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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

#141

Post by JohnFen »

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.…

> 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.

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

#142

Post by hestefisk »

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+...

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?

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

#145

Post by gomox »

jammygit wrote: post #104
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…

I edited your pitch briefly to shorten it, to change from abstract to concrete, and emphasize slightly different things. This version is still not concrete enough imo, and the benefit not crystal-clear enough, but this was just a quick edit The Internet is the greatest content-sharing system ever devised, but it is broken. The content that people create is being pooled within walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter…

I like this better. I would remove the spaced repetition paragraph, and everything below it. The key parts to convey are what and why. How comes later.

I would also skip the "metadata" term. Everyone that understands it can see that if there is a note layer on top of the content, it's metadata. To people that don't get it, it's techno babble.

I actually like the "reboot the internet" catchphrase.

@OP I trust you've been around the internets enough to not let the HN negativity get to you, but in case some of the shit comments in this thread pierce through: good job, keep at it :)

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

#146

Post by lkrubner »

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-...

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

#147

Post by meej »

telesilla wrote: post #130
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…

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.

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

#148

Post by mastrsushi »

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.

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

#149

Post by wasdfff »

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.

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

#150

Post by Diti »

> 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.

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