11 ms·

I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

428 points by burtonator 8y ago

brodouevencode 8y ago
More talk about "rebooting" the Internet (including TBL, et. Al.). 1. Is it really probable? 2. With what that won't cause further fragmentation? Also, is this what they're using to reboot the internet? > A powerful document manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux for managing web content, books, and notes - supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.
- getpolarized 8y ago
  This is basically the entry point.. I need a front end app to get people to contribute content so that Polar can discover and build a larger system on top for content sharing, federation, etc. It's in the roadmap and video. This isn't tied to a specific storage platform / provider so this can run on AWS, Filecoin, Firebase, etc. I talk about it a bit here: https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-platform-independence.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p...
  - brodouevencode 8y ago
    What about the other two questions, especially #2. (It's not just your effort.) Whenever I hear someone attempt to make the case of rebooting the Internet they never identify to what end, how to replace the old internet (because there will be resistance), or (which is annoyingly untrue but I get that you have to market it) come clean in that they're not really rebooting the internet, just how data gets shared across it. IDK, good luck to you. FB, all social media has its hooks into everything. Upending that is going to be a monumental task. _Disclaimer: not a social media user so I really don't care._
    - burtonator 8y ago
      We're not going creating more fragmentation. A metaphor would be "how could tearing down fences create more fragmentation"?
      - brodouevencode 8y ago
        If you say so. Do you really think your competitors are just going to roll over?
getpolarized 8y ago
Here are a few more resources if you're interested: Our roadmap: https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html Here's a discussion of using datastores to support a more distributed web: https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-platform-independence.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p... A high level mission statement which is still a work in progress: https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-Statement.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-Statement.h...
- fundamental 8y ago
  The roadmap for a project should provide a marketing opportunity where you can explain the current direction of a project and the high level changes that are expected to be seen over the coming months or years. Right now your roadmap reads like a list of open feature requests on an issue tracker. IMO it is far too much in the weeds, like most of the site. After going through several pages it is still unclear what problem is being addressed and who is currently the target audience.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    "too much in the weeds" is a good way to phrase this actually. I'm going to work on improving it but slammed for time. Growth is hard man! :)
getpolarized 8y ago
Nice. Just hit the front page! Today is my birthday too so good birthday present from you guys! I'm the creator of Polar so AMA :)
- ne9xt 8y ago
  How many sugar packets can you eat before you start barfing?
- rmbryan 8y ago
  Happy Birthday!
- backpackway 8y ago
  A tldr would be a good start. What is Getpolarized in two sentences and why will users prefer it over existing stuff?
- the_duke 8y ago
  The post left me very confused, and the mission statement didn't help clear up the confusion. While the document manager might be a nifty tool (it does look very interesting to me), I fail to see how a document manager/personal knowledge repo (or adding ebook reader support and mobile apps) would enable rebooting the internet. This definitely needs more information.
- thesorrow 8y ago
  How a reboot of the internet involve using an electron app ?
  - burtonator 8y ago
    Ha.. was waiting for the eventual comment hating on Electron ;) I feel it though.. we might look at porting to Carlo or something in the future if possible: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo
- ai_ia 8y ago
  I have checked out Polar. Love the idea even though I don't use it now. Maybe something I will use it in future. Happy Birthday and wish you Good luck Man.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I fully support the mission, but I would recommend making the post responsive for mobile devices. Opening this on iPhone is zoomed up in an area of a page with no text. A big reason Facebook/Insta has been successful is because it “just works” and is easy to use. I feel like the open web has always had a usability problem for non-technical users and it never really compared to closed solutions.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Completely agree.. 100%. This is a big goal in Q2 and is already in the roadmap. Usability and mobile are on the roadmap. Unfortunately, mobile is alpha right now and you should have received a warning that it's alpha when you went to the mobile site. It's not a ton of work though which is good though. We'll get there.
  - snazz 8y ago
    The only issue for me is that the video iframe is so huge that everything else is made smaller.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Ah.. the POST ... sorry. the entire site is responsive but the post wasn't as it broke due to the youtube vid. Thanks.
kristianc 8y ago
From a marketing perspective, it’s really advisable to tell people what your thing is before asking for money. Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.
- backpackway 8y ago
  Had exactly the same feeling. Non-responsive, want to raise money, did RSS. Didn't get more info after a 10sec skim.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    non-responsive is fixed.. bug with the CSS I didn't catch. mea culpa.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Thanks. I went back and forth on this and it was a tough call.. the plan was to get an initial crowdfunding video out and try to raise from people already passionate about Polar. I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on. If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign. This took a week of work already so was a bug chunk of time.
  - kristianc 8y ago
    The positioning isn’t a fluff piece exercise - it’s how you define what you are building, who it is for, and who it is not for. As a product guy, it’s your North Star. Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of ‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely. Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why we’re different ready at all times - even if your current audience is only true believers. EDIT: Clicked through to your features page. Confused. Polar allows me to "manage my reading"... oookay. What does that mean? What pain point is that solving for me? Does my reading need managing? What are the benefits to me as a user? You need to tell this story before you get to the fact that it's based on Electron (perhaps very much not a selling point) and uses PDF.JS. How is this better than Evernote for me, which, based on sheer longevity is probably going to be my first port of call? Who's your audience? Answer: not 'everyone' - you mention Pre Med students, but then your screenshot has a load of growth hackery stuff. If I'm a med student is there latex support? Getting out a notepad and making yourself clarify what this is, who you are building it for, and what benefit you see it giving them is going to be a big help for you. This goes double for you, as you're effectively creating a double sided marketplace of consumers for your product, and sites willing to integrate with your metadata.
frou_dh 8y ago
What was your role in the invention of RSS and podcasting?
- burtonator 8y ago
  I was actively involved with the rss-dev list, and also submitted and supported many RSS modules, participated in the initial Atom specification initially. I also created Apache Feedparser and other Open Source tools around RSS.
enumjorge 8y ago
I’m not terribly familiar with the history of RSS. In what way were you involved with its invention?
- eternalban 8y ago
  https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.
  - sodosopa 8y ago
    Look under RSS 1.0. It’s not the same as RSS .91 or 2.0 userland/Dave Winer branches. To call it simply as “RSS”? I dunno
    - burtonator 8y ago
      RSS 2.0 was a Dave Winer proprietary thing where no one else was involved.
      - sct202 8y ago
        Have you written a history of RSS article, because it seems like a juicy story to tell?
        burtonator 8y ago
        honestly I did on my old old blog from like +10 years ago but the URL has bitrotted ;)
aeonflux 8y ago
Site needs a designer or at least better cookie-cutter layout. It just looks mediocre. Today marketing is everything...
- burtonator 8y ago
  I know... I'm not a designer and this is one of the reasons I'm raising funding ;)
  - adnanazadsg 8y ago
    Hi, I'm a designer and I can help you with the website design (as well as some feedback/advice on branding and marketing if you are interested) - email is in my profile.
burtonator 8y ago
Here's a better pitch based on your feedback and maybe more tailored to the Hacker News crowd. The Internet is broken as content primary pools behind walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter. These platforms are not open in the sense that the metadata is locked up inside them. Additionally, they're not very respective of the rights and privacy of their user base. Polar tries to reboot this by building out a generic datastore model where users can share content with anyone of their backend datastores. The information/metadata model is free and portable and content and metadata can flow across networks. Polar is implemented as a 'read it later' style app similar to an RSS reader where you can add documents directly (vs RSS subscribing to a feed) and manage them and keep track of your reading. The key part is that Polar adds a metadata layer on top of PDF and the web and you can exchange the metadata with other users (still being implemented, initial sharing should ship next week). This means that you can add content from anywhere on the web and also share it with anyone else. We also archive the content and the actual content archives can be exchanged too. This means if anything is ever deleted you still have a copy. Polar also adds support for features like spaced repetition (never forget anything) and incremental reading (never forget what you're reading and where you left off) to encourage you to use Polar to manage all your reading material. The idea is that if people have a very valuable app to keep track of their content that they're more naturally likely to use it which means that the sharing and open content vision is directly powered by users. Right now we support local mode and cloud powered by Google's Firebase. We're planning on adding other backend providers like Filecoin but we have to take baby steps now because we're still an early project. Polar's design (though not yet implemented) can support end to end encryption and key sharing for group encryption. This means we can support fully end to end encrypted datastores. You can use a system to store your data (that you don't trust) and only you have the key. Additionally, if you want private group sharing we support one to many encryption where you can fan out content to anyone in a fully private group. It's important that this remains Open Source so that we can rely that Polar isn't just going to vanish.
