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Genius laid off a bunch of its engineers
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tarr11 10y agoWeb annotation standards should not be a proprietary format, owned by a private company. Not sure if this W3C spec[1] is in the right direction, but at least it's an open standard. Personally, I liked the WebMention[2] model better (rel="webmention"), where you mark up HTML. But it would require someone to take up the banner and make it easy to distribute and deploy. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ [2] https://webmention.net/draft/ https://webmention.net/draft/
- koolba 10y agoThat first line is the reason something like this is doomed to fail. The second is that the people who would actually use annotations for something constructive are greatly outnumbered by people who will use it to post the same comment spam we see in regular comment sections. Without that being solved this is just another spam delivery vector.
- tarr11 10y agoI'd imagine you could start by whitelisting domains. This wouldn't help commercial sites but if you "followed" a domain it would be no worse than Twitter notifications.
- jerf 10y agoIf you have to start whitelisting participants, you have a very hard time creating a critical mass across the internet. Annotation in a weird way is even harder than a "boil the ocean" problem; you have to have the exact right number of participants, across all the enormous complexity of the Internet, or at least, a very huge chunk of it. If you have nobody on some page, the annotation system is useless, and if you have thousands of people pounding away at the same page, it's pretty useless too. You have to hit this window of reliably having just the right number of users on a page, on an Internet that intrinsically tends towards power law page viewing, somehow across the entire Internet. After ~18 years of watching the space, I simply believe the entire vision is unsolvably flawed, especially in the presence of successful link aggregation and commentary sites.
- jimcsharp 10y agoIt seems like something that should be constrained to social network circles. It might be useful to post graffiti on any site on the Internet - within my group of friends.
- jerf 10y agoUnless your friends are very, very, very similarly minded, that falls under the "everywhere you go, nobody is there" class, and you quickly stop using it in favor of some sort of centralized comment stream like a chat channel or Facebook posts. The power-law distribution of web pages wreaks havoc on almost any attempt to distribute people well here. Your solution basically would make it so the annotation works OK on only those pages that are on the high end of the local power law distribution, but that is probably fewer pages than you might think as you'd all have different long tails.
- jxramos 10y agoI wonder if a StackOverflow building aristocracy up via gamification approach might crowd source nicely to this problem.
- johnpettus 10y agoI don't think it's unsolvably flawed. It's just hard as hell. If you take a structured data approach to annotation and commenting, you can use analytics to weed the naturally-occurring power law distribution of comments down to just the best ideas on any particular sentence, for example.
- jerf 10y agoThen you fail to activate one of the most important aspects of community building when people post comments, which is people feeling like they're participating and making a difference because other people respond to them. Take that engagement away and you're going to have a hard time building a user base. The problem isn't that any given aspect of the annotation problem is unsolvable. The problem is that you can't solve them all at once to build a successful system. Recall that I said I've been "watching this space" for 18 years now. That's no exaggeration; I was the first to hack Third Voice back in the day. It's not like people haven't been trying. Speculating about how it might work someday is really kind 10 or so years too late. In 1999, theorizing about how cool annotations might be was adequate. In 2017, a theory about how cool annotations might be needs to not just explain how they might be cool, but why all previous efforts have failed, and why yours might succeed. That's a much higher bar to leap now. And one obvious solution is to trim away bits of the problem, but you end up in the local maximum of "link aggregation site with comments" pretty darned fast.
- trimbo 10y agoWhy not just use NCSA Mosaic's group annotations? All you need is a line in your .Xdefaults file... https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/support/html/Docs/group-annotations.html https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/support/html/Docs/group-ann...
- johnpettus 10y agoI know the guys who worked on the W3C spec. They worked their butts off. I'm hopeful they'll have some success. But my system (Fiskkit.com, if curious) can't consume W3C annotations because we have more narrowly constrained parameters to enable analytics. But maybe we'll be able to export in a standard readable format? We'll see. Too broke to build that right now! :-)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jraines 10y agoThe premise behind their big investment round was that they would take their annotation tech to the rest of the web. The only place I've personally seen it used is for people to snarkily mark-up political op-eds. It's a cool vision -- I wish I could see, for a given article, the best inline comments or just those of people I find credible -- but it doesn't seem scalable to the wide web, as there just aren't enough people willing to put smart commentary on every article instead of just firing off a few tweets, commenting on the article at an aggregator like reddit (which gives a signal of which things are worth commenting on, and a built-in audience for the commentary) or writing their own post.
