YellowNotes for the Cloud

YellowNotes for the Cloud

Bringing trusted human judgement to an AI-saturated web.

1. The Premise

The web has ever more information, but less and less of it is entirely trustworthy. YellowNotes starts from the idea that we need a way to bring trusted human judgement to wherever we happen to be online. Since AI chatbots learn from the web itself, that same trusted human judgement must be woven directly into AI — not left out of it.

2. Human Judgment‑Based AI

In a world where intelligence becomes plentiful, judgement becomes scarce. YellowNotes combines human judgment with AI: instead of relying on a model trained on everything, you choose whose judgment the AI should use.

2.1 Choose Your Own Curator

Current AI systems are trained on enormous collections of text selected by the model creators. You rarely know exactly what information went into them, or how it was filtered, and you're forced to trust the model makers to have edited that material appropriately.

With YellowNotes, you choose the curator yourself. Each topic is maintained by someone whose judgment you trust, and different people are experts in different subjects — there is no one-size-fits-all model. Rather than relying on one universal AI, you decide whose expertise should guide each conversation, and that choice can change from subject to subject.

2.2 Stop Prompt Engineering, Start Trusting Judgment

Traditional AI expects you to know exactly what to ask. Large language models depend heavily on the prompt, and good answers often require prior knowledge the user doesn't have — with a large all-encompassing model, prompt engineering becomes a required skill, and unless you already know what you need, you can't get it.

YellowNotes supplements your question with the judgment of an expert you selected, so your prompt no longer has to be perfect. You don't have to know the answer before you get it — you simply ask what you want to know, and someone else's selected expertise fills the gap.

2.3 How Topics and Chat Work

An expert creates a topic on a subject they know well. As they find material, they stick a YellowNote on it, and that note becomes part of the topic. Subscribers can then chat with an AI that uses this curator's notes as its source of truth.

The chat interface itself looks like a typical LLM chatbot, with one addition: on top of the GUI is a list of the topics you're subscribed to, letting you pick whose judgment should inform your current conversation.

3. Monetize Your Judgment

The internet overflows with knowledge, but judgement is scarce. If you have it, YellowNotes is built for you to capture your expertise and make it available — and to be paid when others rely on it.

On the platform, creators decide who can use their topics, how, and how much: pricing per prompt is possible, as are usage limits set by the hour, day, or month.

4. The Augmented Web

The web can be an unruly and unreal place, and as the proportion of machine-generated content keeps rising, there's an increasing premium on the personal. YellowNotes argues that the web's future shouldn't be 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.

4.1 The Digital Sticky Note

Inspired by the Post-it®

One of the most brilliant paper inventions was 3M's Post-it note: the right information in exactly the right place. YellowNotes brings that same functionality to the web — attach a note to any spot on the internet, and others see it exactly where you left it.

Notes can be created, tagged, and organized into thematic clouds you can revisit later — useful for tasks, saved links, brainstorms, or sketched plans, all searchable across your collection. A YellowNote isn't limited to typed text either; you can handwrite or draw on it to keep the tactile feel of a real Post-it, and draw an arrow pointing at the exact item it refers to.

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

4.2 Pinpointing Notes with the Browser Extension

The real value of a YellowNote lies in precision: it annotates the exact spot on a page it refers to. Achieving that pinpoint placement on someone else's web page requires the YellowNotes browser extension, which overlays your notes onto the original site as you browse it.

5. Platform Freedom

YellowNotes describes itself as a wholly separate mode of publishing: no intermediaries, with content appearing right where it belongs, and reaching audiences wherever they already are rather than only where a creator's own site happens to be.

5.1 Publish Anywhere, No Intermediaries

Traditional publishing depends on search rankings, recommendation algorithms, and social feeds, all of which filter and reorder content on someone else's terms. YellowNotes instead uses its browser extension to deliver annotations directly to subscribers through its own infrastructure, placing content in front of an audience without being reordered by another platform.

5.2 Subscriber-Controlled Visibility

Nobody sees a creator's annotations unless they've chosen to subscribe, and nobody can place content in a user's browser without that user's prior approval. If a source stops providing value, the subscriber simply unsubscribes — a two-way opt-in that keeps discovery, and its cancellation, entirely in the hands of creator and subscriber rather than a platform algorithm.

5.3 Attack-Robust and DNS-Agnostic

Because YellowNotes operates as a publishing layer independent of the webpages its notes are attached to, a note still displays even if the underlying website is missing or offline. This gives a site owner a way to keep communicating with their audience even when their own site is unavailable.

This independence also makes the system DNS-agnostic: there's no dependency on a website actually existing. A creator can invent an entirely fictitious domain name and publish to it, creating pop-up web communities that are as easy for subscribers to reach as a regular website, yet as obscure to outsiders as a web forum requiring specialized software.

Taken together, this separates publishing from hosting: the original website stays where it is, while a creator's expertise is delivered independently through the extension, with creators no longer dependent on algorithms to surface their work and subscribers deciding whose judgment they trust.

Data Portability Policy

Your data is yours.

• We don't let web scrapers access to your data.
• LLM-vendor are not permitted to moentize your data without you approval.

Your actionables in regards to your data privacy

• Export or delete your YellowNotes data anytime by using the account panel.
• Delete your account and all data entirely at anytime by using the My Account panel.

Data Portability

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

1. Export

Before account deletion, all user data will be securely exported, digitally signed, and sent to the account owner. The exportfile can later be used to fully restore(?) the account — preserving previous state and permissions.

2. Data Deletion

You can delete your data from the accounts page at any time.

3. Account Deletion

Before deletion, all user data will be securely exported, digitally signed, and sent to the account owner. The exportfile can later be used to fully restore the account — preserving previous state and permissions.(*)

4. Restoration

If you can come back, you can't leave. All "social" media platforms depend on users being fearful of losing what they have accumulated. The platform lock-in is not achieved by taking your data prisoner, but by renedering it useless if your take it with you. On YellowNotes you can delete and walk away, and come back and resume where you left off. With some limitations(*)

The fine print

(*)

You Subscriptions are not yours exclusively, it is a shared agreement between you and the the topic owner. The subscriptions can be restored but they will be flagged as having been restored.

Your Subscrbers are simmilary not yours exclusively, they are shared agreements between the subscribers and you as the topic owner. Subscriberships are NOT restored to your topics. Only the topics themselves and the Yellownotes they contain.