- walterbell 8y ago
  Is there a vision for interop with other OSS projects that have pursued similar goals, e.g. IndieWeb, https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks? Who are the OSS or commercial competitors to Polar?
jp_sc 8y ago
You are not Dan Libby, Ramanathan Guha, Dave Winer, or one of the members of the RSS-DEV Working Group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History So why are you claiming to be one of the inventors of RSS?
- burtonator 8y ago
  Yes.. I was. the initial documents were never amended as RSS evolved. Here's one of the modules I created: http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ I think the archive is down but the rss-dev group has thousands of posts of me responding and supporting the dev or RSS. https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev Additionally, I don't really care about being famous for creating something and it's always seemed obnoxious to constantly insist that you were the creator of something. I was involved in a massive public dispute where Dave Winer had a freakout when I tried to collaborate with him on RSS (he attacked the whole RSS 1.0 movement) and I got sick of constantly getting in flame wars when I'm just trying to improve the Internet. I also created Apache Feedparser.
  - jp_sc 8y ago
    Thank you for answering. The members list is indeed incomplete.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Also, no other people who I would consider paramount in creating RSS are on that page including Sam Ruby and the dozens of other people who made massive contributions.
scoutt 8y ago
I don't know what this project is about (it's not explained in that page), but tokens like "Freemium" + "Premium" + "polarized" don't pass through my parser in regards about the future of the internet I want (or I think we deserve).
- burtonator 8y ago
  How so? How do you expect the Internet and sites will support themselves financially? Charge directly?
  - scoutt 8y ago
    Is always about the money, isn't it? :) I believe that we should reboot into a decentralized, accessible, encrypted and anonymous internet. Otherwise if you are asking money for traffic/space/service, then you are just a storage/hosting/cloud/db provider. You're not rebooting the internet. If rebooting the internet means transforming it into a freemium/premium model, then I think it is better as it is now. And that name... "polarized" internet. We have enough (and getting really tired of) that kind of behavior ("polarized": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization). Sorry for the negativity. Perhaps I didn't understand your project enough, or "rebooting the internet" was an ambitious clicky-baity title. Otherwise, if I understood it correctly, you want to store all the documents/information and want to charge for it. If so, I have no further comments.
aquamo 8y ago
I like the ambition, has some similarities to this project: http://freedomcontroller.com
backpackway 8y ago
Serious question: Is here some voting ring upvoting or HN being hacked? Reading the weird submission and this thread full of confused users, I am surprised this got on #1 and even stays there.
- felixfoertsch 8y ago
  I feel the same way. These guys are in every thread about editors posting a link to their site. They posted about it so often, I wish I had a filter for it by now. I think HN has to step up their adblock game.
- jacurtis 8y ago
  It'll probably slide down quickly. It was only posted 30 mins ago and there are ~130 upvotes and ~40 comments. That shows HN lots of interaction and is surprisingly high for a post only 30 mins old. The artificial inflation is probably real, but not malicious. For example, say 1 in 500 readers of a post normally leave a comment on HN. That would be the baseline that HN's algorithm compares stuff too. This post has an extremely intriguing title, causing lots of people to click it. Then as people click it, no one understands it, so then they all come to leave a comment asking what the hell this product/service (i still don't get it myself) is. This confusion is actually helping the post on HN because so many people are confused that let's say 1 in 100 people leave comments instead of 1 in 500 which is the norm. This causes the HN algorithm to assume this post is causing discussion and must be particularly interesting to users because it has 5X the interaction of a normal post. So the confusion is real, and I doubt it will hold for too long, but since the post is so new and has very high genuine interaction (comments of confusion is still interaction) points, the HN algorithm will rank it highly.
- getpolarized 8y ago
  Also, and serious answer. I would NEVER participate in anything like a voting ring and have been very vocal about paid advertising in the RSS community in the past. Lost a very very high paying customer to Datastreamer who was using RSS content to create google spam. We never sold to them as they violated our ToS out of the gate.
- slightwinder 8y ago
bsmith 8y ago
I think this title needs to be changed by a moderator. It has seemingly nothing to do with the linked page.
miguelrochefort 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand how what looks like a poor Evernote clone is supposed to "reboot the Internet". We're far from Xanadu. I'm all for open source, collaboration, personal knowledge management, spaced repetition learning, etc. but this document centric approach seems outdated to me. I thought we were supposed to move toward a more semantic web, something closer to a database than to a bunch of human-written documents. How does the rest of my data, such as quantified self style measurements, fit in this model?
Vordimous 8y ago
Wonderful article, RSS needs to make a comeback. Especially among friends and family who love to make large posts about important topics. I try to tell them to build a blog and then just link to articles that they write. Your article and others inspired me to finally just put together a system to make it easier to start blogging. And gave me the idea to just mimic a social media platform. They do all of the design for you so why not have a blog generation system that a user doesn’t have to mess with, just make content. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
pwinnski 8y ago
Edit: My bad, that[0] was your 'getpolarized' account, not this one. Your name seemed very familiar to me. Weird, did you delete the post about App Store approvals taking a long time even when all you change is text in the description? On the long list of your posts about your product, I don't see that one. I remember it not going very well for you. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19585015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19585015
- burtonator 8y ago
  Yeah.. I don't think I deleted it though. One thing I noticed about that post is that there was a core underlying premise that the community was assuming and I didn't realize that we were talking about completely different things. :)
arendtio 8y ago
FWIW I have been using Polar for the past few months. I use it as a place to store my ebooks (PDF) and articles (websites) that I want to read sometime in the future. In the past, I had a list for that but since I am not the reader type, that list was just growing and 'sometime in the future' might never have come. But with Polar that changed a bit. Polar has three features which made it easier for me to actually read something from my reading list: 1. With just one click you are back where you stopped last time (Polar keeps an offline copy of every article). 2. Every document has a progress bar and you can mark what you read already. This doesn't sound like much, but in fact, it feels rewarding to fill the progress bar ;-) 3. You can add comments to the document and create Anki flashcards. That way you can create your own extract of a document to quickly review it in the future. It is not like those things are not possible with other programs, but for me, Polar made the difference between not reading and reading (at least sometimes) because I can just start it and have everything I need in one place. I am not a particular fan of syncing all my documents via a 3rd party server, but syncing Polar via Nextcloud works just fine so far.
gildas 8y ago
Regarding annotations, wouldn't it be wise to collaborate with hypothes.is?
- burtonator 8y ago
  There's overlap but it seems hypothes.is is more focused on .edus and honestly I don't even find their product usable nor does it have features like incremental reading or spaced repetition that I want to build out.
0xCMP 8y ago
Lots of others are confused about this project. I've never seen it before, but I think I get the idea behind it. We have all this information we can learn from, but literally not enough time. Just think of all the articles you might have "to read" or books/papers/etc. of a similar status. Our best bet is to record our thoughts on the things which seemed to be important and come back to it later if it becomes more relevant. If you had a Kindle book and you invest a ton of time using the highlighting, notes, and flashcard features of Amazon's app then all that data is stuck there. There exists a website to take them out and from the app you can "export" the notes, but it clearly feels forced. You could simply write down your notes in another app, or in a notebook, but then you lose the whole purpose of why eBooks might be super interesting here (namely, that you might miss a part and you can simply click to view the original material). A paper book, unless OCR'd, can't be searched and endlessly marked up the way an eBook could in theory, although it certainly does allow you to completely own the information and work you put in to understanding the topics. In a sense this is trying to solve these smaller problems which make the original idea of collecting and annotating the information you find on the internet and elsewhere difficult and hard to maintain over any reasonable timeframe except as very simple document formats (e.g. HTML, Org, or Text files)
- burtonator 8y ago
  Yeah.. nailed it. That's one big part of it.. I want to be able to have the annotations on my documents as one repository too so I can actually build things with it directly. Spaced repetition and incremental reading are impossible with Kindle or 3rd party apps and they also don't support offline / cached / archived content.
chuckgreenman 8y ago
I'm not sure if this is an Instapaper clone, an Evernote clone, an rss reader, or a flash card sync system. Not really sure anyone needs this. You talk about walled gardens and privacy concerns and "rebooting" the web but say that you're using Google's firebase as a backend for sync. Personally, I'm just sort of at peace with the fact that Google has a copy of all my email and records of my location for the years I've had an android phone. But let's be super real - Google products and privacy aren't known for going together.
