
I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet - burtonator
https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Initial-Crowdfunding-Campaign.html
======
kristianc
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.

~~~
burtonator
Thanks. I went back and forth on this and it was a tough call.. the plan was
to get an initial crowdfunding video out and try to raise from people already
passionate about Polar.

I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what
we're working on.

If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a
kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign.

This took a week of work already so was a bug chunk of time.

~~~
kristianc
The positioning isn’t a fluff piece exercise - it’s how you define what you
are building, who it is for, and who it is not for. As a product guy, it’s
your North Star.

Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of
‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely.

Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why
we’re different ready at all times - even if your current audience is only
true believers.

EDIT: Clicked through to your features page. Confused. Polar allows me to
"manage my reading"... oookay. What does that mean? What pain point is that
solving for me? Does my reading need managing?

What are the benefits to me as a user? You need to tell this story before you
get to the fact that it's based on Electron (perhaps very much not a selling
point) and uses PDF.JS. How is this better than Evernote for me, which, based
on sheer longevity is probably going to be my first port of call?

Who's your audience? Answer: not 'everyone' \- you mention Pre Med students,
but then your screenshot has a load of growth hackery stuff. If I'm a med
student is there latex support?

Getting out a notepad and making yourself clarify what this is, who you are
building it for, and what benefit you see it giving them is going to be a big
help for you.

This goes double for you, as you're effectively creating a double sided
marketplace of consumers for your product, and sites willing to integrate with
your metadata.

~~~
jammygit
I found that the process of making a pitch deck really helped me to flesh out
my last product attempt, it was very educational for me. Next time I try to
make something, I will make such a deck at the ideation phase.

------
burtonator
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 datastore model where
users can share content with anyone of their backend datastores.

The information/metadata model is free and portable and content and metadata
can flow across networks.

Polar is implemented as a 'read it later' style app similar to an RSS reader
where you can add documents directly (vs RSS subscribing to a feed) and manage
them and keep track of your reading.

The key part is that Polar adds a metadata layer on top of PDF and the web and
you can exchange the metadata with other users (still being implemented,
initial sharing should ship next week).

This means that you can add content from anywhere on the web and also share it
with anyone else.

We also archive the content and the actual content archives can be exchanged
too. This means if anything is ever deleted you still have a copy.

Polar also adds support for features like spaced repetition (never forget
anything) and incremental reading (never forget what you're reading and where
you left off) to encourage you to use Polar to manage all your reading
material.

The idea is that if people have a very valuable app to keep track of their
content that they're more naturally likely to use it which means that the
sharing and open content vision is directly powered by users.

Right now we support local mode and cloud powered by Google's Firebase. We're
planning on adding other backend providers like Filecoin but we have to take
baby steps now because we're still an early project.

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 end to
end encrypted datastores.

You can use a system to store your data (that you don't trust) and only you
have the key.

Additionally, if you want private group sharing we support one to many
encryption where you can fan out content to anyone in a fully private group.

It's important that this remains Open Source so that we can rely that Polar
isn't just going to vanish.

~~~
jammygit
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.

~~~
gomox
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 :)

------
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.

~~~
burtonator
> 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

This is probably resolved. There was an issue pre 1.17.5 that caused a few
issues with PDFs taking longer to load.

We're also about to upgrade to Elecron 5.x which fixes some problems with
latency on some Windows machines.

> a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load.

This is actively being worked on ... Unfortunately, I have to decompress in
the UI thread and this slows things down a bit. I'm trying to work on a new
streams approach which should allow me to decompress content in a background
thread and also stream load it in the foreground.

Should work on the web too which I'm excited about.

> While polar focusses on saving webpages > adblock isn’t implemented yet and
> pages

I'm working on porting the web capture directly to the browser which should
help solve this issue. Since the capture is done in a chrome extension ad
block and other features will work as well as any type of extension.

Electron doesn't work on chrome extensions.

> often don’t save and/ or render > properly.

Report them and they will be fixed.

> 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.