- smacktoward 10y agoThere's also the problem that adding the annotation layer on top of the original article can impact performance. I've seen some examples of people using Genius annotation in exactly the segment you mention (political/journalistic), and in every case the annotated version was slow to load and sluggish to browse through. It got to the point where seeing the mention of annotation was enough to kill my interest in clicking through to read more. "Annotating other people's content" is one of those evergreen ideas that keeps popping up (here's an article I wrote about a startup doing the same thing, way back in 1999: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2006/12/third_voice_wro/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2006/12/third_voice_wro/), but every time someone tries it implementation issues seem to kill them.
- reneherse 10y agoThanks for the link to your article. Here's another service from 2009 that died on the same path: https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/blerp-aims-to-turn-the-web-into-one-big-forum/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/blerp-aims-to-turn-the-web...
- CPLX 10y agoI just pulled my old dead-trees copy of the classic Fucked Companies book off the shelf to remind myself of the one I remembered dying in the first dotcom era: https://m.imgur.com/dD4nOol https://m.imgur.com/dD4nOol
- draw_down 10y agoAnnotating other web pages was probably never going to work as a VC-backed business, but it was surprisingly useful.
- jordanb 10y agoThat's true of so many things getting funded in SV today. And a bigger problem than SV wasting money is that these SV backed companies can cut off the air supply for more sustainable bootstrapped businesses in the same space. I could actually see SV being an impediment to innovation by "salting the fields" in so many product categories with hugely overfunded companies that will eventually flame out.
- bernardlunn 10y agoDon't worry. When the macro cycle changes - it always does - big burn ventures won't find any water hoses handy and the lean bootstrappers will have their day again.
- omarchowdhury 10y agoAnd those lean bootstrappers will take on the next round of VC financing [just because they can], starting the cycle over again!
- xatan_dank 10y agoThis is exactly what I've been thinking, thanks for sharing. For example, I've been so angry at how bad YouTube has gotten as of late and I feel that it's dominance is getting in the way of creating a better video service. I would gladly pay $20 a month for a more customizable and ad-free service which respects its users. It was my favorite website from around 2008-2011 and it's since become a disaster.
- CryoLogic 10y agoAs someone who was a full-time YouTuber - I agree. Monetization changes really hurt animators and anyone building high quality but short duration content.
- madamelic 10y agoYeah, I follow one of their engineers on Twitter. She seemed like totally killer, someone any company would kill to have. Apparently Genius didn't think so.
- draw_down 10y agoThere are other reasons for letting people go than poor performance. Sadly.
- madamelic 10y agoI guess they decided against being a tech company and decided to go full media company where tech is a cost center and engineers are replaceable. I think the article hinted at that.
- crush_xc 10y agoLisa Wray?
- madamelic 10y agoYeah. :) I interviewed at Genius and started following her because of "Blondes make better engineers" tagline, it cracked me up.
- tedmiston 10y agoI met several members of their engineering team in Jan 2015 in Brooklyn after their first dev meetup where Tom debuted global web annotations. Every engineer there was top notch. You could tell by how much attention they dedicated to very meta level stuff.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- xatan_dank 10y agoThis doesn't come as any surprise to me. Over the years, I haven't found Genius to be significantly better at annotating lyrics than any of it's competitors. Genius takes longer to load and doesn't provide any more value in its annotations than does azlyrics, youtube comments, facebook, reddit, or anywhere else discussions are occurring. A lot of the time, its annotations are just straight up wrong or embarrassingly shallow, and attracting actual artists to write about their own lyrics didn't excite me. Furthermore, the lyrics themselves are often wrong. The reason I'm complaining about this isn't to be a wet blanket- I just can't believe this service got the amount of funding it did. If their musical annotations are so cringeworthy and poor, what made investors think they could annotate other websites so well that a $58.9 million dollar investment would produce any reasonable return? Genius reminds me quite a lot of last.fm in terms of what kind of service it was and how well it has fared as time has progressed. Both were reasonable ideas to begin with, but is there any reason these ideas needed millions of dollars in funding to operate? I am really getting the impression that these tech VC's are just out of ideas and are consistently trying to monetize internet toys which in reality should remain small web services for dedicated user-developer types.
- pryelluw 10y agoWe've been in a bubble. That's why they got so much money.
- raverbashing 10y ago"its competitors" Edit: yes, I do correct people's mistakes
- fav_collector 10y agodo they have competitors? Other lyrics sites look and feel like static html sites from the early 2000's
- beaconstudios 10y agoI don't think having a more modern design could be classed as a unique selling point. Users often aren't that bothered from what I can tell, if you just want lyrics the fact that the site isn't hyper modern doesn't matter as long as the lyrics are accurate.