- burtonator 8y ago
  This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Google has no rights to your data. It's just stored there.
  - chuckgreenman 8y ago
    > This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Exactly the problem mate, that is something you should be concerned about.
  - lurker458 8y ago
    Do you feel you're sufficiently qualified to make that call on behalf of all your users ?
SanderSantema 8y ago
So I’ve followed the development of polar for a while know. Recently I stopped and uninstalled the program. I might return to it later but at the moment the thing which is most important for something dealing with content gets the least attention: simply dealing with content. For instance, a pdf which loads instantly in Skim or preview on my Mac takes 20 seconds to load in polar a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load. While polar focusses on saving webpages adblock isn’t implemented yet and pages often don’t save and/ or render properly. Even though polar is supposed to be open a non standard format .PHZ was implemented in polar and polar’s database is far from open or useable with other programs. Feels like a lock-in. This along with a slew of other bugs, polar being webtechnology and the focus on getting more users and developing the web version instead of focusing on developing an app which is robust and feature full (or at least expandable) makes me think my values and the values of the polar dev don’t align and polar simply isn’t worth my time. In any case, I hope I’m wrong and polar will be better or someone else takes the core ideas of polar and makes something more stable etc out of it. I hope I might be able to do that, but at the moment I’m unfortunately far from being knowledgeable enough to do this.
- burtonator 8y ago
  > So I’ve followed the development of polar for a while know. Recently I stopped > and uninstalled the program. I might return to it later but at the moment the > thing which is most important for something dealing with content gets the least > attention: simply dealing with content. For instance, a pdf which loads > instantly in Skim or preview on my Mac takes 20 seconds to load in polar This is probably resolved. There was an issue pre 1.17.5 that caused a few issues with PDFs taking longer to load. We're also about to upgrade to Elecron 5.x which fixes some problems with latency on some Windows machines. > a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load. This is actively being worked on ... Unfortunately, I have to decompress in the UI thread and this slows things down a bit. I'm trying to work on a new streams approach which should allow me to decompress content in a background thread and also stream load it in the foreground. Should work on the web too which I'm excited about. > While polar focusses on saving webpages > adblock isn’t implemented yet and pages I'm working on porting the web capture directly to the browser which should help solve this issue. Since the capture is done in a chrome extension ad block and other features will work as well as any type of extension. Electron doesn't work on chrome extensions. > often don’t save and/ or render > properly. Report them and they will be fixed. > Even though polar is supposed to be open a non standard format .PHZ > was implemented in polar and polar’s database is far from open or useable with > other programs. Feels like a lock-in. We're lucky PHZ works at all. It's very very complicated to implement properly. Portability is NOT an issue until I completely nail it working reliably. It's literally NOT possible to implement this now with any web standards. NONE support the features we need to implement caching of web pages. Additionally, I've gone out of my way to mention that Polar is Open Source and that this is important to the vision and respecting people's rights on data portability is insanely important to me. Not calling you out here but if I was trying to lock you up I'm going about it the wrong way. Benefit of the doubt please ;) > This along with a slew of other bugs, polar being webtechnology and the focus on > getting more users and developing the web version instead of focusing on > developing an app which is robust and feature full (or at least expandable) > makes me think my values and the values of the polar dev don’t align and polar > simply isn’t worth my time. How's that? The reason we're working on web + mobile is that users have demanded this functionality. One of the other challenges we have is that there just aren't enough users of the Desktop app to support active development of JUST that platform. If anything the Desktop will be a losing leader for the web edition as I'm expecting more users on that platform. That said, most of the web + desktop unification/integration is done now so desktop + web won't be an issue of competition. Also, I found out the hard way that we MUST support web tech first in Electron as they do not properly support their internal APIs. Electron was broken for about 8 months preventing us from upgrading because of their internal broken APIs. Chrome and web standards are much more reliable. > In any case, I hope I’m wrong and polar will be better or someone else takes the > core ideas of polar and makes something more stable etc out of it. I hope I > might be able to do that, but at the moment I’m unfortunately far from being > knowledgeable enough to do this. You can always donate if you want to keep supporting the project!
oftenwrong 8y ago
"We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars" I wouldn't make any assumptions based on what user's say they are willing to pay. Don't ask them how much they would pay; ask them for money. You will get very different results.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Yes.. if you've ever built anything you'll notice two things: 1. You can't build anything without user feedback. 2. You can't always trust user feedback. Something measurable is important. I've also never personally launched a crowdfunding campaign in this manner so I'm trying to put together as many data points as possible.
SamWhited 8y ago
We've entered a future where not only does it give me an obnoxious cookie disclaimer (how about you just don't set a ton of cookies which make every request huge?) when I launch the web version, but if I try the desktop version it also shows me an obnoxious cookie disclaimer. Please don't launch multiple popups (there's also a welcome one) as soon as your app launches; it scares me away before I can actually try the product.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Thanks.. my plan is to put the cookie disclaimer into a ToS thing which is part of the tour... think it has to be there though for GDPR reasons.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - krageon 8y ago
    You don't need a cookiebar if you don't set the cookies in the first place. In your own ideal scenario you would be receiving a ton of your users' information, but you don't even understand a pretty fundamental part of legislation which pertains to privacy. This doesn't inspire confidence.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    For anyone else running into this sort of garbage, I just discovered that ublock lets you block individual elements. Block the GDPR notice and you haven't accepted it and they can't be assholes and set a ton of tracking cookies (or if they still do, someone in the EU please file a GDPR complaint).
bastawhiz 8y ago
Polar seems like a neat project, but I worry about things like this that are supposed to take on my whole digital life. At one time in my life, I trusted Thunderbird. It got slower and slower, until simple actions (rendering the preview for an email) took thirty seconds or more. At a small scale, this is all well and good, but a lack of foresight around performance means that the biggest power users get punished. How do I know that this won't get dirt slow after the first 1000 (10k? 100k?) documents? Will it lock up my phone trying to crunch through a full text search of a gig of data? It's almost never the case that I see a project like this and have distrust for the mission/philosophy/model/values. But if it can't do what I need it to reasonably, it'd might as well not exist. And I'm not willing to use it for years at a time to find out that it doesn't scale to the point where I need it to. And to be quite honest, I'm more than willing to pay someone to keep a server running to make sure that it does scale and doesn't melt my phone, but that rarely seems to be an option for projects like this.
ankiplease 8y ago
What are the prospects on an ipad pro app? I paid $1500+ for my ipad. I'm very willing to pay for a good, open-source incremental reading solution on my iPad (with exportable content and easy backup). We are at the pre-history of spaced repetition learning. This will have very large effects on society. Just ask any engineer how much they already forgot of what they learned in college. Coursera et al will get into this space, I hope, but that's not enough. We need good, open alternatives like anki (but better) and with incremental reading. But keeping a slew of apps on different platforms updated and running smoothly is expensive. Anki's model of charging for the apple app is not bad.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Great question. I'm working in improving our tablet support. It's a lot easier than the mobile support honestly. If you try the polar webapp on your tablet and give me feedback I'll almost certainly implement any changes you need quickly. The goal for us is that we're going to charge for crowd storage and maybe for the mobile apps but probably only for really aggressive users. Still TBD
ActsJuvenile 8y ago
I read through the entire pitch and I still don't understand what is special about Polar. There are a ton of apps that do all this and more in no particular order: 1) Xodo Reader 2) Liquid Text 3) Margin Notes 3 (AWESOME) 4) KOReader (Open source) And several dozen more...
idlewords 8y ago
What's with all the moving parts to this business model? Why not just sell whatever this thing is (or maybe it's a service? I can't really tell).
Circuits 8y ago
So how exactly, will Polar "re-boot" the internet, deflate inflated tuition and decrease the cost of textbooks? What exactly does "re-boot" the internet even mean? Honestly, this seems like a whole lot of snake oil to me. If you have no intentions of directly combating tuition prices, which would require political intervention at the highest level of government, then why would you mention it? Unless of course your intentions were simply to evoke some emotional reaction in your viewers... reminds me of a family guy episode I watched where Louse ran for mayor. Eventually her campaign devolved from something substantial into a buzzword shouting competition between her and her running mate. I was half surprised when the article ended without talking about how Polar was going to rid the world of terrorism and the opioid epidemic.
- burtonator 8y ago