We're lucky PHZ works _at all_. It's very very complicated to implement
properly. Portability is NOT an issue until I completely nail it working
reliably.

It's literally NOT possible to implement this now with any web standards. NONE
support the features we need to implement caching of web pages.

Additionally, I've gone out of my way to mention that Polar is Open Source and
that this is important to the vision and respecting people's rights on data
portability is insanely important to me.

Not calling you out here but if I was trying to lock you up I'm going about it
the wrong way.

Benefit of the doubt please ;)

> 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.

How's that?

The reason we're working on web + mobile is that users have demanded this
functionality.

One of the other challenges we have is that there just aren't enough users of
the Desktop app to support active development of JUST that platform. If
anything the Desktop will be a losing leader for the web edition as I'm
expecting more users on that platform.

That said, most of the web + desktop unification/integration is done now so
desktop + web won't be an issue of competition.

Also, I found out the hard way that we MUST support web tech first in Electron
as they do not properly support their internal APIs. Electron was broken for
about 8 months preventing us from upgrading because of their internal broken
APIs.

Chrome and web standards are much more reliable.

> 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.

You can always donate if you want to keep supporting the project!

------
arendtio
FWIW I have been using Polar for the past few months.

I use it as a place to store my ebooks (PDF) and articles (websites) that I
want to read sometime in the future. In the past, I had a list for that but
since I am not the reader type, that list was just growing and 'sometime in
the future' might never have come. But with Polar that changed a bit.

Polar has three features which made it easier for me to actually read
something from my reading list:

1\. With just one click you are _back where you stopped_ last time (Polar
keeps an offline copy of every article).

2\. Every document has a progress bar and you can mark what you read already.
This doesn't sound like much, but in fact, it feels rewarding to _fill the
progress bar_ ;-)

3\. You can add comments to the document and create Anki flashcards. That way
you can _create your own extract_ of a document to quickly review it in the
future.

It is not like those things are not possible with other programs, but for me,
Polar made the difference between not reading and reading (at least sometimes)
because I can just start it and have everything I need in one place. I am not
a particular fan of syncing all my documents via a 3rd party server, but
syncing Polar via Nextcloud works just fine so far.

------
jp_sc
You are not Dan Libby, Ramanathan Guha, Dave Winer, or one of the members of
the RSS-DEV Working Group.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History)

So why are you claiming to be one of the inventors of RSS?

~~~
burtonator
Yes.. I was. the initial documents were never amended as RSS evolved.

Here's one of the modules I created:

[http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/](http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/)

I think the archive is down but the rss-dev group has thousands of posts of me
responding and supporting the dev or RSS.

[https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev](https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev)

Additionally, I don't really care about being famous for creating something
and it's always seemed obnoxious to constantly insist that you were the
creator of something.

I was involved in a massive public dispute where Dave Winer had a freakout
when I tried to collaborate with him on RSS (he attacked the whole RSS 1.0
movement) and I got sick of constantly getting in flame wars when I'm just
trying to improve the Internet.

I also created Apache Feedparser.

~~~
jp_sc
Thank you for answering. The members list is indeed incomplete.

------
getpolarized
Here are a few more resources if you're interested:

Our roadmap:

[https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html](https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html)

Here's a discussion of using datastores to support a more distributed web:

[https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-
and-p...](https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-platform-
independence.html)

A high level mission statement which is still a work in progress:

[https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-
Statement.h...](https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-
Statement.html)

~~~
fundamental
The roadmap for a project should provide a marketing opportunity where you can
explain the current direction of a project and the high level changes that are
expected to be seen over the coming months or years. Right now your roadmap
reads like a list of open feature requests on an issue tracker. IMO it is far
too much in the weeds, like most of the site. After going through several
pages it is still unclear what problem is being addressed and who is currently
the target audience.

~~~
burtonator
"too much in the weeds" is a good way to phrase this actually. I'm going to
work on improving it but slammed for time.

Growth is hard man! :)

------
donttrackmebro
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](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.

