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

getpolarized.io

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

#71

Post by SanderSantema »

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.

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

#72

Post by burtonator »

brodouevencode wrote: post #15
getpolarized wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're not going creating more fragmentation.

A metaphor would be "how could tearing down fences create more fragmentation"?

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

#73

Post by burtonator »

pwinnski wrote: post #45

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

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. :)

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

#74

Post by oftenwrong »

"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.

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

#75

Post by burtonator »

scoutt wrote: post #31

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).

How so? How do you expect the Internet and sites will support themselves financially? Charge directly?

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

#76

Post by burtonator »

oftenwrong wrote: post #74

"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.

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.

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

#77

Post by slightwinder »

backpackway wrote: post #34

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.

It's a catchy title, and that guy is spamming HN in the last months about his app, so he likely has some fans reacting to this.

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

#78

Post by SamWhited »

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.

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

#79

Post by bastawhiz »

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.

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

#80

Post by AlwaysRock »

burtonator wrote: post #54
jeswin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a for profit company, running on a propriety firebase backend, focused on solving one single (but important) use case for which solutions having varying degrees of success and utility already exist. You're not going to "reboot the internet" - that headline is a very grandiose claim likely to turn off most people on this forum.

Well I suck if my goal is anything other trying to make the world a better place. I've been working on Polar for free for the last six months ten hours a day 6-7 days a week because I want the world to be a better place. But hey.. I guess I should be doing this for free because I'm grandiose and trying to make the world a better place.

I don't think that tone will help you.
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