Lost Trust

Every time I save an article to Instapaper I immediately open the app to make sure it actually went there. Although quite some time has passed since this proved a worthwhile exercise, my unfortunate habit stems from a fear derived of Instapaper’s past inability to parse Cabin Porn URLs. Because I once had faith in the system I happily sent every post I planned to write about over to Instapaper, intending to come back to those articles at a later date. However, this practice came back to bite me when Instapaper failed to accurately record the correct article URLs, much less successfully parse their contents, and I lost several weeks’ worth of effort spent in aggregation. I seem to remember something similar happening with other sites around this time, but Cabin Porn is the sole site that Instapaper consistently failed to handle appropriately.

Instapaper has gotten a lot better server-side lately, with faster, more reliable syncing and fewer errors in parsing content, but in the end these improvements are all for naught because the original, rock-solid trust I once had in the app is gone. Trust once had and then lost is much more difficult to regain than gaining one’s trust at the onset. Something to keep in mind when developing anything that touches personal data.