> There may be data leaks (such as the name of a book in an exception log) but
> we try to keep this to either zero or a minimum by iterating and improving
> any potential data leaks.

I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are
entitled to my usage data and it's okay to introduce private data leaks (to
third parties!) as long as you fix them later is enough to turn me off even if
there was an opt out.

It's too late to win me back but I would have happily paid for this if you
took privacy seriously.

~~~
burtonator
Definitely this is not going away. I _might_ make this a premium feature
though.

I'm NOT tracking anything private. I'm tracking things like whether you're
clicking a button or not.

This is how you're paying for the app.

I literally CAN NOT build Polar without this data.

> I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are
> entitled to my usage data

The reverse is true as well. I wrote this app for free. You're not entitled to
use it unless you run the analytics because that's how you're paying for it.

I'm using your usage to improve the product.

If it has an exception or is slow on your platform I want to know about it.

If you're literally providing nothing of value in return I'm not interested in
those types of users.

I'm going to write a blog post about this but this perspective is completely
wrong headed.

You should be BEGGING developers to track your usage of the app as it greatly
improves app design and reduces the cost of developing the app.

Cohort analysis ALONE has been a gods send in developing Polar.

~~~
pwg
> > I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are
> entitled to my usage data

> The reverse is true as well. I wrote this app for free. You're not entitled
> to use it unless you run the analytics because that's how you're paying for
> it.

Then you _really_ should add a License file specific for polar (you only seem
to have imported license files for electron, chromium, and two resource
modules) clearly stating this limitation. Note the below comments are based on
what was found in the tar.gz on github.

Right now, with no license file directed at Polar, it is ambiguous as to what
limitations surrounding use/sharing exist.

And, three of your license files (electron and the two modules that leaked in)
are the MIT licence, where one is granted rights to:

(quote) ... deal in the Software without restriction, including without
limitation the rights to use, ... subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software. (end quote)

So if one interprets the ambiguity of Polar's license status such that the
three imported MIT files likely apply to Polar, then you have no stated
restriction which matches your restriction of "no use, unless you give me
google analytics".

------
brodouevencode
More talk about "rebooting" the Internet (including TBL, et. Al.).

1\. Is it really probable?

2\. With what that won't cause further fragmentation?

Also, is this what they're using to reboot the internet?

> A powerful document manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux for managing web
> content, books, and notes - supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and
> keeps track of your reading progress.

~~~
getpolarized
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...](https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-platform-
independence.html)

~~~
brodouevencode
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 it.

IDK, good luck to you. FB, all social media has its hooks into everything.
Upending that is going to be a monumental task. _Disclaimer: not a social
media user so I really don't care._

~~~
burtonator
We're not going creating more fragmentation.

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

~~~
brodouevencode
If you say so.

Do you really think your competitors are just going to roll over?

------
backpackway
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.

~~~
jacurtis
It'll probably slide down quickly. It was only posted 30 mins ago and there
are ~130 upvotes and ~40 comments. That shows HN lots of interaction and is
surprisingly high for a post only 30 mins old.

The artificial inflation is probably real, but not malicious. For example, say
1 in 500 readers of a post normally leave a comment on HN. That would be the
baseline that HN's algorithm compares stuff too.

This post has an extremely intriguing title, causing lots of people to click
it. Then as people click it, no one understands it, so then they all come to
leave a comment asking what the hell this product/service (i still don't get
it myself) is. This confusion is actually helping the post on HN because so
many people are confused that let's say 1 in 100 people leave comments instead
of 1 in 500 which is the norm. This causes the HN algorithm to assume this
post is causing discussion and must be particularly interesting to users
because it has 5X the interaction of a normal post.

So the confusion is real, and I doubt it will hold for too long, but since the
post is so new and has very high genuine interaction (comments of confusion is
still interaction) points, the HN algorithm will rank it highly.

------
miguelrochefort
I'm not sure I understand how what looks like a poor Evernote clone is
supposed to "reboot the Internet". We're far from Xanadu.

I'm all for open source, collaboration, personal knowledge management, spaced
repetition learning, etc. but this document centric approach seems outdated to
me. I thought we were supposed to move toward a more semantic web, something
closer to a database than to a bunch of human-written documents. How does the
rest of my data, such as quantified self style measurements, fit in this
model?

------
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.

