News Genius Picks Up Again Where Failures Left Off

https://ellacydawson.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/how-news-geniu...

Interesting snippet:

> After some back and forth, Ella blocked this person, who then took to News Genius to annotate the article, noting it may be "punching down a little bit here." The editor of News Genius joined in with snarky and hostile comments. Despite having blocked both individuals on Twitter, they linked to Ella's tweets, which is potentially a violation of Twitter's terms of service, but certainly indicates a violation of agency when, say, a political figure isn't involved or some other newsworthy person.

My take:

If Genius wants to succeed in the newspace, its moderators and annotators will need to collaborate and communicate more effectively with the authors of articles.

This debacle reminds me of Yelp Reviews: my colleague who worked there said that Yelp positioned itself early on as neutral and as hands-off as possible, trusting that the community[1] would average out any shadiness or extreme reviews. What actually happened is the small business owners who didn't understand Yelp or who found certain reviews to be very unfair were not engaged by Yelp. Feeling left out, these business owners thought themselves without recourse on the Yelp platform, so they turned to other avenues, like lawsuits and the public space, e.g. the theory that Yelp promotes negative reviews if you don't pay them[2].

Building software that can create value automatically, without constant human intervention, is the lynchpin for a software startup.

Most if not all software problems, however, require a delicate, and perhaps dedicated, human touch. A startup can't simply fall back on the claim that it's just a "facilitator" for a transaction. Users aren't dumb: "facilitator" conveys being a platform minus responsibility, and they will take that negative message to heart.

[1] Sometimes, I feel like you can regex replace "Community" with "mass of users who will do our QA for us and/or fill in the customer support/social problems of our software."

[2] I don't fully know yet if the more extreme claims are true; I have no doubt that at least some Yelp employees felt that corners should be cut in pursuit of growth.

What if you have a program that helps you do the two-window trick, positioning and sizing the windows automatically?

What if you modify the program to hide the URL bar on one of the windows, making it a minimal frame?

What if instead of doing the same UI function at the OS level, you write it at the browser level in a plugin or some custom browser logic?

What if instead of doing it in a browser plugin, you make a website that does the same function so the user doesn't have to go through the hassle of installing a plugin?

At what point do you cross the line from "that's clearly OK" to "you're mis-appropriating the site publisher's content"?

I see this as simply an alternative UI that gives the user more control over how articles, and discussion about those articles, utilize their screen real estate.

Site owners can't moderate commentary on their articles? They can't moderate Reddit or HN threads about their articles today, and nobody seems to be up in arms over that.

Completely unmoderated commentary becoming a haven for the worst sorts of people trolling in all sorts of ways, illegal activities, etc.? If you run this UI, you're opting into a community that has whatever level of moderation it has -- if it's moderated lightly or not at all, users will likely soon be accosted by something they offensive, and make an appropriate decision about whether this community is right for them.

This isn't the sort of thing I would use, but it seems mildly innovative and relatively benign (or at least not any more offensive than any other social networking startup that underestimates the moderation burdens of running a large online community).

I always thought this was fascinating and makes me think of the implications of happenstance. A company called Genius whose first domain had the word rape in it, which was promoted by a poker player who once created his own personal TV commercial and ran it via Google TV ads- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocekqhrmPNo

But give them $20 million and say they are pioneers in a general space that's decades old, and suddenly Genius is pioneering annotations and redefining fair use.