- dpflan 10y agoMainly related to web annotation: does anyone here use Hypothes.is? (its goal to do web annotation correctly, versus Genius' desire to do the same (eventually, right?)) (https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/)
- tedmiston 10y agoSimilar idea but different audiences. The vision of Hypothesis is more like the Wikipedia of web annotations.
- johnpettus 10y agoclimatefeedback.org is a good implementation of Hypothes.is They get scientists to check climate-related articles. Check them out and support them if you can. Good people doing good work.
- erinniehaus 10y agoHypothes.is is great for small groups of scientists, academics and they are doing good work . For more general news annotation, I use Fiskkit.com
- lowglow 10y agoI never really thought Genius was cool until I saw eminem was annotating his own songs. That was pretty neat.
- rrdharan 10y agoHe was/is a major investor in Genius: http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6752952/eminem-partner-genius http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6752952/eminem-partne...
- TheGRS 10y agoI never heard of Genius until I got into listening to Hamilton a few months ago. Its a great resource for getting historical explanations for the dense lyrics of the songs and even Miranda himself wrote a lot of the snippets. Its the only thing I've used Genius for so far.
- tartuffe78 10y agoDoes anyone ever expect loud layoffs?
- Yhippa 10y agoI actually like their product but wonder if they just haven't recovered from this: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-seo-genius-lyric-site-fails-to-recover-traffic-after-google-penalty https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no.... If they were higher up when a user searches Google for "lyrics" during their critical growth phase they might have had the growth to keep their engineering going strong. Kind of reminds me of Foursquare right now.
- tptacek 10y agoGoogle fucked them hard. But they kept their engineering going for many years afterwards, and their business model (from what I can tell) involved partnerships with media companies like newspapers, which are a channel for interactions that aren't mediated by Google.
- artursapek 10y agoGoogle punished them appropriately. They fucked themselves.
- gthtjtkt 10y agoI think Google fucked them hard just to prove a point. 99% of lyrics sites are utter trash littered with popups, redirects and extremely obnoxious ads. Genius was the first lyrics site I ever saw that broke that mold. Sure, they also broke Google's arbitrary rules, but they had a better product that genuinely deserved to be at the top of the rankings. I still wince when I click on a link to any other lyrics site.
- tomjakubowski 10y agoI worked for a pre-Genius lyrics service [1] with a website that also broke that mold, at least in my opinion. We didn't have very many ads, and the site design was simpler and far less spammy than most lyrics websites were at the time, probably because the website was just a hook to get people to install their mobile apps. The lyrics licensing industry is absolutely brutal, and I will be pleasantly surprised if anyone that isn't owned by a music publisher is able to succeed in this market. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TuneWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TuneWiki
- sfjailbird 10y agoI predicted Genius' certain doom at the time of their funding and got heckled by Marc Andreesen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6531937
- spenrose 10y ago"Nope. We don't do those. It's the real deal. One of the fastest growing consumer properties of all time with huge market opportunity." is not heckling.
- tptacek 10y ago"Good luck in jail" sure is.
- mattmanser 10y agoIt's an innocent joke about his username.
- Rebelgecko 10y agoI think they were referring to the "good luck in jail" comment
- x1798DE 10y agoI think that was a reference to the OP's nick, sfjailbird. Hard to see how it could be taken as disparaging in that context...
- sjg007 10y agoWho are their customers?
- legitster 10y agoIf you enjoy Hip-Hop or any other lyrically dense music, Genius is absolutely the best place to dig deeper and enjoy it. But they spent a ton of time and effort to branch out to other genres, and to be honest, there is almost nothing gained there.
- gaius 10y agoUnintelligible death metal is a good fit too.
- robryan 10y agoThey still have better presentation of lyrics then the top rank lyrics sites, even if the other genres lack the same level of annotation.
- thedarkginger 10y agoFollowed them for a while because I do think their core competency had a lot of value (having a rap lyrics site with no pop up ads alone pretty much did that...) Kind of a bummer that they raised at such a high valuation and repeatedly set their sights on scaling to areas with minimal chance of success. Also always thought about how the need for annotations is probably a lot lower in other genres / types of text content. I rarely need an abridged Wikipedia-level explanation of who Donald Trump is, but these kinds of clues tend to be key in interpreting the wordplay of hip hop.
- throwaway91111 10y agoThe site was always great; the business seemed over sold to investors when looking at internal resource investment. They're frankly turning into a hip hop publication at this point, much to my dismay. I don't find their content very attractive beyond their core competency of verified artists.