~~~
burtonator
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.

------
0xCMP
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
relevant.

If you had a Kindle book and you invest a ton of time using the highlighting,
notes, and flashcard features of Amazon's app then all that data is stuck
there. There exists a website to take them out and from the app you can
"export" the notes, but it clearly feels forced.

You could simply write down your notes in another app, or in a notebook, but
then you lose the whole purpose of why eBooks might be super interesting here
(namely, that you might miss a part and you can simply click to view the
original material).

A paper book, unless OCR'd, can't be searched and endlessly marked up the way
an eBook could in theory, although it certainly does allow you to completely
own the information and work you put in to understanding the topics.

In a sense this is trying to solve these smaller problems which make the
original idea of collecting and annotating the information you find on the
internet and elsewhere difficult and hard to maintain over any reasonable
timeframe except as very simple document formats (e.g. HTML, Org, or Text
files)

~~~
burtonator
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.

------
scoutt
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).

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

~~~
scoutt
Is always about the money, isn't it? :)

I believe that we should reboot into a decentralized, accessible, encrypted
and anonymous internet.

Otherwise if you are asking money for traffic/space/service, then you are just
a storage/hosting/cloud/db provider. _You 're not rebooting the internet_.

If rebooting the internet means transforming it into a freemium/premium model,
then I think it is better as it is now.

And that name... "polarized" internet. We have enough (and getting really
tired of) that kind of behavior ("polarized":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization)).

Sorry for the negativity. Perhaps I didn't understand your project enough, or
"rebooting the internet" was an ambitious clicky-baity title. Otherwise, if I
understood it correctly, you want to store all the documents/information and
want to charge for it. If so, I have no further comments.

------
bsmith
I think this title needs to be changed by a moderator. It has seemingly
nothing to do with the linked page.

------
frou_dh
What was your role in the invention of RSS and podcasting?

~~~
burtonator
I was actively involved with the rss-dev list, and also submitted and
supported many RSS modules, participated in the initial Atom specification
initially.

I also created Apache Feedparser and other Open Source tools around RSS.

------
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.

~~~
burtonator
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.

~~~
krageon
You don't need a cookiebar if you don't set the cookies in the first place. In
your own ideal scenario you would be receiving a ton of your users'
information, but you don't even understand a pretty fundamental part of
legislation which pertains to privacy. This doesn't inspire confidence.

------
jayalpha
You got a lot of critic here but feedback is good. I will try out your
product. I am happy that its exits an an app and not web only. I don't know if
this can "reboot" the internet or become a money making business. But looks
interesting for sure.

What changed my life was recoll
[https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/](https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/)

I also looked into OpenPaper but in the end it offers nothing that recoll does
not and recoll does it better. [https://openpaper.work/en-
us/](https://openpaper.work/en-us/)

Marking PDFs, make them searchable and adding comments in Polar could be great
for grants and writing a thesis.

EDIT:

1\. I really DO like the webcapture feature. I often save importent webpages
since I know they may either not be available anymore in the future or I can't
find the link anymore. This feature seems smooth already. But how can I sure
that your software will still work in 10 years? Do you have an export feature
already?

2\. I would really like to be able to have folders as a feature to sort stuff
better.

3\. Your blog does not have an RSS feed.

------
Vordimous
Wonderful article, RSS needs to make a comeback. Especially among friends and
family who love to make large posts about important topics. I try to tell them
to build a blog and then just link to articles that they write. Your article
and others inspired me to finally just put together a system to make it easier
to start blogging. And gave me the idea to just mimic a social media platform.
They do all of the design for you so why not have a blog generation system
that a user doesn’t have to mess with, just make content.

Any feedback would be wonderful. [https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-
your-own-media/](https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/)

I will also mention that
[https://www.stackbit.com/](https://www.stackbit.com/) is doing basically the
same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers”
perspective.

------
enumjorge
I’m not terribly familiar with the history of RSS. In what way were you
involved with its invention?

