"Previous management used to pay people to write or create things."

September 27, 2021 2:37 PM

True Genius: How to go from “the future of journalism” to a fire sale in a few short years (SLNiemanLab)

(Genius (pka Rap Genius) previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously)

posted by box (25 comments total)

That cover image tells me all I need to know: four overhyped, overprivileged white boys (pointedly not calling them men) preening for the camera. They are given a huge amount of VC money to fuck around with and as the hype train leaves the station, they don’t even pretend to be anything more than the equivalent of a one-joke SNL skit that’s gone on way too long.

All the while, women and POC startup founders with genuine good ideas and smart strategies languish behind underfunded and underhyped.

Fuck them.
posted by zooropa at 2:45 PM on September 27, 2021 [15 favorites]

I used to like Genius. Lately I just found tons of things listed with either no annotation or just BS'ing. What's the point?
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:45 PM on September 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Annotation is just a comment box you can put anywhere on a web page. Some annotations are great! If you have a coherent community with shared goals and common values, they can be amazing and create something on a Wikipedia scale. But they have all the flaws of the comment box, too — namely, they’re a great place to see people be assholes to one another, and most people don’t have much of unique value to add to the discussion.

Metafilter: …
posted by clew at 2:58 PM on September 27, 2021 [5 favorites]

end capitalism, save these poor people from themselves. the money, the power, it makes them very stupid and dissolves whatever purpose they thought they may have had
posted by eustatic at 2:59 PM on September 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

The fact that Chris Cillizza thought it was the future of journalism should have been the first red flag.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:03 PM on September 27, 2021 [11 favorites]

Oh, there are egomaniacs of all ethnicities creating lunatic media companies: "Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40 Million Conference Call Gone Wrong" (SL NYT).
posted by PhineasGage at 3:08 PM on September 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

I’ve been trying to remember the names of earlier efforts to do this, back to 2007 at the latest and I think at least one in the 1990s (!). but I only get faint memories of the HTML trickery. Frames! Nested frames! They all pivoted and died.

Even then it seemed obvious to people already commenting on the web that we didn’t really all want to see everyone’s comments on the sites we visited, or have ours seen. We wanted our karass to comment with.
posted by clew at 3:10 PM on September 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

MediaLab also acquired Imgur this week, after the Niemen article was published.

I was confused for a while, but it seems the holding company MediaLab is not associated in any way with the MIT Media Lab.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:17 PM on September 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

Hey Zooropa, not that your overall point about women and POC being underfunded isn't valid, but it's actually just three entrepreneurs and one interviewer/host: "Tom Lehman, Ilan Zechory and Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius speak onstage with Josh Constine".

Also, while I couldn't definitively figure out whether Mahbod Moghadam (who Wikipedia describes as an Iranian Jew) identifies as white himself, this article would seem to suggest he doesn't: Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam thinks the company should have a Black CEO (and that Ilan should be fired for being a racist).
posted by tiamat at 3:20 PM on September 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

Mahbod is also the founder who turned out to be a raging asshole (CW: misogyny) and got fired for it. As a casual outside observer the combination of that happening and them taking financing took all the personality out of the site. Mind you, the Rap Genius personality that was there was pretty loathsome, but it was a part of the site's early success.

As the article notes Genius got bought by MediaLab. Owner of Kik, the platform infamously riddled with child porn. Which as mbrubeck notes also just bought Imgur today.
posted by Nelson at 3:35 PM on September 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

re:imgur; downloaded my few meager pics and deleted my account just now. thanks for the heads up yall.
posted by glonous keming at 4:04 PM on September 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

They went from Yale and Stanford to working at hedge funds and law firms
That says a lot, sociologically.
posted by doctornemo at 4:09 PM on September 27, 2021

Web annotation: Hypothes.is is still going and growing, in the education world.
posted by doctornemo at 4:10 PM on September 27, 2021 [4 favorites]

four overhyped, overprivileged white boys (pointedly not calling them men) preening for the camera

That photo makes me think of Jean-Ralphio.
posted by duoshao at 4:16 PM on September 27, 2021 [8 favorites]

I think at least one in the 1990s

That would be Third Voice, the first ever annotation platform, that was quickly sued out of existence by terrified content providers who found spam links all over their pages and no way to do anything about it.

