I got tired of constantly tabbing between whatever I was reading and the commentary about it. And when I found an interesting article somewhere outside an aggregator, I'd often end up going back to Hacker News or Reddit just to see whether anyone had discussed it. I started wondering: why does the discussion have to live somewhere else? Why not bring it to the page I'm already reading? That became Backchannel. It started as a way to put Hacker News beside any article, then grew into a blended conversation across Hacker News, Bluesky, Reddit, and other sources. From there, the idea naturally went the other direction too: if the conversation can follow you while you browse, the front page can become a place to discover what people are talking about across all of them. That's been the most interesting part of building it: taking something I was constantly switching between and turning it into part of the browsing experience itself.

Backchannel

The internet's commentary track.

The internet's commentary track.