~~~
eternalban
[https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html](https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html)

grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.

~~~
sodosopa
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

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

~~~
sct202
Have you written a history of RSS article, because it seems like a juicy story
to tell?

~~~
burtonator
honestly I did on my old old blog from like +10 years ago but the URL has
bitrotted ;)

------
ActsJuvenile
I read through the entire pitch and I still don't understand what is special
about Polar. There are a ton of apps that do all this and more in no
particular order:

1) Xodo Reader 2) Liquid Text 3) Margin Notes 3 (AWESOME) 4) KOReader (Open
source) And several dozen more...

------
ankiplease
What are the prospects on an ipad pro app?

I paid $1500+ for my ipad. I'm very willing to pay for a good, open-source
incremental reading solution on my iPad (with exportable content and easy
backup).

We are at the pre-history of spaced repetition learning. This will have very
large effects on society. Just ask any engineer how much they already forgot
of what they learned in college. Coursera et al will get into this space, I
hope, but that's not enough.

We need good, open alternatives like anki (but better) and with incremental
reading. But keeping a slew of apps on different platforms updated and running
smoothly is expensive. Anki's model of charging for the apple app is not bad.

~~~
burtonator
Great question. I'm working in improving our tablet support. It's a lot easier
than the mobile support honestly.

If you try the polar webapp on your tablet and give me feedback I'll almost
certainly implement any changes you need quickly.

The goal for us is that we're going to charge for crowd storage and _maybe_
for the mobile apps but probably only for really aggressive users.

Still TBD

------
getpolarized
Nice. Just hit the front page! Today is my birthday too so good birthday
present from you guys!

I'm the creator of Polar so AMA :)

~~~
thesorrow
How a reboot of the internet involve using an electron app ?

~~~
burtonator
Ha.. was waiting for the eventual comment hating on Electron ;)

I feel it though.. we might look at porting to Carlo or something in the
future if possible:

[https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo](https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo)

------
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.

~~~
burtonator
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.

~~~
chuckgreenman
> 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.

------
pwinnski
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19585015)

~~~
burtonator
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. :)

------
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.

------
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I fully support the mission, but I would recommend making the post responsive
for mobile devices. Opening this on iPhone is zoomed up in an area of a page
with no text.

A big reason Facebook/Insta has been successful is because it “just works” and
is easy to use. I feel like the open web has always had a usability problem
for non-technical users and it never really compared to closed solutions.

~~~
burtonator
Completely agree.. 100%. This is a big goal in Q2 and is already in the
roadmap.

Usability and mobile are on the roadmap. Unfortunately, mobile is alpha right
now and you should have received a warning that it's alpha when you went to
the mobile site.

It's not a ton of work though which is good though. We'll get there.

~~~
snazz
The only issue for me is that the video iframe is so huge that everything else
is made smaller.

------
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.

------
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-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-
in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it)

------
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+...](https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/OMEA/Omea+Frascati+Release+Notes)

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?

------
sytelus
Looks like just another web annotation app. There is already getpocket.com and
diigo.com, both cheap and already have free versions. Although I agree sharing
is unsolved and there is so much more that can be done. So I like the new
player in this space, especially with more ambitious plans but I think there
was really no need to pull “I am the inventor of RSS...” perhaps. Also claims
of rebooting internet seems to be overly grand for apps in this space. This
shouldn’t need a lot of capital and could be bootstrapped easily with may be
little ShowHN post.

------
scarface74
Why should I support a project where the people involved can’t even clearly
explain what it is?I seriously doubt the ability of anyone to execute a
successful business who can’t even communicate their plan.

------
tripzilch
I know it's besides the point and this is probably a cool project but can we
stop equating $5 with coffee? That's like saying popcorn costs $8.

 _Most_ of the time, my coffee is either free or costs like 30 cents maybe?
(wild guess, probably less depending on beans) _relatively rarely_ I will I
pay $5 for it, but I associate it with the price of not otherwise having
access to coffee (because I'm in a hurry, didn't bring a thermos, etc)

------
idlewords
What's with all the moving parts to this business model? Why not just sell
whatever this thing is (or maybe it's a service? I can't really tell).

------
ramtatatam
I have gone through the article and trying to understand what is so different
with this project compared to other I see on the internet that would make me
to donate... I read on almost every startup blog that idea must be
crystalised, short so everyone just get it, and if it takes long to explain
then most likely it's not the right idea... Or maybe I'm not intelligent
enough to get it.

------
aeonflux
Site needs a designer or at least better cookie-cutter layout. It just looks
mediocre. Today marketing is everything...