- k__ 10y agoI have a bit of confirmation bias here. I never found most hip-hop lyrics being so deep that hey need some annotations for explanation. Then it felt like very far fetched to me that people who considered annotating hip-hop lyrics now want to "annotate the world". And now they can't live up to their promises, which perfectly fits in my, probably wrong, model of hip-hop culture in general.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- microcolonel 10y agoI put some transliterations and metadata on Genius.com and I think it's the best lyric site on the internet. They just need to figure out how to stay alive and grow the catalogue further, test things which don't cost them millions of dollars to fail at.
- microcolonel 10y agoI think it'll be a shame if they suddenly stop being a well-organized lyrics site and focus on their lame propaganda feed instead. Maybe they could donate the lyrics metadata to the public domain.
- pnathan 10y agoThey are the best lyrics site on the net, period. The annotations are... not always that great. The annotations that journalists do on speeches can be super useful. But in general... I'd like to have a portable system to annotate PDFs, textfiles, etc. Local files. Take notes and cross-link against multiple files & multiple notes. I've been making notes sporadically for a decade about such a thing, with occasional bits of code that don't really solve the problem. Currently I'm playing with a neo4j backed proto-prototype. :: shrug ::
- mythrwy 10y agoIt isn't local but something like this? https://hypothes.is/ https://hypothes.is/ http://docdrop.org/ http://docdrop.org/
- pnathan 10y agoYeah, those are sibling ideas, I think.
- johnpettus 10y agoIsn't that the concept behind Evernote? (Not a user, but that's what I always thought it's thing was.)
- bronson 10y agoThey're pivoting to Pop-Up Video?
- exogeny 10y agoEasy lesson here: don't raise a ton of money just because you can. The valuation that was set and the terms that come with it limit their exits by an inordinate degree, and I don't imagine for a second their plans required the amount of capital they raised. Also, if you're an LP of a16z, don't let Horowitz waste $40m just because he wants to hang out with rappers.
- omarchowdhury 10y agoWhy does he even want to hang out with rappers? The majority of them sell delusion.
- walshemj 10y agoDoes any one think that naming the individuals in this way is a kind'a of dick move (to quote Dean Winchester). It's going to impact their bargaining position for a new gig
- soyiuz 10y agoLet's not forget the elephant in the room: [Rap] Genius rose to popularity by flagrant copyright infringement. They were forced to settle with music publishers in 2014, after receiving a generous round of funding (in the millions). See https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius-website-agrees-to-license-with-music-publishers.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius.... Around the same time they were pitching colleges for classroom use, but were embarrassingly unprepared to address the copyright problem. Their "platform" involved republishing texts to which they had no rights. They did not even have a good story about claims on student (author) contributions. Who owns the annotations? They had no coherent answer during a demo at my uni. We passed. It is beyond me as to how smart investors threw money at such incompetence.
- swyman 10y agoMaybe I'm reading it incorrectly (IANAL) but that article left me thinking the mistake was signing the original deal with Sony. Does fair use actually cover what the platform did at at the time?
- soyiuz 10y agoIn my reading of the law they clearly broke fair use. According to the letter of the law, factors in consideration of fair use include: 1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107) Rap genius was/is a for profit corp and they reproduced the copyrighted work in full, on their own servers. I don't see how they could argue fair use. In addition, their use is arguably non transformative, in that they leave the original intact. The writing was on the wall, Sony deal or not. It was just a question of copyright holders noticing/acting on the violation. The initial round with Anderssen Horowitz for 15 million in 2014 prompted swift response.
- stevebmark 10y agoThere is no way that Genius ever can, nor ever will, achieve their vision. This is a money pit funding overgrown children from day one, and nothing else. This is throwing money at an idea before it's proven, and trying to force an idea no one wants on people. It's an embarrassment of the valley.
- johnpettus 10y agoI talked to a VC who saw their original pitch. Said it was the fastest growth curve he's seen in his career. That was back when they were RapGenius.
- stevebmark 10y agoI'm assuming "growth" meant meaningless users just writing comments, and it was pitched as DAUs convertible to profit. If my assumption is correct this sounds like fraud to me.
- timgilbert 10y agoWell, I guess that explains why it's so widely-used for stuff other than rap lyrics then.
- tzz 10y agoWhat contributed the most to kill their business is that now Google displays lyric results inline. Your are in great risk if Google can just replace your business by displaying it inline when people are searching.
- stagbeetle 10y agoThere's a niche of people who want to know the backstory of the lyrics. Especially for more symbol-liberal artists like Bowie. And rap like Norf Norf.
- edoceo 10y agoRelevant reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/5zncj2/all_of_the_websites_for_finding_lyrics_look_like/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/5zncj2/all_...
- angry_napkin 10y agoJust because you can raise money doesn't mean you should. I find video extremely distracting on a daily basis and avoid it at all costs. You may not feel the same.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]