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:
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 flushing money down the drain on a project that'll be dead in 3 weeks.
I can definitely see they are passionate about it, but the messaging needs a ton of work.
> 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.
I suppose the author's assumption is that a normal user/visitor to the site would have seen the homepage before seeing the crowdfund pitch.
Agreed! This is exactly what I thought when watching it. He mentions "changing the internet" and that was it. Then started asking for money and outlining his plans to launch and indiegogo and I still had no clue what Polar even was.
I had the same issue. I have a rough idea (I think) of what Polar is trying to do -- but I'm not entirely sure. I'm also not sure how this would be "rebooting the internet", or what the overall benefit to the internet actually is. I may have missed it (that's likely), but I didn't see where that was explained.
It may be that the video explained it, but I'm not be in a situation where I can watch it right now.
EDIT: After reading the bulk of the other comments here, I am relieved that I'm not the only confused one. I thought I was just being stupid. I often am.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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!
> The Internet is broken as content primary pools behind walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter.
Wait, this confuses me even more. My understanding is that Polar is basically a content management system. Is that not correct? If I understand correctly, then it is an entirely different beast than the likes of Facebook or Twitter.
If the comparison to Facebook and Twitter is apt, then I have no idea of what Polar actually is.
I think there’s a headline in there with the double meaning of “Save the web.” Something like... “Save the web. Polar helps you archive, search, and take notes on what you read online. Whether it’s the web-based documentation you need to keep that one piece of infrastructure running, that PDF for your dissertation research, or anything else online you’d like to keep your own copy of, Polar can help. Plus we think by helping people save their copy of the web, we can fix the web too. Learn more.” But with better examples from how your customers are already using Polar. I’ve been looking for an open source solution to this problem (basically, how can I have my own search engine built from things I’ve read) for a while now. I’m not ready to add a new tool quite yet, but am keeping an eye on this. Good luck!
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.
Have you looked into Solid, https://solid.inrupt.com/, for a distributed data store model? For annotations, have you looked at https://web.hypothes.is/ which uses the web annotations standard? These are both fairly large efforts and could be useful to build on
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.
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.
Also, no other people who I would consider paramount in creating RSS are on that page including Sam Ruby and the dozens of other people who made massive contributions.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel the same way. These guys are in every thread about editors posting a link to their site. They posted about it so often, I wish I had a filter for it by now. I think HN has to step up their adblock game.
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.
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?
"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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
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:
[+] [-] kristianc|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] scrooched_moose|7 years ago|reply
Nothing about that inspires any confidence and left me pretty convinced that I would be flushing money down the drain on a project that'll be dead in 3 weeks.
I can definitely see they are passionate about it, but the messaging needs a ton of work.
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
https://getpolarized.io/
> 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.
I suppose the author's assumption is that a normal user/visitor to the site would have seen the homepage before seeing the crowdfund pitch.
[+] [-] backpackway|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacurtis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|7 years ago|reply
It may be that the video explained it, but I'm not be in a situation where I can watch it right now.
EDIT: After reading the bulk of the other comments here, I am relieved that I'm not the only confused one. I thought I was just being stupid. I often am.
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rick22|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SanderSantema|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jeswin|7 years ago|reply
You're not going to "reboot the internet" - that headline is a very grandiose claim likely to turn off most people on this forum.
[+] [-] mercer|7 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] JohnFen|7 years ago|reply
Wait, this confuses me even more. My understanding is that Polar is basically a content management system. Is that not correct? If I understand correctly, then it is an entirely different beast than the likes of Facebook or Twitter.
If the comparison to Facebook and Twitter is apt, then I have no idea of what Polar actually is.
[+] [-] uxamanda|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jammygit|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] walterbell|7 years ago|reply
Who are the OSS or commercial competitors to Polar?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cldwalker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arendtio|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
So why are you claiming to be one of the inventors of RSS?
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
Here's one of the modules I created:
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
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.
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getpolarized|7 years ago|reply
Our roadmap:
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...
A high level mission statement which is still a work in progress:
https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-Statement.h...
[+] [-] fundamental|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donttrackmebro|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brodouevencode|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] backpackway|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacurtis|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] felixfoertsch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slightwinder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getpolarized|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] miguelrochefort|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
Spaced repetition and incremental reading are impossible with Kindle or 3rd party apps and they also don't support offline / cached / archived content.
[+] [-] scoutt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsmith|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frou_dh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
I also created Apache Feedparser and other Open Source tools around RSS.
[+] [-] SamWhited|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayalpha|7 years ago|reply
What changed my life was 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/
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|7 years ago|reply
Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/
I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
[+] [-] lkrubner|7 years ago|reply
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
[+] [-] enumjorge|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eternalban|7 years ago|reply
grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.