  True.. I think part of this is that some of the more long term features I plan on implementing in Polar are pretty revolutionary and I don't really want to discuss then until we're ready to release. I'm worried of larger and more funded companies like Facebook simply running off with the ideas and not contributing back the way I intend. But fair criticism.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > I think part of this is that some of the more long term features I plan on implementing in Polar are pretty revolutionary and I don't really want to discuss then until we're ready to release. Then you shouldn't even hint at them yet. It will just be confusing. I know that with products I've developed and sold in the past, I've always had much grander plans for them than what I actually told people at first. > I'm worried of larger and more funded companies like Facebook simply running off with the ideas and not contributing back the way I intend. That's a common and understandable fear, but I think a misplaced one. Truly, ideas are a dime a dozen. The value is in execution. Execute very well (and don't forget the "do one thing extremely well" advice -- it's a truism for a reason) and it doesn't matter if anybody else has lifted your idea. Well funded companies like Facebook, etc., will be in a position to implement their form of your idea in the end anyway, even if it's just by buying and using your product. The protection from the big boys that you get from secrecy is largely illusory.
reneberlin 8y ago
"Rebooting the internet" is a bit of a stretch. You are referring to the Port:80 and meant the "web". Also, you touched the topic "decentralizing the web" with this claim, which is a much more bigger concern compared to your plan. Please consider a more narrow description of your idea.
donttrackmebro 8y ago
For what it's worth, I think Polar sounds awesome and excitedly downloaded it one of the last times it appeared here, but the tracking policy is a total deal breaker for me. https://getpolarized.io/docs/tracking-policy.html https://getpolarized.io/docs/tracking-policy.html > Polar uses Google Analytics and other 3rd party services to track your usage of Polar for quality assurance, UI/UX and usability issues, fault detection, and adoption and usage of new features. > There may be data leaks (such as the name of a book in an exception log) but we try to keep this to either zero or a minimum by iterating and improving any potential data leaks. I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are entitled to my usage data and it's okay to introduce private data leaks (to third parties!) as long as you fix them later is enough to turn me off even if there was an opt out. It's too late to win me back but I would have happily paid for this if you took privacy seriously.
- telesilla 8y ago
  Oh yes this needs to be opt-in. There really is no need to be tracking usage. My own feature request here: I use Zotero for academic writing which takes care of formatting the bibliography. I would love to use Polar if it could also do this or if not, of it could somehow export a list of documents to Zotero (not sure if Zotero has an import module like this). I'd also need folders. If it had those two things, I'd be immediate subscriber because I have a million PDFs open at any one time where I forget where I am and where the good highlights are.
  - meej 8y ago
    Agreed, as soon as I looked at the main page and saw "flashcards" and highlighting, I wanted it to work either like or with Zotero.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > Polar uses Google Analytics and other 3rd party services to track your usage of Polar for quality assurance, UI/UX and usability issues, fault detection, and adoption and usage of new features. I agree, this is a showstopper. If this data is critical to the project, then the application should collect it directly and not use (or share data with) 3rd party services to do it.
jayalpha 8y ago
You got a lot of critic here but feedback is good. I will try out your product. I am happy that its exits an an app and not web only. I don't know if this can "reboot" the internet or become a money making business. But looks interesting for sure. What changed my life was recoll https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ I also looked into OpenPaper but in the end it offers nothing that recoll does not and recoll does it better. https://openpaper.work/en-us/ https://openpaper.work/en-us/ Marking PDFs, make them searchable and adding comments in Polar could be great for grants and writing a thesis. EDIT: 1. I really DO like the webcapture feature. I often save importent webpages since I know they may either not be available anymore in the future or I can't find the link anymore. This feature seems smooth already. But how can I sure that your software will still work in 10 years? Do you have an export feature already? 2. I would really like to be able to have folders as a feature to sort stuff better. 3. Your blog does not have an RSS feed.
nullsmack 8y ago
I just want to sync by documents somewhere I can control and have portable versions that can also sync with that location. Even if it's something like Git.
ramtatatam 8y ago
I have gone through the article and trying to understand what is so different with this project compared to other I see on the internet that would make me to donate... I read on almost every startup blog that idea must be crystalised, short so everyone just get it, and if it takes long to explain then most likely it's not the right idea... Or maybe I'm not intelligent enough to get it.
cliffreich 8y ago
Is there a way I can import my pocket saved links to this app? Or what's structure I need to import from file?
nmca 8y ago
I'm trialling this to make some statistics flashcards, we'll see how it goes :)
VectorLock 8y ago
Oh man classic burtonator right here. Never change.
moneywoes 8y ago
$5 for a cup of coffee? Where is it that expensive?
_bxg1 8y ago
After you mentioned academics/scientific content in the video, is when all of this came into focus and I understood how a document management/annotation app intersects with one possible interpretation of "reboot the internet". But I think there's some misguidance there. Academic content gets paywalled for economic reasons, not technical reasons. The basic web as it exists right now can do just as good a job distributing such things as it did 20 years ago. If your technology doesn't change the economic equation, it's not going to change anything. Social content on the other hand gets walled-in for social reasons. This is closer to being solvable by new technology, but the primary drivers are ease-of-use and network effects, not technical architecture. I don't see Polar really addressing those things. Facebook gained popularity because 1) any regular person could just visit a website and be off to the races for free, and 2) other people were on it. #2 isn't really addressable directly, but by requiring a native app download, you're already behind on #1. If you want to usurp a walled-garden with an open one, you can't just build better technology, you have to give regular people something that's both effortless and uniquely compelling compared to what they already use. That's an incredibly difficult (if noble) thing to try and do in this space.
acd 8y ago
I hope GetPolarized succeeds as a funding model there need to be a way to fund Open source software instead of much of new SaaS being closed source and investor funded.
throw0101a 8y ago
Is "RSS" treated as a generic term for 'syndication format', or does it actually mean the file format (as compared to including Atom/RFC4287)? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
hestefisk 8y ago
It’s an interesting idea, but you could pitch it much better. What is the problem you are trying to fix? How do you fix it? Why is it different? It reminds me a bit of OMEA that Jetbrains developed about 15 years ago. It was a desktop based information manager built on RSS but with full text search capabilities across desktop, email integration with Outlook and others. https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/OMEA/Omea+Frascati+Release+Notes https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/OMEA/Omea+Frascati+... On the technical side, I think it would be much more powerful to have a native experience. The web is flooded with electron apps. How about a Flutter based UI, which would also work on mobile?
scarface74 8y ago
Why should I support a project where the people involved can’t even clearly explain what it is?I seriously doubt the ability of anyone to execute a successful business who can’t even communicate their plan.
deca6cda37d0 8y ago
The biggest issue I have with the application is that it’s not following the Human Interface Guidelines for every platform. A native look and feel for the Mac would make me use it.
lkrubner 8y ago
Kevin Burton is one of the inventors of RSS? Really? Back in 2006 I wrote what was one of the most comprehensive blog posts on the history of RSS, and somehow I never heard of him. If anyone is interested in some of the personalities who were fighting it out in the early days of RSS, I would encourage you to read my essay "RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it". This essay was written during the last year when RSS still seemed like the wave of the future, before Twitter took off and changed the conversation completely: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
mastrsushi 8y ago
What makes this different than Feedly or any other unified feed service for them matter? The fact that I can archive and annotate? Unless this is explained more elaborately, all I see is yet another app, not an attempt at rebooting the internet.
wasdfff 8y ago
I tried to get into polarized but ended up going back to zotero, which ticked more of my boxes (ref management, document storage options, install and sync library, notes, and saved webpages on any computer, free with cheap cloud storage upgrades, community built add ons). I’ll keep checking in though.
Diti 8y ago
> If we haven’t generated enough value for you that you wouldn’t buy me a cup of coffee I think we’re doing something wrong. Or, maybe, just maybe, giving $5-“coffee” to 15 different services every month isn’t sustainable and none of this is your fault.
sytelus 8y ago
Looks like just another web annotation app. There is already getpocket.com and diigo.com, both cheap and already have free versions. Although I agree sharing is unsolved and there is so much more that can be done. So I like the new player in this space, especially with more ambitious plans but I think there was really no need to pull “I am the inventor of RSS...” perhaps. Also claims of rebooting internet seems to be overly grand for apps in this space. This shouldn’t need a lot of capital and could be bootstrapped easily with may be little ShowHN post.
HocusLocus 8y ago
But RSS runs on Windows XP!
tripzilch 8y ago
I know it's besides the point and this is probably a cool project but can we stop equating $5 with coffee? That's like saying popcorn costs $8. Most of the time, my coffee is either free or costs like 30 cents maybe? (wild guess, probably less depending on beans) relatively rarely I will I pay $5 for it, but I associate it with the price of not otherwise having access to coffee (because I'm in a hurry, didn't bring a thermos, etc)

