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

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.

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.

Maybe a better submission would've been the homepage itself, which has the app's purpose in a single lead graf:

https://getpolarized.io/

> 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.

I suppose the author's assumption is that a normal user/visitor to the site would have seen the homepage before seeing the crowdfund pitch.

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

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)