Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

getpolarized.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 163 posts

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

#101

Post by mercer »

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've been thinking on something similar for a long time, and first of all congrats for actually building something. I never got that far.

As for feedback, I'd strongly suggest focusing on UX above all else. I tried Polarized a while ago, and gave up on using it because it didn't 'feel' very usable. I know that's vague feedback, and I wish I could be more specific, but broadly speaking it just felt more like a great idea rather than a great tool.

The internet wasn't successful because of the idea(l)s behind it. It was successful because it was simple, practically and conceptually speaking, and anyone with a text editor could do something amazing with it ("look ma, the whole world can read what I wrote!").

Or another example: I get all warm and fuzzy when I think about Emacs and its extensibility and whatnot, but I use VSCode for most of my day to day coding because it gives me a nice default set of features that are well-integrated and presented in a unified UI. I also don't particularly like Apple and what it stands for, but here I am paying a premium for a MacBook (2015 model, but still) and OSX because if I'm gonna spend my day using a tool, it better feel right!

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

#102

Post by sct202 »

burtonator wrote: post #84
sodosopa wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look under RSS 1.0. It’s not the same as RSS .91 or 2.0 userland/Dave Winer branches. To call it simply as “RSS”? I dunno

RSS 2.0 was a Dave Winer proprietary thing where no one else was involved.

Have you written a history of RSS article, because it seems like a juicy story to tell?

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

#103

Post by Circuits »

So how exactly, will Polar "re-boot" the internet, deflate inflated tuition and decrease the cost of textbooks? What exactly does "re-boot" the internet even mean? Honestly, this seems like a whole lot of snake oil to me. If you have no intentions of directly combating tuition prices, which would require political intervention at the highest level of government, then why would you mention it? Unless of course your intentions were simply to evoke some emotional reaction in your viewers... reminds me of a family guy episode I watched where Louse ran for mayor. Eventually her campaign devolved from something substantial into a buzzword shouting competition between her and her running mate. I was half surprised when the article ended without talking about how Polar was going to rid the world of terrorism and the opioid epidemic.

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

#104

Post by jammygit »

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 where comments, likes, and ability to share with friend is locked down. While this content is locked down, users have no control over their rights or their privacy. Their ability to use this content and its metadata is also severely limited.

Polar is attempting to reboot the internet by correcting these issues.

Polar protects the rights of users by providing a free and portable personal datastore where users can link content, reactions, comments, and discussions with anyone on their own terms.

Polar is implemented as a 'read it later' style app similar to an RSS reader where you add entire documents to your datastore. The key part is that Polar adds a metadata layer on top of PDF and the web: you can add notes, markups, reading progress, or even flash cards, and finally exchange both the documents and the metadata with anyone of your choosing.

Note that this makes Polar ideal for both spaced repetition learning (never forget anything), and for incremental reading (never forget what you're reading and where you left off)!

What We Are Building

Right now we support local mode and cloud powered by Google's Firebase. We intend to use our funding for X Y Z

Polar's design (though not yet implemented) can support end to end encryption and key sharing for group encryption. This means we can support fully private user networks that require zero trust.

Finally, in order for this project to reboot the internet as it is capable of, it is important that this remains Open Source. Because of this, Polar will never vanish and need never give in to special interests that are not our own.

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

#105

Post by reneberlin »

"Rebooting the internet" is a bit of a stretch. You are referring to the Port:80 and meant the "web". Also, you touched the topic "decentralizing the web" with this claim, which is a much more bigger concern compared to your plan.

Please consider a more narrow description of your idea.

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

#106

Post by gjm11 »

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.

No one's saying you suck. Only that "reboot the internet" doesn't seem like a very good description of what you're actually doing or trying to do.

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

#107

Post by zestyping »

burtonator wrote: post #65
kristianc wrote: post #10

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.

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…

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 useful about Polar.

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

#108

Post by burtonator »

zestyping wrote: post #107
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…

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.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #80
burtonator wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by burtonator »

Circuits wrote: post #103

So how exactly, will Polar "re-boot" the internet, deflate inflated tuition and decrease the cost of textbooks? What exactly does "re-boot" the internet even mean? Honestly, this seems like a whole lot of snake oil to me. If you have no intentions of directly combating tuition prices, which would require political intervention at the highest level of government, then why would you mention it? Unless of course your in…

True.. I think part of this is that some of the more long term features I plan on implementing in Polar are pretty revolutionary and I don't really want to discuss then until we're ready to release.

I'm worried of larger and more funded companies like Facebook simply running off with the ideas and not contributing back the way I intend.

But fair criticism.

Post reply on HN