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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

#61

Post by chuckgreenman »

I'm not sure if this is an Instapaper clone, an Evernote clone, an rss reader, or a flash card sync system. Not really sure anyone needs this.

You talk about walled gardens and privacy concerns and "rebooting" the web but say that you're using Google's firebase as a backend for sync. Personally, I'm just sort of at peace with the fact that Google has a copy of all my email and records of my location for the years I've had an android phone. But let's be super real - Google products and privacy aren't known for going together.

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

#62

Post by burtonator »

gildas wrote: post #57

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

There's overlap but it seems hypothes.is is more focused on .edus and honestly I don't even find their product usable nor does it have features like incremental reading or spaced repetition that I want to build out.

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

#63

Post by burtonator »

chuckgreenman wrote: post #61

I'm not sure if this is an Instapaper clone, an Evernote clone, an rss reader, or a flash card sync system. Not really sure anyone needs this. You talk about walled gardens and privacy concerns and "rebooting" the web but say that you're using Google's firebase as a backend for sync. Personally, I'm just sort of at peace with the fact that Google has a copy of all my email and records of my location for the years I'v…

This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Google has no rights to your data. It's just stored there.

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

#64

Post by chuckgreenman »

burtonator wrote: post #63
chuckgreenman wrote: post #61

I'm not sure if this is an Instapaper clone, an Evernote clone, an rss reader, or a flash card sync system. Not really sure anyone needs this. You talk about walled gardens and privacy concerns and "rebooting" the web but say that you're using Google's firebase as a backend for sync. Personally, I'm just sort of at peace with the fact that Google has a copy of all my email and records of my location for the years I'v…

This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Google has no rights to your data. It's just stored there.

> This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly.

Exactly the problem mate, that is something you should be concerned about.

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

#65

Post by burtonator »

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 inattentional blindness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness

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

#66

Post by burtonator »

0xCMP wrote: post #59

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 rel…

Yeah.. nailed it. That's one big part of it.. I want to be able to have the annotations on my documents as one repository too so I can actually build things with it directly.

Spaced repetition and incremental reading are impossible with Kindle or 3rd party apps and they also don't support offline / cached / archived content.

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

#67

Post by getpolarized »

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.

Also, and serious answer. I would NEVER participate in anything like a voting ring and have been very vocal about paid advertising in the RSS community in the past.

Lost a very very high paying customer to Datastreamer who was using RSS content to create google spam.

We never sold to them as they violated our ToS out of the gate.

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

#68

Post by tempguy9999 »

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.

> Well I suck if my goal is anything other trying to make the world a better place.

Yeah, you do, and so do I if I try to do anything. While people here have a valid question ('wat is this thing?') which you need to address, and perhaps you oversold your case, I feel for you.

Stick your neck out for other people and a common breed of web-dog will stick its teeth in, howling "it'll never work so there's no point trying!". And thereby will ensure it won't.

Disheartening isn't it, but there are plenty of good people though. I can't help you at the moment (tough times here I'm afraid) but I wish you luck!

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

#69

Post by kristianc »

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…

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 is it going to be better than the existing document managers that they have?

(If you find yourself going down the ‘its Decentralized’ route, don’t, people simply do not care)

It doesn’t have to even be much better than what people have, as long as it knocks it out the park for that use case. Hell, GMail started as conversational email plus a load of storage.

It may make your messaging seem kind of sparse - that’s a good thing. People are time poor, and have time to dig into the features later.

But without it you’re going to end up building something that is kind of a lot of things, but not really good at anything.

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

#70

Post by burtonator »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #68
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.

> Well I suck if my goal is anything other trying to make the world a better place. Yeah, you do, and so do I if I try to do anything. While people here have a valid question ('wat is this thing?') which you need to address, and perhaps you oversold your case, I feel for you. Stick your neck out for other people and a common breed of web-dog will stick its teeth in, howling "it'll never work so there's no point tryin…

Respect :).. thanks.. No good deed goes unpunished :)
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