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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

#121

Post by em-bee »

kristianc wrote: post #69
burtonator wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been good feedback (even if a bit rough) and will definitely try to refine it a bit more. One of the things I've found that I struggle with is trying to explain what I'm building as most things are obvious to me since I'm the one building it. Our users have done a GREAT job helping me out with that and pointing out the flaws with Polar regarding usability that I can't see. I wonder if this is related to inat…

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one. Focus on a real pain point that people are having, and organize everything in your messaging around that. Why do people need a document manager in the first place? What is this going to do for them that their existing solutions don’t do? How…

i have been going down exactly that path. i found a platform for collaboration and document management that i thought was awesome. i didn't create it, but it was GPL licensed and i tried to get people to use it. no luck. i eventually added a REST API and use it myself as a development platform for building websites.

so now i solve peoples problems using the tool that solves my problem.

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

#124

Post by amelius »

sqrt17 wrote: post #36
scrooched_moose wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even if I knew what I was supporting...I guess the plan is to raise $27/current user (which seems completely unrealistic) which will allow them to limp along until they definitely raise $150,000 from the "Internet as a whole", which will allow them to limp along until they definitely get approved for a whole bunch of grants? Nothing about that inspires any confidence and left me pretty convinced that I would be f…

To quote from the article, > We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars, and of course we have thousands of users Which is based on the illusion that you get an unbiased sample when you ask users to respond to a poll. You don't - the people most likely to sacrifice a moment of their time are also those more likely to come forward with money, conver…

How would you fix this kind of bias?

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

#126

Post by sqrt17 »

amelius wrote: post #124
sqrt17 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote from the article, > We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars, and of course we have thousands of users Which is based on the illusion that you get an unbiased sample when you ask users to respond to a poll. You don't - the people most likely to sacrifice a moment of their time are also those more likely to come forward with money, conver…

How would you fix this kind of bias?

The only way I've seen this addressed is using the idea that late responders are more similar to non-responders than early responders - so in a study where you suspect that non-responders have a different bias to responders you'd use late responses to get an idea about what non-responding people would have answered.

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

#127

Post by zestyping »

burtonator wrote: post #108
zestyping wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell a good story. A strong narrative is much more engaging and memorable than a list of features. Your front page at http://getpolarized.io mostly consists of a huge screenshot. When I look at the screenshot, all I see is a PDF viewer with some highlighting. Everybody already has a PDF viewer included with their OS that supports highlighting; there's nothing interesting about that screenshot that shows me what is us…

Good point!!! I'm going to revamp the home page to improve upon this.. part of the issue I have is that some of the features aren't really obviously cool once you don't have the whole. For example web page archival is kind of cool but it becomes a LOT more exciting when you add document management, highlighting, document sharing, etc.

Exactly! :)

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

jeswin wrote: post #49
burtonator wrote: post #25

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 d…

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.

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

burtonator wrote: post #83
SamWhited wrote: post #78

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…

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]

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

#130

Post by telesilla »

donttrackmebro wrote: post #113

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 > 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.…

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.

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