--- title: Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing... description: SlideBySide lets people present a PDF or PowerPoint together over a shared link instead of screen sharing. Everyone viewing the link follows the same slide,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-slidebyside-present-slides-without-sharing-your-screen-f0zu4vyuc twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen | daily.dev og:description: SlideBySide lets people present a PDF or PowerPoint together over a shared link instead of screen sharing. Everyone viewing the link follows the same slide,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-slidebyside-present-slides-without-sharing-your-screen-f0zu4vyuc og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/F0Zu4vYUc.png og:image:alt: Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary SlideBySide lets people present a PDF or PowerPoint together over a shared link instead of screen sharing. Everyone viewing the link follows the same slide, with live labeled cursors, shared slide control and drawing tools including a pen, highlighter and laser. Viewers can also browse slides on their own and jump back to the live view. Decks can be uploaded directly or imported from Google Slides, Drive or OneDrive, and permissions control who can change slides, draw, browse or download. No account is needed to join or start a session, and uploaded versions are kept along with their drawings. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 30 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-29). **TL;DR:** Commenters see the idea as a neat proof of concept but question its differentiation from existing tools like Teams, Webex, Adobe Connect, and reveal.js multiplex, with privacy/trust concerns around uploading slides to a third-party service being the most pointed criticism. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 45% mixed · 35% skeptical **The case for** - Some found the slide-synchronization-without-screen-share idea clever and potentially new compared to prior PPT-to-web tools. - The use case of letting students control their own shared presentation resonated with at least one commenter. - One person appreciated the solution being born from the creator's own personal experience. **The pushback** - Several pointed out that Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Adobe Connect already offer similar slide-following/detach features. - Strong concern that uploading company or sensitive slides to a random third-party service is a serious data privacy risk, with one comparing it to a honeypot. - One suggested live cursors could be distracting and should be toggleable. - A commenter questioned why the backend needs to process slide content at all versus doing more client-side. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Discussion mixes genuine interest in the concept with repeated comparisons to existing tools and notable pushback on privacy/trust of uploading slides to a new service. **Hottest debate:** Whether the tool offers meaningful value over built-in features already present in Teams, Webex, Adobe Connect, and reveal.js, versus concerns that the core risk (uploading sensitive slides to an unproven third party) outweighs the convenience gained. **Open questions** - Will encryption or privacy guarantees be added to address trust concerns? - Can live cursors or independent slide browsing be disabled to reduce distraction and confusion? - Is this intended to become a sustainable business or remain a side/proof-of-concept project? **Highlights** > I know Show HN rules want you to be extra nice to people, but this is indistinguishable in execution from a honeypot, so anyone uploading their company slides to some random service like this one will likely be fired on the spot for gross negligence. I see your idea and I suppose there is value in it, but the problem of screen sharing is basically fictional compared to the real problem of someone just uploading company data (+ metadata!) to a random service some random person came up with. Screen sharing only shares pixels and does so through parties that the economy considers trustworthy enough. This is not going to work as the SaaS you seem to envision it to be. It might work for a self-hosted internal service thing or a group of friends though. ___ Thinking about this, I suspect that at least one naive bored corporate guy browsing HN will have tried this out with a random pptx they had lying around on their work computer. The data is now.. somewhere. So this could be an actual honeypot. > — [hypfer on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285616) > This looks clever. I've seen PPT to web tools before (https://sparkslides.com/publish/, https://slidehtml5.com/), but I think the slide synchronization idea is new. I can't evaluate more than that as I don't use these. In the past I have liked marp (https://marp.app/) for technical slides as you write in markdown, can use version control, etc. Powerpoint always felt odd as a developer. To share public slides I've published to GitHub pages (https://github.com/robalexdev/marp-to-pages). I've seen professors use it for all their slides. But that doesn't synchronize slides, last I checked. > — [8organicbits on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50278217) > The (MS Teams) feature is very cool and potentially useful, but: it only works on certain types of meetings/calls, and the way it’s implemented, people get lost, because they start playing with their slides, and then it’s not clear they can press the “Live” button to sync up again, so then they end up interrupting the speaker to say they are lost, or multiple people will say they are not clear where they are… > — [nico on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50279321) > I am not sure there are many instances where I would be comfortable uploading my slides to a random website? > — [antonly on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50277025) > Number 1 feature: live cursors. Yeah, it makes people go wow, but I hope it can be switched off. Nothing less useful than having random movement distracting people from whatever I'm presenting... > — [netsharc on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283294) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276883) · 63 points · 30 comments ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@demovexa** · 0 upvotes > Following along on a shared link instead of a screen share fixes the "can you see my screen?" part, and being able to browse on your own and jump back to live is a nice touch. One gap with shared decks is anything that moves. Once a deck is a PDF, a product demo slide becomes a screenshot. A short clip linked from that slide, or sent afterwards to people who missed the session, covers it. I'm building DemoVexa, which makes demo videos from a product's code, and we wrote about sending a short clip instead of booking another call:... ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I replaced PowerPoint with three open-source tools, and only one stuck around](https://daily.dev/posts/i-replaced-powerpoint-with-three-open-source-tools-and-only-one-stuck-around-wzwgqbyry) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Slide decks are boring. Here’s how I share ideas instead](https://daily.dev/posts/slide-decks-are-boring-here-s-how-i-share-ideas-instead-y6a4llsa4) · LogRocket · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Web slides are web apps: live interactivity for Reveal.js and Slidev—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog](https://daily.dev/posts/web-slides-are-web-apps-live-interactivity-for-reveal-js-and-slidev-martian-chronicles-evil-martia-bugevorlh) · Martian Chronicles · 1 upvotes · 1 comments - [Do you even need a presentation?](https://daily.dev/posts/do-you-even-need-a-presentation--cg83fbgpn) · Martin Fowler · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-slidebyside-present-slides-without-sharing-your-screen-f0zu4vyuc) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-slidebyside-present-slides-without-sharing-your-screen-f0zu4vyuc","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/show-hn-slidebyside-present-slides-without-sharing-your-screen-f0zu4vyuc"},"datePublished":"2026-10-28T22:53:49.124Z","dateModified":"2026-10-29T09:11:08.761Z","description":"SlideBySide lets people present a PDF or PowerPoint together over a shared link instead of screen sharing. 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One gap with shared decks is anything that moves. Once a deck is a PDF, a product demo slide becomes a screenshot. A short clip linked from that slide, or sent afterwards to people who missed the session, covers it. I’m building DemoVexa, which makes demo videos from a product’s code, and we wrote about sending a short clip instead of booking another call: https://demovexa.com/blog/sales-demo-video-follow-up?utm_source=dailydev\u0026amp;utm_medium=community\u0026amp;utm_campaign=comments","datePublished":"2026-10-29T02:56:37.492Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/F0Zu4vYUc#c-rf7K0NdUu","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"DemoVexa","url":"https://daily.dev/demovexa","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--I0Ym8soj--/f_auto,pg_1/v1792077531/avatars/avatar_F6wD6jMSPjwEMcztjwnyE?_a=BAMAMicg0"}}]} ```