428 points by burtonator 8y ago

More talk about "rebooting" the Internet (including TBL, et. Al.). 1. Is it really probable? 2. With what that won't cause further fragmentation? Also, is this what they're using to reboot the internet? > A powerful document manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux for managing web content, books, and notes - supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.

getpolarized 8y ago
This is basically the entry point.. I need a front end app to get people to contribute content so that Polar can discover and build a larger system on top for content sharing, federation, etc. It's in the roadmap and video. This isn't tied to a specific storage platform / provider so this can run on AWS, Filecoin, Firebase, etc. I talk about it a bit here: https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-platform-independence.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p...
- brodouevencode 8y ago
  What about the other two questions, especially #2. (It's not just your effort.) Whenever I hear someone attempt to make the case of rebooting the Internet they never identify to what end, how to replace the old internet (because there will be resistance), or (which is annoyingly untrue but I get that you have to market it) come clean in that they're not really rebooting the internet, just how data gets shared across it. IDK, good luck to you. FB, all social media has its hooks into everything. Upending that is going to be a monumental task. _Disclaimer: not a social media user so I really don't care._
  - burtonator 8y ago
    We're not going creating more fragmentation. A metaphor would be "how could tearing down fences create more fragmentation"?
    - brodouevencode 8y ago
      If you say so. Do you really think your competitors are just going to roll over?

getpolarized 8y ago

Here are a few more resources if you're interested: Our roadmap: https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html Here's a discussion of using datastores to support a more distributed web: https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-platform-independence.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p... A high level mission statement which is still a work in progress: https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-Statement.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-Statement.h...

fundamental 8y ago
The roadmap for a project should provide a marketing opportunity where you can explain the current direction of a project and the high level changes that are expected to be seen over the coming months or years. Right now your roadmap reads like a list of open feature requests on an issue tracker. IMO it is far too much in the weeds, like most of the site. After going through several pages it is still unclear what problem is being addressed and who is currently the target audience.
- burtonator 8y ago
  "too much in the weeds" is a good way to phrase this actually. I'm going to work on improving it but slammed for time. Growth is hard man! :)

getpolarized 8y ago

Nice. Just hit the front page! Today is my birthday too so good birthday present from you guys! I'm the creator of Polar so AMA :)

ne9xt 8y ago
How many sugar packets can you eat before you start barfing?
rmbryan 8y ago
Happy Birthday!
backpackway 8y ago
A tldr would be a good start. What is Getpolarized in two sentences and why will users prefer it over existing stuff?
the_duke 8y ago
The post left me very confused, and the mission statement didn't help clear up the confusion. While the document manager might be a nifty tool (it does look very interesting to me), I fail to see how a document manager/personal knowledge repo (or adding ebook reader support and mobile apps) would enable rebooting the internet. This definitely needs more information.
thesorrow 8y ago
How a reboot of the internet involve using an electron app ?
- burtonator 8y ago
  Ha.. was waiting for the eventual comment hating on Electron ;) I feel it though.. we might look at porting to Carlo or something in the future if possible: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo
ai_ia 8y ago
I have checked out Polar. Love the idea even though I don't use it now. Maybe something I will use it in future. Happy Birthday and wish you Good luck Man.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I fully support the mission, but I would recommend making the post responsive for mobile devices. Opening this on iPhone is zoomed up in an area of a page with no text. A big reason Facebook/Insta has been successful is because it “just works” and is easy to use. I feel like the open web has always had a usability problem for non-technical users and it never really compared to closed solutions.

burtonator 8y ago
Completely agree.. 100%. This is a big goal in Q2 and is already in the roadmap. Usability and mobile are on the roadmap. Unfortunately, mobile is alpha right now and you should have received a warning that it's alpha when you went to the mobile site. It's not a ton of work though which is good though. We'll get there.
- snazz 8y ago
  The only issue for me is that the video iframe is so huge that everything else is made smaller.
burtonator 8y ago
Ah.. the POST ... sorry. the entire site is responsive but the post wasn't as it broke due to the youtube vid. Thanks.

kristianc 8y ago

From a marketing perspective, it’s really advisable to tell people what your thing is before asking for money. Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.

backpackway 8y ago
Had exactly the same feeling. Non-responsive, want to raise money, did RSS. Didn't get more info after a 10sec skim.
- burtonator 8y ago
  non-responsive is fixed.. bug with the CSS I didn't catch. mea culpa.
burtonator 8y ago
Thanks. I went back and forth on this and it was a tough call.. the plan was to get an initial crowdfunding video out and try to raise from people already passionate about Polar. I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on. If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign. This took a week of work already so was a bug chunk of time.
- kristianc 8y ago
  The positioning isn’t a fluff piece exercise - it’s how you define what you are building, who it is for, and who it is not for. As a product guy, it’s your North Star. Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of ‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely. Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why we’re different ready at all times - even if your current audience is only true believers. EDIT: Clicked through to your features page. Confused. Polar allows me to "manage my reading"... oookay. What does that mean? What pain point is that solving for me? Does my reading need managing? What are the benefits to me as a user? You need to tell this story before you get to the fact that it's based on Electron (perhaps very much not a selling point) and uses PDF.JS. How is this better than Evernote for me, which, based on sheer longevity is probably going to be my first port of call? Who's your audience? Answer: not 'everyone' - you mention Pre Med students, but then your screenshot has a load of growth hackery stuff. If I'm a med student is there latex support? Getting out a notepad and making yourself clarify what this is, who you are building it for, and what benefit you see it giving them is going to be a big help for you. This goes double for you, as you're effectively creating a double sided marketplace of consumers for your product, and sites willing to integrate with your metadata.

frou_dh 8y ago

What was your role in the invention of RSS and podcasting?

burtonator 8y ago
I was actively involved with the rss-dev list, and also submitted and supported many RSS modules, participated in the initial Atom specification initially. I also created Apache Feedparser and other Open Source tools around RSS.

enumjorge 8y ago

I’m not terribly familiar with the history of RSS. In what way were you involved with its invention?

eternalban 8y ago
https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.
- sodosopa 8y ago
  Look under RSS 1.0. It’s not the same as RSS .91 or 2.0 userland/Dave Winer branches. To call it simply as “RSS”? I dunno
  - burtonator 8y ago
    RSS 2.0 was a Dave Winer proprietary thing where no one else was involved.
    - sct202 8y ago
      Have you written a history of RSS article, because it seems like a juicy story to tell?
      - burtonator 8y ago
        honestly I did on my old old blog from like +10 years ago but the URL has bitrotted ;)

aeonflux 8y ago

Site needs a designer or at least better cookie-cutter layout. It just looks mediocre. Today marketing is everything...

burtonator 8y ago
I know... I'm not a designer and this is one of the reasons I'm raising funding ;)
- adnanazadsg 8y ago
  Hi, I'm a designer and I can help you with the website design (as well as some feedback/advice on branding and marketing if you are interested) - email is in my profile.

burtonator 8y ago

Here's a better pitch based on your feedback and maybe more tailored to the Hacker News crowd. The Internet is broken as content primary pools behind walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter. These platforms are not open in the sense that the metadata is locked up inside them. Additionally, they're not very respective of the rights and privacy of their user base. Polar tries to reboot this by building out a generic datastore model where users can share content with anyone of their backend datastores. The information/metadata model is free and portable and content and metadata can flow across networks. Polar is implemented as a 'read it later' style app similar to an RSS reader where you can add documents directly (vs RSS subscribing to a feed) and manage them and keep track of your reading. The key part is that Polar adds a metadata layer on top of PDF and the web and you can exchange the metadata with other users (still being implemented, initial sharing should ship next week). This means that you can add content from anywhere on the web and also share it with anyone else. We also archive the content and the actual content archives can be exchanged too. This means if anything is ever deleted you still have a copy. Polar also adds support for features like spaced repetition (never forget anything) and incremental reading (never forget what you're reading and where you left off) to encourage you to use Polar to manage all your reading material. The idea is that if people have a very valuable app to keep track of their content that they're more naturally likely to use it which means that the sharing and open content vision is directly powered by users. Right now we support local mode and cloud powered by Google's Firebase. We're planning on adding other backend providers like Filecoin but we have to take baby steps now because we're still an early project. Polar's design (though not yet implemented) can support end to end encryption and key sharing for group encryption. This means we can support fully end to end encrypted datastores. You can use a system to store your data (that you don't trust) and only you have the key. Additionally, if you want private group sharing we support one to many encryption where you can fan out content to anyone in a fully private group. It's important that this remains Open Source so that we can rely that Polar isn't just going to vanish.

