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

getpolarized.io

11–20 of 163 posts

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

#11

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.

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.

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

#12

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.

Had exactly the same feeling. Non-responsive, want to raise money, did RSS. Didn't get more info after a 10sec skim.

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

#13

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.

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.

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

#15

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.

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-p.…

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._

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

#17

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.

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 chu…

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.

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

#18

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.

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 chu…

You're too wrapped up in the grand vision to invite us for the ride. Don't do that. Give us a quick and concise summary without jargon or marketing flair. If you can't express it in a few sentences, it's not ready.

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

#20

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 :)

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.

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