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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

There'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/), but every time someone tries it implementation issues seem to kill them.

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I worked at another deadpooled-ish internet annotation company in the 2008-2009 timeframe, called Reframeit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1swp-2QeMI

We worked as an embeddable product like Genius as well as a browser extension, and we had similar issues: client-side performance, "how do you anchor things to a page that's probably going to change out from under you," and "how do you scale to serve the combined traffic of every site you serve comments on without spending more money than you make?"

I think web annotation is a good idea but probably needs to live in a moneymaking niche for a while before it can grow to the broader web. Lyrics were an interesting start for Genius but it's tough to make money there. Law, news, internal research, etc. seem like interesting starts to me.

Fermat's Library does annotations for important academic papers. The papers are sent to subscribers at a good cadence - once per week. I enjoy reading them. Not sure if it could ever be a monetizable business, and I doubt the team running it is considering charging.

http://fermatslibrary.com/

I wonder if a first use case could focus in on something like https://archive.org/web/, get people hooked somehow, then generalize it to future changes by pointing back at some snapshot maybe.

Personally, I dislike the "get people hooked" formulation.

I also worked at Reframe It, after you left.

To add to your point, Disqus is also struggling: https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/disqus-lays-off-11-as-it-p...

Not to stray too far off topic, but that Disqus story is ridiculous. What do they do that 2 people charging $10/mo couldn't? "Looks like the freemium thing isn't supporting our fancy office, let's try to sell some data out the back door."

I mean, seriously:

But more recently Disqus has been trying out other things to expand its business. That has included a growing programmatic ad platform based around sponsored comments, which debuted in 2014 (it’s this that makes the company money, as Disqus takes a share on ads that run through its otherwise free platform). And earlier this year, Disqus opted for another traffic gain as it relaunched of its own site as a central repository not just of content and comments from sites that you follow and comment on with a Disqus ID; but also of standalone comment threads that existed independent of these, Reddit-style.

This seems like a lot of digging of one's own grave. Apologies if all of this ground was covered in Dec, but it looks like the story never made it to HN.

Thanks 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...

I 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

That's the one smacktoward referenced.

Yep, Third Voice is the one I was writing about in '99.

What's interesting is that Genius seems to have run into the same brick wall Third Voice did: people who make Web sites really hate having randos mark them up. See, for instance, these two articles on Genius from last year:

http://observer.com/2016/03/genius-web-annotator-emma-dawson...

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/03/news_...

The complaints in those pieces are exactly the same ones that people were making about Third Voice back in the '90s. Exactly the same. And Genius' defense ("But your blog is public!") is exactly the same too.

I feel like maybe there's just a fundamental issue of empathy here: the kind of person who launches an annotation startup can't understand the complicated emotions the kind of person who writes in public has about their writing. So they keep stepping on toes by barging in too strongly, instead of looping the content creators in early to get them on board (or at least figure out how to make an annotation product that doesn't offend their sensibilities too much).

The last paragraph in that kind of makes me cry a little inside. Apparently if I want to get a normal job at a tech company, I need to be able to implement R-star on a whiteboard under pressure, but if I want to be CEO all I had to do was invent chewy granola bars...

They're making fun of investors investing the ridiculous amount of 15 million... little did they know

They've raised a lot more than $15M, 3-4x that.

ReFrameIt and Me.Dium were also two annotation startups. It's something that people keep trying over and over again. While neat, I honestly don't expect it to ever catch on.

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