walterbell 8y ago
Is there a vision for interop with other OSS projects that have pursued similar goals, e.g. IndieWeb, https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks? Who are the OSS or commercial competitors to Polar?

jp_sc 8y ago

You are not Dan Libby, Ramanathan Guha, Dave Winer, or one of the members of the RSS-DEV Working Group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History So why are you claiming to be one of the inventors of RSS?

burtonator 8y ago
Yes.. I was. the initial documents were never amended as RSS evolved. Here's one of the modules I created: http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/ I think the archive is down but the rss-dev group has thousands of posts of me responding and supporting the dev or RSS. https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev Additionally, I don't really care about being famous for creating something and it's always seemed obnoxious to constantly insist that you were the creator of something. I was involved in a massive public dispute where Dave Winer had a freakout when I tried to collaborate with him on RSS (he attacked the whole RSS 1.0 movement) and I got sick of constantly getting in flame wars when I'm just trying to improve the Internet. I also created Apache Feedparser.
- jp_sc 8y ago
  Thank you for answering. The members list is indeed incomplete.
burtonator 8y ago
Also, no other people who I would consider paramount in creating RSS are on that page including Sam Ruby and the dozens of other people who made massive contributions.

scoutt 8y ago

I don't know what this project is about (it's not explained in that page), but tokens like "Freemium" + "Premium" + "polarized" don't pass through my parser in regards about the future of the internet I want (or I think we deserve).

burtonator 8y ago
How so? How do you expect the Internet and sites will support themselves financially? Charge directly?
- scoutt 8y ago
  Is always about the money, isn't it? :) I believe that we should reboot into a decentralized, accessible, encrypted and anonymous internet. Otherwise if you are asking money for traffic/space/service, then you are just a storage/hosting/cloud/db provider. You're not rebooting the internet. If rebooting the internet means transforming it into a freemium/premium model, then I think it is better as it is now. And that name... "polarized" internet. We have enough (and getting really tired of) that kind of behavior ("polarized": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization). Sorry for the negativity. Perhaps I didn't understand your project enough, or "rebooting the internet" was an ambitious clicky-baity title. Otherwise, if I understood it correctly, you want to store all the documents/information and want to charge for it. If so, I have no further comments.

aquamo 8y ago

I like the ambition, has some similarities to this project: http://freedomcontroller.com

backpackway 8y ago

Serious question: Is here some voting ring upvoting or HN being hacked? Reading the weird submission and this thread full of confused users, I am surprised this got on #1 and even stays there.

felixfoertsch 8y ago
I feel the same way. These guys are in every thread about editors posting a link to their site. They posted about it so often, I wish I had a filter for it by now. I think HN has to step up their adblock game.
jacurtis 8y ago
It'll probably slide down quickly. It was only posted 30 mins ago and there are ~130 upvotes and ~40 comments. That shows HN lots of interaction and is surprisingly high for a post only 30 mins old. The artificial inflation is probably real, but not malicious. For example, say 1 in 500 readers of a post normally leave a comment on HN. That would be the baseline that HN's algorithm compares stuff too. This post has an extremely intriguing title, causing lots of people to click it. Then as people click it, no one understands it, so then they all come to leave a comment asking what the hell this product/service (i still don't get it myself) is. This confusion is actually helping the post on HN because so many people are confused that let's say 1 in 100 people leave comments instead of 1 in 500 which is the norm. This causes the HN algorithm to assume this post is causing discussion and must be particularly interesting to users because it has 5X the interaction of a normal post. So the confusion is real, and I doubt it will hold for too long, but since the post is so new and has very high genuine interaction (comments of confusion is still interaction) points, the HN algorithm will rank it highly.
getpolarized 8y ago
Also, and serious answer. I would NEVER participate in anything like a voting ring and have been very vocal about paid advertising in the RSS community in the past. Lost a very very high paying customer to Datastreamer who was using RSS content to create google spam. We never sold to them as they violated our ToS out of the gate.
slightwinder 8y ago

bsmith 8y ago

I think this title needs to be changed by a moderator. It has seemingly nothing to do with the linked page.

miguelrochefort 8y ago

I'm not sure I understand how what looks like a poor Evernote clone is supposed to "reboot the Internet". We're far from Xanadu. I'm all for open source, collaboration, personal knowledge management, spaced repetition learning, etc. but this document centric approach seems outdated to me. I thought we were supposed to move toward a more semantic web, something closer to a database than to a bunch of human-written documents. How does the rest of my data, such as quantified self style measurements, fit in this model?

Vordimous 8y ago

Wonderful article, RSS needs to make a comeback. Especially among friends and family who love to make large posts about important topics. I try to tell them to build a blog and then just link to articles that they write. Your article and others inspired me to finally just put together a system to make it easier to start blogging. And gave me the idea to just mimic a social media platform. They do all of the design for you so why not have a blog generation system that a user doesn’t have to mess with, just make content. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

pwinnski 8y ago

Edit: My bad, that[0] was your 'getpolarized' account, not this one. Your name seemed very familiar to me. Weird, did you delete the post about App Store approvals taking a long time even when all you change is text in the description? On the long list of your posts about your product, I don't see that one. I remember it not going very well for you. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19585015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19585015

burtonator 8y ago
Yeah.. I don't think I deleted it though. One thing I noticed about that post is that there was a core underlying premise that the community was assuming and I didn't realize that we were talking about completely different things. :)

arendtio 8y ago

FWIW I have been using Polar for the past few months. I use it as a place to store my ebooks (PDF) and articles (websites) that I want to read sometime in the future. In the past, I had a list for that but since I am not the reader type, that list was just growing and 'sometime in the future' might never have come. But with Polar that changed a bit. Polar has three features which made it easier for me to actually read something from my reading list: 1. With just one click you are back where you stopped last time (Polar keeps an offline copy of every article). 2. Every document has a progress bar and you can mark what you read already. This doesn't sound like much, but in fact, it feels rewarding to fill the progress bar ;-) 3. You can add comments to the document and create Anki flashcards. That way you can create your own extract of a document to quickly review it in the future. It is not like those things are not possible with other programs, but for me, Polar made the difference between not reading and reading (at least sometimes) because I can just start it and have everything I need in one place. I am not a particular fan of syncing all my documents via a 3rd party server, but syncing Polar via Nextcloud works just fine so far.

gildas 8y ago

Regarding annotations, wouldn't it be wise to collaborate with hypothes.is?

burtonator 8y ago
There's overlap but it seems hypothes.is is more focused on .edus and honestly I don't even find their product usable nor does it have features like incremental reading or spaced repetition that I want to build out.

0xCMP 8y ago

Lots of others are confused about this project. I've never seen it before, but I think I get the idea behind it. We have all this information we can learn from, but literally not enough time. Just think of all the articles you might have "to read" or books/papers/etc. of a similar status. Our best bet is to record our thoughts on the things which seemed to be important and come back to it later if it becomes more relevant. If you had a Kindle book and you invest a ton of time using the highlighting, notes, and flashcard features of Amazon's app then all that data is stuck there. There exists a website to take them out and from the app you can "export" the notes, but it clearly feels forced. You could simply write down your notes in another app, or in a notebook, but then you lose the whole purpose of why eBooks might be super interesting here (namely, that you might miss a part and you can simply click to view the original material). A paper book, unless OCR'd, can't be searched and endlessly marked up the way an eBook could in theory, although it certainly does allow you to completely own the information and work you put in to understanding the topics. In a sense this is trying to solve these smaller problems which make the original idea of collecting and annotating the information you find on the internet and elsewhere difficult and hard to maintain over any reasonable timeframe except as very simple document formats (e.g. HTML, Org, or Text files)

burtonator 8y ago
Yeah.. nailed it. That's one big part of it.. I want to be able to have the annotations on my documents as one repository too so I can actually build things with it directly. Spaced repetition and incremental reading are impossible with Kindle or 3rd party apps and they also don't support offline / cached / archived content.

chuckgreenman 8y ago

I'm not sure if this is an Instapaper clone, an Evernote clone, an rss reader, or a flash card sync system. Not really sure anyone needs this. You talk about walled gardens and privacy concerns and "rebooting" the web but say that you're using Google's firebase as a backend for sync. Personally, I'm just sort of at peace with the fact that Google has a copy of all my email and records of my location for the years I've had an android phone. But let's be super real - Google products and privacy aren't known for going together.

burtonator 8y ago
This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Google has no rights to your data. It's just stored there.
- chuckgreenman 8y ago
  > This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Exactly the problem mate, that is something you should be concerned about.
- lurker458 8y ago
  Do you feel you're sufficiently qualified to make that call on behalf of all your users ?

