mentioned several years ago. This would’ve been a great addition to sharpen the figurative knife in the aspect of Japanese grammar (more moat building). But there’s nothing. Even now there’s just a prototype that hasn’t been worked on in a long time.
Don’t get me wrong, the team is still adding features and that is worthy of praise no matter how much I critique it. They truly have no incentive to add things, really. They could’ve just left it at grammar points and do slight updates in the same vein as Wanikani.
But Bunpro is not Wanikani. Bunpro is in a very unique position where they can become the biggest Japanese learning app on the internet, but they are doing it in the silliest of ways.
I am a firm believer that everything must be questioned to ascertain the truth of something. Is SRS even good for grammar? What’s the science behind it?
Is FSRS even a good match for Bunpro’s needs? When chatting privately, I got the impression that they didn’t know how the FSRS algorithm worked. That is a huge problem! I took a look at the FSRS algorithm and while it’s not hard if you have ML knowledge, it can be overwhelming.
I am listing off a bunch of random things, I get that. But if you look from a top-down perspective as to how everything fits together, it’s not fitting together well. They have good ideas in isolation that aren’t serving each other well as best as it should.
It’s sad for me to say, despite how much I love the site and the team behind it, I overall get the feeling that they have no longterm vision and are okay with taking half measures in a field where they shouldn’t.
I get why my posts may seem confusing and unpopular because I am directly saying that X isn’t good enough, gut it/change it. But I firmly believe that the team can make something great, they just need firm pushback to counterbalance the praise.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I fear this post and the direction the thread is taking may go beyond the original intent of this thread, so I will no longer post to it. But overall, the fact that there’s some good that can come of it will always be a win.
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