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See what everyone's talking about.  

What it does

• The web's commentary track: Avoid the two-tab-tango and conveniently read the community's comments in-context.
• Never miss a thread: Every page you land on gets checked against the sources you've picked, so you find out a discussion exists without going hunting for one.
• What the internet is saying, in one thread: Hacker News and Reddit merged into a single conversation, each comment quietly noting where it came from. Pick your sources with a checkbox; Reddit is off until you turn it on.
• See what they're talking about: Quotes in the comments get matched back to the article and lit where they sit. Click a highlight to filter the thread to the people discussing that passage; click a quote inside a comment to jump to the sentence it came from.
  • Currently in beta. Enable Annotations in the settings menu to try it out!
• Read, then join in: Vote, reply, and even submit on Hacker News. It uses the session you already have, in a popup on news.ycombinator.com. The script never sees your password. Reddit is read-only.
• Quality of life: Indent guides, OP marking, and new comment highlighting.
• Yours to adjust: Button shape and size, sidebar width, theme, which annotation layers show, and a per-site off switch. It's one file with no build step, so if the settings don't cover it, the source is right there.

What it can see

It runs on every page, so this matters: there's no backend, no analytics, and no telemetry. Which hosts it contacts depends on which sources you switch on.

• Hacker News talks to the HN API, Algolia search, and news.ycombinator.com, with no persistent identifier attached.
• Reddit sends the pages you visit to reddit.com, and if you're signed in to Reddit, those requests arrive as your account. Signed out, they carry a long-lived device identifier instead.

Webmail, banking, auth flows, and cloud consoles are excluded outright.

Full detail, including a host-by-host table, in SECURITY.md.

Where did HNewhere go?

Nothing went anywhere. HNewhere is now Backchannel. Same project, same history, same install URL, same settings. It was renamed in v1.6.0 when it stopped being about one site: it now reads Hacker News and/or Reddit, and each source is a checkbox you control. The repository has since been renamed to match, and links to the old one redirect.

If you already have it installed it updates itself and renames in place. Your hidden sites, your reading queue, your collapsed threads and your preferences all carry over untouched.

Install

1. Install a userscript manager:

   • Tampermonkey
   • Violentmonkey
   • Userscripts (Safari)

2. Install Backchannel

   • Upgrading from HNewhere? Let it auto-update and it renames itself. If you install from this link instead, delete the old HNewhere entry afterwards — managers match a manual install by name, so the rename arrives as a second script and both would run at once.

3. Browse the web as usual. If a thread exists for that page the (BC) button lights up. Clicking it opens the sidebar. Still grey? Nobody's posted it yet-- click to submit it yourself.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. Please report anything security-sensitive privately via SECURITY.md. Backchannel is a single file with no build step or dependencies: edit HNewhere.user.js, load it in your userscript manager, and what you see is what users install. Release history is in CHANGELOG.md.

License

MIT