SanderSantema 8y ago

So I’ve followed the development of polar for a while know. Recently I stopped and uninstalled the program. I might return to it later but at the moment the thing which is most important for something dealing with content gets the least attention: simply dealing with content. For instance, a pdf which loads instantly in Skim or preview on my Mac takes 20 seconds to load in polar a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load. While polar focusses on saving webpages adblock isn’t implemented yet and pages often don’t save and/ or render properly. Even though polar is supposed to be open a non standard format .PHZ was implemented in polar and polar’s database is far from open or useable with other programs. Feels like a lock-in. This along with a slew of other bugs, polar being webtechnology and the focus on getting more users and developing the web version instead of focusing on developing an app which is robust and feature full (or at least expandable) makes me think my values and the values of the polar dev don’t align and polar simply isn’t worth my time. In any case, I hope I’m wrong and polar will be better or someone else takes the core ideas of polar and makes something more stable etc out of it. I hope I might be able to do that, but at the moment I’m unfortunately far from being knowledgeable enough to do this.

burtonator 8y ago
> So I’ve followed the development of polar for a while know. Recently I stopped > and uninstalled the program. I might return to it later but at the moment the > thing which is most important for something dealing with content gets the least > attention: simply dealing with content. For instance, a pdf which loads > instantly in Skim or preview on my Mac takes 20 seconds to load in polar This is probably resolved. There was an issue pre 1.17.5 that caused a few issues with PDFs taking longer to load. We're also about to upgrade to Elecron 5.x which fixes some problems with latency on some Windows machines. > a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load. This is actively being worked on ... Unfortunately, I have to decompress in the UI thread and this slows things down a bit. I'm trying to work on a new streams approach which should allow me to decompress content in a background thread and also stream load it in the foreground. Should work on the web too which I'm excited about. > While polar focusses on saving webpages > adblock isn’t implemented yet and pages I'm working on porting the web capture directly to the browser which should help solve this issue. Since the capture is done in a chrome extension ad block and other features will work as well as any type of extension. Electron doesn't work on chrome extensions. > often don’t save and/ or render > properly. Report them and they will be fixed. > Even though polar is supposed to be open a non standard format .PHZ > was implemented in polar and polar’s database is far from open or useable with > other programs. Feels like a lock-in. We're lucky PHZ works at all. It's very very complicated to implement properly. Portability is NOT an issue until I completely nail it working reliably. It's literally NOT possible to implement this now with any web standards. NONE support the features we need to implement caching of web pages. Additionally, I've gone out of my way to mention that Polar is Open Source and that this is important to the vision and respecting people's rights on data portability is insanely important to me. Not calling you out here but if I was trying to lock you up I'm going about it the wrong way. Benefit of the doubt please ;) > This along with a slew of other bugs, polar being webtechnology and the focus on > getting more users and developing the web version instead of focusing on > developing an app which is robust and feature full (or at least expandable) > makes me think my values and the values of the polar dev don’t align and polar > simply isn’t worth my time. How's that? The reason we're working on web + mobile is that users have demanded this functionality. One of the other challenges we have is that there just aren't enough users of the Desktop app to support active development of JUST that platform. If anything the Desktop will be a losing leader for the web edition as I'm expecting more users on that platform. That said, most of the web + desktop unification/integration is done now so desktop + web won't be an issue of competition. Also, I found out the hard way that we MUST support web tech first in Electron as they do not properly support their internal APIs. Electron was broken for about 8 months preventing us from upgrading because of their internal broken APIs. Chrome and web standards are much more reliable. > In any case, I hope I’m wrong and polar will be better or someone else takes the > core ideas of polar and makes something more stable etc out of it. I hope I > might be able to do that, but at the moment I’m unfortunately far from being > knowledgeable enough to do this. You can always donate if you want to keep supporting the project!

oftenwrong 8y ago

"We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars" I wouldn't make any assumptions based on what user's say they are willing to pay. Don't ask them how much they would pay; ask them for money. You will get very different results.

burtonator 8y ago
Yes.. if you've ever built anything you'll notice two things: 1. You can't build anything without user feedback. 2. You can't always trust user feedback. Something measurable is important. I've also never personally launched a crowdfunding campaign in this manner so I'm trying to put together as many data points as possible.

SamWhited 8y ago

We've entered a future where not only does it give me an obnoxious cookie disclaimer (how about you just don't set a ton of cookies which make every request huge?) when I launch the web version, but if I try the desktop version it also shows me an obnoxious cookie disclaimer. Please don't launch multiple popups (there's also a welcome one) as soon as your app launches; it scares me away before I can actually try the product.

burtonator 8y ago
Thanks.. my plan is to put the cookie disclaimer into a ToS thing which is part of the tour... think it has to be there though for GDPR reasons.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- krageon 8y ago
  You don't need a cookiebar if you don't set the cookies in the first place. In your own ideal scenario you would be receiving a ton of your users' information, but you don't even understand a pretty fundamental part of legislation which pertains to privacy. This doesn't inspire confidence.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  For anyone else running into this sort of garbage, I just discovered that ublock lets you block individual elements. Block the GDPR notice and you haven't accepted it and they can't be assholes and set a ton of tracking cookies (or if they still do, someone in the EU please file a GDPR complaint).

bastawhiz 8y ago

Polar seems like a neat project, but I worry about things like this that are supposed to take on my whole digital life. At one time in my life, I trusted Thunderbird. It got slower and slower, until simple actions (rendering the preview for an email) took thirty seconds or more. At a small scale, this is all well and good, but a lack of foresight around performance means that the biggest power users get punished. How do I know that this won't get dirt slow after the first 1000 (10k? 100k?) documents? Will it lock up my phone trying to crunch through a full text search of a gig of data? It's almost never the case that I see a project like this and have distrust for the mission/philosophy/model/values. But if it can't do what I need it to reasonably, it'd might as well not exist. And I'm not willing to use it for years at a time to find out that it doesn't scale to the point where I need it to. And to be quite honest, I'm more than willing to pay someone to keep a server running to make sure that it does scale and doesn't melt my phone, but that rarely seems to be an option for projects like this.

ankiplease 8y ago

What are the prospects on an ipad pro app? I paid $1500+ for my ipad. I'm very willing to pay for a good, open-source incremental reading solution on my iPad (with exportable content and easy backup). We are at the pre-history of spaced repetition learning. This will have very large effects on society. Just ask any engineer how much they already forgot of what they learned in college. Coursera et al will get into this space, I hope, but that's not enough. We need good, open alternatives like anki (but better) and with incremental reading. But keeping a slew of apps on different platforms updated and running smoothly is expensive. Anki's model of charging for the apple app is not bad.

burtonator 8y ago
Great question. I'm working in improving our tablet support. It's a lot easier than the mobile support honestly. If you try the polar webapp on your tablet and give me feedback I'll almost certainly implement any changes you need quickly. The goal for us is that we're going to charge for crowd storage and maybe for the mobile apps but probably only for really aggressive users. Still TBD

ActsJuvenile 8y ago

I read through the entire pitch and I still don't understand what is special about Polar. There are a ton of apps that do all this and more in no particular order: 1) Xodo Reader 2) Liquid Text 3) Margin Notes 3 (AWESOME) 4) KOReader (Open source) And several dozen more...

idlewords 8y ago

What's with all the moving parts to this business model? Why not just sell whatever this thing is (or maybe it's a service? I can't really tell).