~~~
burtonator
I know... I'm not a designer and this is one of the reasons I'm raising
funding ;)

~~~
adnanazadsg
Hi, I'm a designer and I can help you with the website design (as well as some
feedback/advice on branding and marketing if you are interested) - email is in
my profile.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

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

~~~
burtonator
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.

------
deca6cda37d0
The biggest issue I have with the application is that it’s not following the
Human Interface Guidelines for every platform. A native look and feel for the
Mac would make me use it.

------
acd
I hope GetPolarized succeeds as a funding model there need to be a way to fund
Open source software instead of much of new SaaS being closed source and
investor funded.

------
nullsmack
I just want to sync by documents somewhere I can control and have portable
versions that can also sync with that location. Even if it's something like
Git.

------
throw0101a
Is "RSS" treated as a generic term for 'syndication format', or does it
actually mean the file format (as compared to including Atom/RFC4287)?

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_\(Web_standard\)) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS)

------
cliffreich
Is there a way I can import my pocket saved links to this app? Or what's
structure I need to import from file?

------
_bxg1
After you mentioned academics/scientific content in the video, is when all of
this came into focus and I understood how a document management/annotation app
intersects with one possible interpretation of "reboot the internet". But I
think there's some misguidance there.

Academic content gets paywalled for economic reasons, not technical reasons.
The basic web as it exists right now can do just as good a job distributing
such things as it did 20 years ago. If your technology doesn't change the
economic equation, it's not going to change anything.

Social content on the other hand gets walled-in for social reasons. This is
closer to being solvable by new technology, but the primary drivers are ease-
of-use and network effects, not technical architecture. I don't see Polar
really addressing those things. Facebook gained popularity because 1) any
regular person could just visit a website and be off to the races for free,
and 2) other people were on it. #2 isn't really addressable directly, but by
requiring a native app download, you're already behind on #1.

If you want to usurp a walled-garden with an open one, you can't just build
better technology, you have to give _regular people_ something that's both
effortless and _uniquely compelling_ compared to what they already use. That's
an incredibly difficult (if noble) thing to try and do in this space.

------
aquamo
I like the ambition, has some similarities to this project:

    
    
      http://freedomcontroller.com

------
nmca
I'm trialling this to make some statistics flashcards, we'll see how it goes
:)

------
VectorLock
Oh man classic burtonator right here. Never change.

------
moneywoes
$5 for a cup of coffee? Where is it that expensive?

------
HocusLocus
But RSS runs on Windows XP!

------
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.

~~~
burtonator
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.

~~~
JohnFen
> 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.

Then you shouldn't even hint at them yet. It will just be confusing. I know
that with products I've developed and sold in the past, I've always had much
grander plans for them than what I actually told people at first.

> 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.

That's a common and understandable fear, but I think a misplaced one. Truly,
ideas are a dime a dozen. The value is in execution. Execute very well (and
don't forget the "do one thing extremely well" advice -- it's a truism for a
reason) and it doesn't matter if anybody else has lifted your idea.

Well funded companies like Facebook, etc., will be in a position to implement
their form of your idea in the end anyway, even if it's just by buying and
using your product. The protection from the big boys that you get from secrecy
is largely illusory.

