Why YellowNotes exists

More information, less trust

The web holds more information than ever, but less and less of it is entirely trustworthy. We believe people need a way to bring trusted human judgment with them wherever they go online. And since AI chatbots learn from the web itself, that same trusted human judgment must be woven directly into AI — not left out of it.

Human judgment over algorithmic decisions

Machines now decide what people see on the internet. Machines decide what answer you get from an AI chatbot. Algorithms steer people towards content generated by other algorithms.

We want to overturn that. In a world where intelligence becomes plentiful, judgment becomes scarce. YellowNotes exists to bring human judgment to bear where algorithms decide today.

Human companionship

In the struggle against the algorithms, everyone is on their own. YellowNotes offers companionship: the people whose judgment you trust can come with you, page by page, wherever you are on the web. Take your friends with you.

Our vision

Giving the web back its margins

The internet wasn't built with margins to scribble in. For thirty years, we've been forced to consume, annotate, and share web content inside rigid comment sections, proprietary social silos, or chaotic bookmark folders. YellowNotes is breaking open the web. We are building a permissionless, spatial layer over the entire internet — turning every URL on earth into an open canvas.

In 1977, 3M liberated physical paper by creating the Post-it note. Thoughts no longer needed to be permanently printed on a page; they could live anywhere. We're taking that brilliant, lightweight freedom and unleashing it across the modern web — minus the adhesive loss.

Where before you stuck a note on the fridge saying "buy milk," you can now stick one on a web page saying the same thing — or send a note that opens straight to the right product with "get two of this one."

An augmented web

The web can be an unruly and unreal place, and as the share of machine-generated content keeps rising, the personal becomes ever more valuable. We believe the web's future isn't about generating still more information, but about enriching what already exists with layers of trusted human insight, context, and interpretation — augmented reality, but for websites.

Choose your own curator

Today's AI systems are trained on enormous collections of text selected by the model makers. You rarely know what went into them or how it was filtered, and you are asked to simply trust that it was done well. Getting good answers also demands skill at prompting — you often need to know the answer before you can ask the right question.

We think there is no one-size-fits-all model. Different people are experts in different subjects, and you should be the one who decides whose expertise guides each conversation — and be free to change your mind, subject by subject.

Judgment deserve to get paid

The internet overflows with knowledge, but judgment is scarce. Those who have it should be able to capture it, make it available, and be paid when others rely on it.

"Wizard of Oz" products — where a human does the work behind a digital dashboard — already exist at scale, most notably Amazon's Mechanical Turk. That work pays very poorly because the workers have no way to set themselves apart. On YellowNotes, a curator's name, reputation, and track record travel with their work.

Zero lost context

Ever found a mystery note on your desk and wondered what it was for? Web bookmarks suffer the same fate. Every YellowNote remembers exactly where it was born — the page, the paragraph, the sentence — so a thought never loses its context.

Precision communication

Stop sending colleagues 5,000-word articles with a message saying "read section three." Put a YellowNote on the exact sentence that matters, send the link, and let your recipient go straight to the point.

Independence

True platform independence

YellowNotes live on their own infrastructure. They float above the web without touching or altering the host site's code. That means no webmaster can censor your insights, no paywall can erase your context, and no platform algorithm can dictate who sees your work. It is a wholly separate, independent mode of web publishing — one that separates publishing from hosting.

Leapfrogging the aggregators

Big-tech aggregators and AI scrapers have built empires by stripping content from its original creators, keeping users trapped inside search results and social feeds.

YellowNotes flips the script. By tethering notes directly to original web pages, we bypass the middleman algorithms entirely — driving traffic back to primary sources and re-establishing a direct, uninterrupted line between creators and their readers.

Your data is yours

Your data is not truly yours unless you can "take your ball and go home" — and come back whenever you like.

Social media platforms depend on users being afraid of losing what they have built up. That lock-in isn't achieved by holding your data prisoner, but by making it useless once you take it with you. We think that if you can't come back, you can't really leave. On YellowNotes you can delete your account, walk away, and later return and pick up where you left off.

We aren't just digitizing sticky notes. We're giving the web back its margins — and giving people the freedom to leave their mark anywhere.

Who we are

YellowNotes has been developed by tech-industry insiders with decades of experience. Those years have not dulled their sense of the limitations of current practices, or of the social and economic drawbacks that follow from them. We are using those insights to build a new path.