Circuits 8y ago

So how exactly, will Polar "re-boot" the internet, deflate inflated tuition and decrease the cost of textbooks? What exactly does "re-boot" the internet even mean? Honestly, this seems like a whole lot of snake oil to me. If you have no intentions of directly combating tuition prices, which would require political intervention at the highest level of government, then why would you mention it? Unless of course your intentions were simply to evoke some emotional reaction in your viewers... reminds me of a family guy episode I watched where Louse ran for mayor. Eventually her campaign devolved from something substantial into a buzzword shouting competition between her and her running mate. I was half surprised when the article ended without talking about how Polar was going to rid the world of terrorism and the opioid epidemic.

burtonator 8y ago
True.. I think part of this is that some of the more long term features I plan on implementing in Polar are pretty revolutionary and I don't really want to discuss then until we're ready to release. I'm worried of larger and more funded companies like Facebook simply running off with the ideas and not contributing back the way I intend. But fair criticism.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > I think part of this is that some of the more long term features I plan on implementing in Polar are pretty revolutionary and I don't really want to discuss then until we're ready to release. Then you shouldn't even hint at them yet. It will just be confusing. I know that with products I've developed and sold in the past, I've always had much grander plans for them than what I actually told people at first. > I'm worried of larger and more funded companies like Facebook simply running off with the ideas and not contributing back the way I intend. That's a common and understandable fear, but I think a misplaced one. Truly, ideas are a dime a dozen. The value is in execution. Execute very well (and don't forget the "do one thing extremely well" advice -- it's a truism for a reason) and it doesn't matter if anybody else has lifted your idea. Well funded companies like Facebook, etc., will be in a position to implement their form of your idea in the end anyway, even if it's just by buying and using your product. The protection from the big boys that you get from secrecy is largely illusory.

reneberlin 8y ago

"Rebooting the internet" is a bit of a stretch. You are referring to the Port:80 and meant the "web". Also, you touched the topic "decentralizing the web" with this claim, which is a much more bigger concern compared to your plan. Please consider a more narrow description of your idea.

donttrackmebro 8y ago

For what it's worth, I think Polar sounds awesome and excitedly downloaded it one of the last times it appeared here, but the tracking policy is a total deal breaker for me. https://getpolarized.io/docs/tracking-policy.html https://getpolarized.io/docs/tracking-policy.html > Polar uses Google Analytics and other 3rd party services to track your usage of Polar for quality assurance, UI/UX and usability issues, fault detection, and adoption and usage of new features. > There may be data leaks (such as the name of a book in an exception log) but we try to keep this to either zero or a minimum by iterating and improving any potential data leaks. I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are entitled to my usage data and it's okay to introduce private data leaks (to third parties!) as long as you fix them later is enough to turn me off even if there was an opt out. It's too late to win me back but I would have happily paid for this if you took privacy seriously.

telesilla 8y ago
Oh yes this needs to be opt-in. There really is no need to be tracking usage. My own feature request here: I use Zotero for academic writing which takes care of formatting the bibliography. I would love to use Polar if it could also do this or if not, of it could somehow export a list of documents to Zotero (not sure if Zotero has an import module like this). I'd also need folders. If it had those two things, I'd be immediate subscriber because I have a million PDFs open at any one time where I forget where I am and where the good highlights are.
- meej 8y ago
  Agreed, as soon as I looked at the main page and saw "flashcards" and highlighting, I wanted it to work either like or with Zotero.
JohnFen 8y ago
> Polar uses Google Analytics and other 3rd party services to track your usage of Polar for quality assurance, UI/UX and usability issues, fault detection, and adoption and usage of new features. I agree, this is a showstopper. If this data is critical to the project, then the application should collect it directly and not use (or share data with) 3rd party services to do it.

jayalpha 8y ago

You got a lot of critic here but feedback is good. I will try out your product. I am happy that its exits an an app and not web only. I don't know if this can "reboot" the internet or become a money making business. But looks interesting for sure. What changed my life was recoll https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ I also looked into OpenPaper but in the end it offers nothing that recoll does not and recoll does it better. https://openpaper.work/en-us/ https://openpaper.work/en-us/ Marking PDFs, make them searchable and adding comments in Polar could be great for grants and writing a thesis. EDIT: 1. I really DO like the webcapture feature. I often save importent webpages since I know they may either not be available anymore in the future or I can't find the link anymore. This feature seems smooth already. But how can I sure that your software will still work in 10 years? Do you have an export feature already? 2. I would really like to be able to have folders as a feature to sort stuff better. 3. Your blog does not have an RSS feed.

nullsmack 8y ago

I just want to sync by documents somewhere I can control and have portable versions that can also sync with that location. Even if it's something like Git.

ramtatatam 8y ago

I have gone through the article and trying to understand what is so different with this project compared to other I see on the internet that would make me to donate... I read on almost every startup blog that idea must be crystalised, short so everyone just get it, and if it takes long to explain then most likely it's not the right idea... Or maybe I'm not intelligent enough to get it.

cliffreich 8y ago

Is there a way I can import my pocket saved links to this app? Or what's structure I need to import from file?

nmca 8y ago

I'm trialling this to make some statistics flashcards, we'll see how it goes :)

VectorLock 8y ago

Oh man classic burtonator right here. Never change.

moneywoes 8y ago

$5 for a cup of coffee? Where is it that expensive?

_bxg1 8y ago

After you mentioned academics/scientific content in the video, is when all of this came into focus and I understood how a document management/annotation app intersects with one possible interpretation of "reboot the internet". But I think there's some misguidance there. Academic content gets paywalled for economic reasons, not technical reasons. The basic web as it exists right now can do just as good a job distributing such things as it did 20 years ago. If your technology doesn't change the economic equation, it's not going to change anything. Social content on the other hand gets walled-in for social reasons. This is closer to being solvable by new technology, but the primary drivers are ease-of-use and network effects, not technical architecture. I don't see Polar really addressing those things. Facebook gained popularity because 1) any regular person could just visit a website and be off to the races for free, and 2) other people were on it. #2 isn't really addressable directly, but by requiring a native app download, you're already behind on #1. If you want to usurp a walled-garden with an open one, you can't just build better technology, you have to give regular people something that's both effortless and uniquely compelling compared to what they already use. That's an incredibly difficult (if noble) thing to try and do in this space.

acd 8y ago

I hope GetPolarized succeeds as a funding model there need to be a way to fund Open source software instead of much of new SaaS being closed source and investor funded.

throw0101a 8y ago

Is "RSS" treated as a generic term for 'syndication format', or does it actually mean the file format (as compared to including Atom/RFC4287)? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

hestefisk 8y ago

It’s an interesting idea, but you could pitch it much better. What is the problem you are trying to fix? How do you fix it? Why is it different? It reminds me a bit of OMEA that Jetbrains developed about 15 years ago. It was a desktop based information manager built on RSS but with full text search capabilities across desktop, email integration with Outlook and others. https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/OMEA/Omea+Frascati+Release+Notes https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/OMEA/Omea+Frascati+... On the technical side, I think it would be much more powerful to have a native experience. The web is flooded with electron apps. How about a Flutter based UI, which would also work on mobile?

scarface74 8y ago

Why should I support a project where the people involved can’t even clearly explain what it is?I seriously doubt the ability of anyone to execute a successful business who can’t even communicate their plan.

deca6cda37d0 8y ago

The biggest issue I have with the application is that it’s not following the Human Interface Guidelines for every platform. A native look and feel for the Mac would make me use it.

lkrubner 8y ago

Kevin Burton is one of the inventors of RSS? Really? Back in 2006 I wrote what was one of the most comprehensive blog posts on the history of RSS, and somehow I never heard of him. If anyone is interested in some of the personalities who were fighting it out in the early days of RSS, I would encourage you to read my essay "RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it". This essay was written during the last year when RSS still seemed like the wave of the future, before Twitter took off and changed the conversation completely: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...

mastrsushi 8y ago

What makes this different than Feedly or any other unified feed service for them matter? The fact that I can archive and annotate? Unless this is explained more elaborately, all I see is yet another app, not an attempt at rebooting the internet.

wasdfff 8y ago

I tried to get into polarized but ended up going back to zotero, which ticked more of my boxes (ref management, document storage options, install and sync library, notes, and saved webpages on any computer, free with cheap cloud storage upgrades, community built add ons). I’ll keep checking in though.

Diti 8y ago

> If we haven’t generated enough value for you that you wouldn’t buy me a cup of coffee I think we’re doing something wrong. Or, maybe, just maybe, giving $5-“coffee” to 15 different services every month isn’t sustainable and none of this is your fault.

sytelus 8y ago

Looks like just another web annotation app. There is already getpocket.com and diigo.com, both cheap and already have free versions. Although I agree sharing is unsolved and there is so much more that can be done. So I like the new player in this space, especially with more ambitious plans but I think there was really no need to pull “I am the inventor of RSS...” perhaps. Also claims of rebooting internet seems to be overly grand for apps in this space. This shouldn’t need a lot of capital and could be bootstrapped easily with may be little ShowHN post.

HocusLocus 8y ago

But RSS runs on Windows XP!

tripzilch 8y ago

I know it's besides the point and this is probably a cool project but can we stop equating $5 with coffee? That's like saying popcorn costs $8. Most of the time, my coffee is either free or costs like 30 cents maybe? (wild guess, probably less depending on beans) relatively rarely I will I pay $5 for it, but I associate it with the price of not otherwise having access to coffee (because I'm in a hurry, didn't bring a thermos, etc)