6 ms·

Can you give more details on what the possible consequences are? I just can't see how people making trollish interpretation of lyrics can possibly be harmful. A

by uyt 5y ago

Can you give more details on what the possible consequences are? I just can't see how people making trollish interpretation of lyrics can possibly be harmful. At worse it just becomes a stupid meme. This is just internet culture.

humanistbot 5y ago
I'm not the parent, but as a frequent reader of Genius, the annotations often discuss the connection between the lyrics and the artist's personal life --- sometimes with wild speculation. It is standard in contemporary music for artists to build their careers writing songs about their personal experiences, no matter the genre. Pop, hip-hop, country, folk, and punk are all filled with artists who are loved by their fans for successfully performing "authenticity" in their songs. Fans of those kinds of artists love to try and decode the lyrics. People go to Genius and read the annotations for a Taylor Swift song because they want to know which breakup that song is about. It gets into even more of a difficult situation when it comes to artists who sing/rap about their legally-questionable activities. Now, if you hold the belief that words on the internet can never hurt, you won't buy that argument. But every user-generated content platform needs to have a plan for moderation of that content. Rumors and misinformation can spread everywhere.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  They do have verified accounts that lets the artist annotate their own songs and interact with fans on the site. I thought that was super cool until I read some real cringe-worthy crap from the artist and it just killed the song for me.
donohoe 5y ago
It wouldn't be appropriate to go into specifics, but I can add more information. It wasn't about lyrics. Thats where Genius started. They moved into allowing annotation for news sites. This presented copyright issues (which I wasn't complaining about in my original comment) where they would reproduce the story and images on a new domain. This presented problems as many publishers have contracts with writers, illustrators, and photographers where they need to pay them more if their content appears on other websites - or simply not allowed to have this hosted anywhere else. Genius ignored those issues and the simple copyright aspects. The other concern was that, as a publisher, if you had an article that wasn't liked by a powerful interest group (business, religion, cult, lobby, etc.), they could perform coordinated efforts to annotate and contradict every fact - those that were fact-checked and run past legal - to undermine reports. This isn't about how the public get to flag 'fake news', this is how interest groups can undermine legitimate stories. Genius were not willing to address this, or put basic safeguards in place to address this at any meaningful level - let alone giving us an option to 'opt-out'. And by the way, this was not 'hypothetical'. In my role I had seen how this happened in numerous forms and this was a bigger attack vector. I hope that helps provide the necessary context.

by uyt 5y ago

humanistbot 5y ago

I'm not the parent, but as a frequent reader of Genius, the annotations often discuss the connection between the lyrics and the artist's personal life --- sometimes with wild speculation. It is standard in contemporary music for artists to build their careers writing songs about their personal experiences, no matter the genre. Pop, hip-hop, country, folk, and punk are all filled with artists who are loved by their fans for successfully performing "authenticity" in their songs. Fans of those kinds of artists love to try and decode the lyrics. People go to Genius and read the annotations for a Taylor Swift song because they want to know which breakup that song is about. It gets into even more of a difficult situation when it comes to artists who sing/rap about their legally-questionable activities. Now, if you hold the belief that words on the internet can never hurt, you won't buy that argument. But every user-generated content platform needs to have a plan for moderation of that content. Rumors and misinformation can spread everywhere.

monkeybutton 5y ago
They do have verified accounts that lets the artist annotate their own songs and interact with fans on the site. I thought that was super cool until I read some real cringe-worthy crap from the artist and it just killed the song for me.

donohoe 5y ago

It wouldn't be appropriate to go into specifics, but I can add more information. It wasn't about lyrics. Thats where Genius started. They moved into allowing annotation for news sites. This presented copyright issues (which I wasn't complaining about in my original comment) where they would reproduce the story and images on a new domain. This presented problems as many publishers have contracts with writers, illustrators, and photographers where they need to pay them more if their content appears on other websites - or simply not allowed to have this hosted anywhere else. Genius ignored those issues and the simple copyright aspects. The other concern was that, as a publisher, if you had an article that wasn't liked by a powerful interest group (business, religion, cult, lobby, etc.), they could perform coordinated efforts to annotate and contradict every fact - those that were fact-checked and run past legal - to undermine reports. This isn't about how the public get to flag 'fake news', this is how interest groups can undermine legitimate stories. Genius were not willing to address this, or put basic safeguards in place to address this at any meaningful level - let alone giving us an option to 'opt-out'. And by the way, this was not 'hypothetical'. In my role I had seen how this happened in numerous forms and this was a bigger attack vector. I hope that helps provide the necessary context.