There was about 10 minutes when it seemed like a beautiful new layer, like a cocktail party was happening on every web page.
posted by fatbird at 5:14 PM on September 27, 2021 [7 favorites]

From the article: "Obviously, we still need people out in the field (and in the office) reporting and writing on both breaking news and investigative stories. Journalism can’t ever lose that."

Oh my.
posted by rpfields at 8:27 PM on September 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

Huh, I was just reading The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium, 2012–present from NiemanLab before this, which has... a similar vibe, although I figure Medium has maybe five years or a decade left in it before it implodes. (I guess maybe the main difference is that Ev just seems incompetent to run a business, whereas these guys are that and also assholes)

VC funding is some weird shit.
posted by wesleyac at 11:07 PM on September 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

And I was hoping my Genius IQ from annotating Use Your Illusion II songs would open doors for my daughter...
posted by johngoren at 3:01 AM on September 28, 2021

four overhyped, overprivileged white boys (pointedly not calling them men) preening for the camera. They are given a huge amount of VC money to fuck around with and as the hype train leaves the station, they don’t even pretend to be anything more than the equivalent of a one-joke SNL skit that’s gone on way too long.

looool love this metaphor

SNL itself *is* overhyped, overprivileged white boys given a huge amount of money to fuck around and make one joke that goes on way too long!
posted by Borborygmus at 4:35 AM on September 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

wesleyac: "Huh, I was just reading The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium, 2012–present"

From that article: This year, for instance, Jeff Bezos used Medium to reveal the National Enquirer’s efforts to blackmail him. Bezos might have used something else if Medium didn’t exist, but it does seem as if some of the very early hopes that the platform would democratize blogging has been achieve.

That Jeff Bezos, gazillionaire owner of THE WASHINGTONFUCKINGPOST, is this article's poster boy for the "democratization of blogging"... well, color my eyes ROLLED.
posted by chavenet at 5:02 AM on September 28, 2021 [9 favorites]

Rap Genius felt neat to me. Rap is dense, and speaks across cultural boundaries. There are legit wonderful commentaries on there. But it was just neat. If I never read the words VC or Pivot again I'd be happy. And yeah, the founders were definitely dredged from the sludge of Brooklyn.

So much of our world now seems like 1/2 baked ideas that should be hobbies or "expressive failures" fed dreams of hubris and money, unwilling to stay humble and just be neat.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 5:50 AM on September 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm not sure I understand how this meta-layer was going to be implemented internet wide. Was the Washington Post/ NYTimes/etc supposedly going to allow a Genius addon? Or would you find the article through the Genius domain? Or is it all a browser plugin?
posted by Think_Long at 6:46 AM on September 28, 2021

Ted Nelson has a suggestion.
posted by at by at 8:14 AM on September 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Think_Long, you essentially had two browser windows open, and the "commentary" one was always monitoring what you had in the "browsing" one and checking to see if its server had comments on it. Two browser windows at once was clunky at the time. Then they added little highlights or footnote-links to what you were browsing in its own pane, which annoyed almost everyone even before it became an attack vector. (I’m probably combining several attempts at this in one memory.)

It still doesn’t seem like a bad idea if it were way more controlled - I would not mind having a sub-FPP-comments sidebar for Metafilter fellow readers. It seems like a way to collaborate on making FPPs, even.
posted by clew at 10:07 AM on September 28, 2021

I believe at one point the vision was a browser plugin, too, back when those operated under considerably freer browser security restrictions than they do today. Personally, I always felt that that vision came with the caveat that "this will work great until Google decides to crush us like a bug via Chrome updates, or acquire us into their surveillance infrastructure" but I guess they were never able to get any user traction for it anyways.

The pity is that Genius is still the best site that currently exists for song lyrics, as far as I can tell, in terms of being an actually usable site with a reasonable presentation. For some reason song lyrics were one of those awful spam-trap subjects before Genius came along, where you'd wind up getting search results from hundreds of near-identical sites that were packed to the gills with low-quality ads. None of them had licensed the actual lyrics from ASCAP or whatever, so they all relied on users to type in the content (with widely-varying levels of fidelity), and then they scraped each other's sites constantly, which led to all kinds of shitty web behavior like disabling right-clicks, inserting ads when you copied text, or adding dumb-ass plain-text "watermarks" that were displayed as white text on a white background.

In this context Genius-the-site was unique in not being actively user-hostile, even while Genius-the-company was almost cartoonishly loathsome for all the reasons noted here and in the article.
posted by whir at 1:58 PM on September 30, 2021