The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2026
Backchannel (HNewhere): comments beside the article, not a second tab — 433 HN points
One-file userscript showing HN and other community threads in a sidebar on the page you read; the 2026-07-28 Show HN drew 433 points and 126 comments.
Backchannel
What the business is
A free MIT-licensed userscript, first called HNewhere and renamed Backchannel in v1.6.0, that adds a sidebar to any page showing the community threads discussing it — Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky, Lobsters, Wikipedia, Mastodon, Lemmy and Hypothes.is — with quote-to-comment annotations, voting and replies through the site's own session, in one file with no backend.
How it started
Developer twalichiewicz was tired of opening two tabs for every Hacker News link — one for the article and one for its discussion — so they built HNewhere, a lightweight userscript that detects when the page you are reading was submitted to HN and shows the discussion in a sidebar. It was posted as a Show HN on 2026-07-28.
What happened
The Show HN drew 433 points and 126 comments. In v1.6.0 the project stopped being about one site and was renamed Backchannel: Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky (via the Constellation index), Lobsters, Wikipedia, Mastodon (via Tootfinder), Lemmy and Hypothes.is became independent checkbox sources, quote-to-comment annotations were added for articles and PDFs, and a customizable front page blends the enabled sources. The security model is documented host by host — no backend, analytics or telemetry, and webmail, banking, auth flows and cloud consoles are excluded. By the 2026-09-04 crawl the repo had 83 commits, 257 stars and 10 forks.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Backchannel (originally HNewhere) is a free, MIT-licensed userscript by twalichiewicz that puts the internet's discussions beside whatever you are reading. Install it in a userscript manager and, when a page has a matching thread, it shows the conversation in a sidebar; voting, replying and even submitting happen in a popup on the source's own site, through the session the reader already has there.
The founding bet is a workflow bet: instead of opening the aggregator in a second tab, bring comments into the context of the page. HNewhere started with Hacker News; version 1.6.0 renamed the project Backchannel and made each source — Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky, Lobsters, Wikipedia, Mastodon, Lemmy and Hypothes.is — an independent checkbox, with quoted passages in comments matched back to article text as clickable annotations.
It ships as a single file with no build step, no backend, no analytics and no telemetry, documenting host by host what each enabled source receives; webmail, banking, auth flows and cloud consoles are excluded outright. The Show HN on 2026-07-28 drew 433 points and 126 comments, and by the September 2026 crawl the repo had 83 commits, 257 stars and 10 forks.
What has to be true
- It removes context switching: the discussion appears beside the text, so readers join a thread without opening a second tab.
- Quote annotations tie comments to the passage under discussion, making a long HN thread readable in place.
- One auditable file with no backend is a trust feature for a script that runs on every page you visit, and the privacy model is documented per host.
- Multi-source expansion (Reddit, Bluesky, Wikipedia, Lobsters and more) turned a single-site fix into a general commentary layer, each source a checkbox.
- Renaming in place preserved installs, history and settings, letting the project evolve without asking users to migrate.
What can be applied
A small personal annoyance is a legitimate wedge: the two-tab HN fix earned a 433-point Show HN, and adding sources behind the same one-file, no-backend constraint kept compounding.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-05 Backchannel remains a live, self-updating userscript at version 1.6+, still a single file with no build step, with a customizable front page hosted on GitHub Pages. The maintainer accepts bug reports and pull requests and asks for security-sensitive reports via SECURITY.md; no company, funding or paid tier has been attached to the project.
Sources
- Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript
- twalichiewicz/HNewhere (Backchannel) — The internet's commentary track
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