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You're a for profit company, running on a propriety firebase backend, focused on solving one single (but important) use case for which solutions having varying degrees of success and utility already exist.

You're not going to "reboot the internet" - that headline is a very grandiose claim likely to turn off most people on this forum.

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

I've been working on Polar for free for the last six months ten hours a day 6-7 days a week because I want the world to be a better place.

But hey.. I guess I should be doing this for free because I'm grandiose and trying to make the world a better place.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't think that tone will help you.

You have to put the effort in to something that you expect people to actually pay for. I’m not gonna lie, I’m sure I’m not the only one who gave a giggle at $27. I would use this if it were free and so would many others. Tons of people dedicate months or years to FOSS projects and tons of people dedicate months or years to achieve something great, and, as you say, helpful, without ever getting so much as a thank you.

It doesn’t stop them. That’s what makes them truly great people.

I don’t see that you’re looking at your customer or purpose with this statement. It seems you’re far more concerned with your bottom line at the moment...a clickbaity headline like you chose kinda puffs your ego regarding the project out of proportion, and the fact that the follow up video to that link contains such little actual information about the product is strange at best.

We developers are not usually ourselves the best designers or marketers - getting on HN can be a really big deal for your success - but I see a lot of confused people here. Perhaps look at someone involved in marketing. Just saying.

Mad respect for all you’ve contributed to the technology sphere.

> I’m sure I’m not the only one who gave a giggle at $27

To be fair, it's not hard to imagine software that allows the easy sharing of content that would be worth $27. It all depends on what, exactly, it really does and how much benefit I'd get from using it.

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

Opera Unite had the potential to reboot the Internet by including a simple-to-use web server and content manager alongside the browser. It had basic blogging, streaming and even a chat server. It could be used by 'normal' users to self-host their own content and to share files without them having to download an app or sign up to a subscription.

Whereas Polar seems to be aiming for a stratum above those end-users. But such techy people can already self-host if they want to. Most just don't want to. It's not a technology problem so much as a time-opportunity issue.

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.

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 :)

Man... love this!!! Thanks... very very constructive criticism and I appreciate it!

That is definitely a lot clearer. I'm dubious that it's a viable product, but it's at least coherent.

Is there a vision for interop with other OSS projects that have pursued similar goals, e.g. IndieWeb, https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks?

Who are the OSS or commercial competitors to Polar?

The internal design of Polar factors this in and I've been pretty aggressive of keeping the code isolated so people can just plugin in new Datastores.

The Datastore model means that someone can write a new Datastore and that will be support federation.

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