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Comment by MaxfordAndSons | Hacker News Reader

What is the motivation behind this? It strikes me as something like an anti-ad-blocker tool, except instead of serving to protect your sites ad revenue it's just trying to suppress free discourse about your content through a third party tool that happens to be exposed to this kind of suppression, but isn't actually invasive, and is only used by people who opt-in to it anyway. Basically it seems to me like a tool for people to protect their ability to successfully disseminate misinformation. Which, I guess is your prerogative and all, but I personally find disheartening. Having an effective universal annotation platform in wide use across the web could go a long way towards improving the SNR for all users.

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Hey MaxfordAndSons, OP here.

Thanks for your comment. News Genius' site is a bit misleading, as there are a few different ways one could wind up with site annotations.

The first, as you mention, is by opting in. I agree that such a tool could be a useful way to foster discourse on your content. This tool is not meant for people who opt in to Genius annotations.

Further down on Genius' page, it states that any page can be annotated simply by prepending `genius.it/` to a site URL, regardless of whether the content publisher has granted permission. Unfortunately, the comments section of any Internet page tends to showcase some extremely uncivilized discourse. This is why many site authors choose to disable comments. Genius circumvents these people's wishes. Further, unlike a comments section, Genius does not actually notify the owner of a website if his/her content is annotated. Site owners have the option to moderate comments; it took Genius until today to even add a Report Abuse button.

Hopefully this clarifies some of the motivation. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

The readers of the comments need to opt-in to reading the newsgenius annotations. So the argument of "some people might find these comments offensive" does not make sense. If you find the comments on news genius offensive, don't read them.

If you ask me, site owners should NOT have a right to moderate comments. That just encourages silencing dissent and disagreement and publishing misinformation, as others have noted.

Should site owners also have the right to issue takedown notices to reddit or hacker news when someone links to their site? Or to delete comments on those websites?

I haven't seen many people arguing that News Genius shouldn't be permitted to exist (except perhaps on copyright/derived work grounds, which given their implementation is quite arguable), just that it's not a good idea as implemented. And, of course, people are well within their rights to use javascript/etc to prevent the embedding that News Genius does, or to e.g. block referrals from reddit or HN.

You'd be able to make a blog post without annotations accusing you of disseminating misinformation and suppressing free thought, for one.

I think you're severely overrating the quality of Internet comments too, and with these annotations there isn't even a report feature available to help clean them up. Genius.

> I think you're severely overrating the quality of Internet comments

Maybe so, but I think perhaps you're underrating the desire by state and corporate actors for tools to suppress free discourse.

> there isn't even a report feature available

No, there definitely is a "Report Abuse" button. But, there clearly isn't much in the way of a global reputation/meta-moderation system, except what's carried over from the original Genius site, which doesn't exactly share the same editorial values as an (my) ideal annotation platform. The managing editor being from Gawker and going around posting snarky/superficially critical comments on serious pieces of writing is pretty emblematic of this. Which is a shame.

Since it's related, and I'm a fan of their work, here's another annotation platform, https://hypothes.is/, whose developers seem much more serious about creating a robust reputation system.

The Report Abuse button seems like it was just recently added, in the past day. It was not present when the tool was originally released.

I'll take your word for it; it's pretty shocking that it wasn't there from day one. As I've written elsewhere, it seems like Genius's vision of universal annotations is not really lined up with the/my/some tech folks platonic ideal of it - Genius seems to want to extend RapGenius to the rest of the web to enable a mix of both factual and editorial commentary, whereas the aforementioned ideal would be much more focused on fact checking, not just providing a universal commenting layer.

It's clearly a grayer issue than I first comprehended when writing my initial response to your work; I apologize for my strongly negative tone.

I suppose it's the annotations being presented on your site to give it an undeserved sense of legitimacy; instead of a detractor otherwise of no consequence complaining on their own blog there is a detractor getting real estate alongside your content.

It's a blurry line for sure, but I think the motivation of silencing the 'riff-raff' is understandable.

> What is the motivation behind this?

The README links to the explanation: https://ellacydawson.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/how-news-geniu...

Odd, I don't see the link there.

But anyway, reading Ms. Dawson's post does make me seriously reconsider the ethical motivations for making this tool. I suppose my initial negative reaction was more based on the 'platonic ideal of a universal web annotation layer' as gkop puts it, rather than an actual understanding of how the Genius platform operates.

Here's another article with additional context: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/31/11336852/genius-annotation-cont...

First, there's been tools like this for a while. MS had an annotations tool built into IE in the 90s. (Though I think it required some sort of Office server or something.)

Second, her reasoning seems to revolve around not having comments on her site. Isn't this literally what every link aggregator from HN to reddit does?

She mentions reddit and others, but doesn't explain how they're different. Apparently it's because people can "scribble" "on her website". This makes News Genius "worse than Twitter". I guess if reddit created a browser plugin she'd hate it too?

>pasted in links to my tweets—which theoretically they should not have had access to, as I had blocked them both on Twitter

How can you block anyone on Twitter and think it'll work? Just sign out and block's gone?

>No one likes being questioned

I think that sums up her attitude. Note I think her work is fine, but she's literally complaining about people discussing her work on other sites.

>she's literally complaining about people discussing her work on other sites

Things like this don't become a problem until it is so easily organized. A bunch of tweets, FB posts, HN, reddit or other social comments are so scattered they don't have as much impact. The comments aren't visible on the the same page as the content.

I'm going to have to think more about this. I've had this thought a couple of times now but I don't have a full picture of it yet.

They are not visible on the same page as the content unless you have news genius installed or have navigated to the news genius proxy for that page. You need to opt in to see the comments.

God forbid people can post organized opinions you disagree with...

Or if the proxy shows up in search results higher than the original site.

Search indexing is disabled.

http://genius.it/robots.txt

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.

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

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.

What a crock of shit. People installing an addon to comment on your content "silences writers" by making their readers actually think about the crap they write? God forbid people actually think. I'm so sick of this anti-commenting drivel promoting mindless belief. If you can't stand being questioned, please stop posting on the internet.

https://genius.it/8917326/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11406...

Haha, I get it. I was too quick to defend Genius as a proxy for the universal annotation platform of my dreams. But the idea is that, in wide adoption, such a platform would be much more resilient to comments like your example. Sort of like HN's commenting atmosphere!

Genius is also definitely not a company that would provide anything approaching HN-quality comments. The company's cofounder & CEO had to be removed for completely tasteless comments [http://recode.net/2014/05/26/rap-genius-co-founder-moghadam-...].

>Having an effective universal annotation platform in wide use across the web

...funded by venture capital with an expectation of hyper growth and liquidity event would not necessarily be beneficial for all users. To put it mildly.

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