2 ms·

Thanks for the link. The protestations are a little silly from what I gather. So this is the crux of it: Genius allows people to comment on stuff that people w

by welanes 11y ago

Thanks for the link. The protestations are a little silly from what I gather. So this is the crux of it: Genius allows people to comment on stuff that people write - like an improved comment section. Occasionally these comments suck and are offensive. From the blog post: "News Genius adds one more way for people on the Internet to be made unsafe." and "A tool that allows my abusive ex-boyfriend to interact with me and my content is a tool that should not exist." The solipsism is laughable. The Internet will forever provide an infinite supply of trolls but when you publish on a public platform as opposed to behind a password protected blog or via email, people will talk about what you write (if you're lucky. many people publish in obscurity) and it just so happens that you may not always agree with what they say. The reflex to shut down rather than, say, ignore dissenting opinion is an odd but increasingly more common one.

sosuke 11y ago
A new word for me! solipsism: the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.
MaxfordAndSons 11y ago
Yea, I agree that her reasoning isn't entirely well founded. But I'm nonetheless empathetic, because she's an embattled blogger fighting trolls to justify her work all the time, and the gap between that experience and the idealistic motivations for a universal annotation platform must be enormous. From our tech-centric perspectives, the value of a universal annotation platform seems self evident, but for a layman's perspective, it just seems like another toxic commenting layer that content creators can't moderate (which, in the ideal, it is). The fact that it's then collocated with their content, instead of, say, a click away on HN or twitter, makes it feel more violating. The truly ideal platform would have massive adoption with benevolent power users that both prevented abuse and generated value adding content by verifying factual claims, adding appropriate context, etc. This ideal use case is pretty far from Genius's original platform (explaining rap lyrics in an entertaining fashion), and that mismatch of intents seems to be the source of the problem.

by welanes 11y ago

sosuke 11y ago

A new word for me! solipsism: the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

MaxfordAndSons 11y ago

Yea, I agree that her reasoning isn't entirely well founded. But I'm nonetheless empathetic, because she's an embattled blogger fighting trolls to justify her work all the time, and the gap between that experience and the idealistic motivations for a universal annotation platform must be enormous. From our tech-centric perspectives, the value of a universal annotation platform seems self evident, but for a layman's perspective, it just seems like another toxic commenting layer that content creators can't moderate (which, in the ideal, it is). The fact that it's then collocated with their content, instead of, say, a click away on HN or twitter, makes it feel more violating. The truly ideal platform would have massive adoption with benevolent power users that both prevented abuse and generated value adding content by verifying factual claims, adding appropriate context, etc. This ideal use case is pretty far from Genius's original platform (explaining rap lyrics in an entertaining fashion), and that mismatch of intents seems to be the source of the problem.