Remark
A browser extension that layers uncensored comments on top of any website
www.remark.surf
Remark started with a very petty grievance. I left a comment under a YouTube video, the channel owner disagreed, and my comment disappeared. I tried again, it disappeared again. Eventually specific words I had used ended up on their filter blacklist. The experience was frustrating enough that I started thinking about what an alternative would look like.
Remark is a browser extension that adds its own comment layer on top of any website, using its own database that site owners cannot touch. You get replies, mentions, and upvotes, and your comments show up for anyone else using the extension on the same page. Moderation lives with us rather than with the host site, which means the only things that get removed are the usual “racism and similarly offensive” cases, not “the channel owner disagreed”.
The side effect I didn’t anticipate is that it works on sites that have no comments at all. You can leave a note on a Wikipedia article, a documentation page, anything. One login across the entire web. The codebase ended up around 10,000 lines and remains one of the projects I’m fondest of, partly because the motivation was so concrete.