That sounds great to me, anybody know what caused so much trouble? Looking at genius.com now it's not even trying, homepage is all about music.
> While reviewing your stuff, I noticed that you’ve got some really high quality work, but there are a few areas that could use a bit of improvement. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to be de-editored, it just means we need to work together on improving your annotations/acceptances
That sounded like work, so I declined :) And thus was my editorship revoked. I am going to guess that they had trouble ever getting a volunteer-editor model to stick.
P.S. the original DM thread offering me an editor position contains this gem:
> The deal with usage is this. We of course want to work on as much stuff in public domain (we have A LOT up there now). But if a newer text is elsewhere on the web we feel like it’s fair game.
Translation: if someone else shares content illegally, we can too
P.P.S. I think their SEO shenanigans [0) set them back a lot. Genius results still don’t come up very high when I google lyrics sometimes.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/amp/
As an early Quora Top Writer, I feel you on this. I really enjoyed it for a while, and it was nice to have an audience for my writing. But as the site grew and got more centrally controlled, it wore thin. Eventually some admin told me I was Doing It Wrong and I decided I'd had enough.
In the years since I've decided that I'm just not going to give volunteer labor to for-profit things. If they want to make a zillion dollars, great, they can pay their workers like everybody else. If I get the urge to contribute, I can always work on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other public-benefit projects.
So there's that.
Sure, Genius will then come along and copy-paste those lyrics, but that just means you have no reason to do it yourself.
Like - I want to buy a "Philips Electric Toothbrush". I could go and buy it on their own site. But I'll probably (sorry) go straight to Amazon.
Searching and checking out on Amazon is just so much mentally more efficient than navigating and buying from a site I'm not used to.
I agree bands should definitely upload their own lyrics, but comparatively, if I'm listening to a record and I want to know song lyrics or (sometimes) check what they're singing about - I'll just go straight to Genius because I know how it's likely to be there and it's easy to use (especially compared to lots of other lyrics sites). Band websites are not what they were in the 90s - if they have them at all.
After some Amazon anti-worker horribleness a year or two ago, I dropped my Prime subscription and now Amazon is my last resort for shopping. It turns out that as a web experience, it's pretty garbage these days. It's crammed with ads and dubious listings. So I think your "mentally more efficient" is what I'd call "habit". Ordering books from my local bookstore is just as quick and is definitely more pleasant.
I also don't think Amazon has spent that like you say on "getting that checkout process as frictionless as possible". What they've spent it on is magnifying Amazon's dominance and profitability. And a checkout experience is 25 years old at this point; it's not exactly a hotbed of innovation. My random local bookstore is using some perfectly solid package that does just fine. It's no harder to check out there than Amazon. And as a bonus, shopping is easier and they're always going to send me an authentic copy of the book.
Re "I'd expect that the overlap between Amazon users and online shoppers is very high." Honestly, I'd expect the same with Genius and 'people who look up lyrics often'. I mean - I can't name another lyrics website (apart from maybe songmeanings.net, which I'm not sure is still alive?) - and as someone who looks up lyrics a fair amount, Genius appears at the top of Google enough, and is far less spammy/shitty than any of the other random sites that I'll often just start there...
Allll this said, perhaps my analogy wasn't perfect. But I stand by that if I was in a band, and I wanted to share my lyrics - as well as my own site (assuming I could be bother to maintain than AND all the social stuff), I would make sure they were on Genius. Perhaps with decent explanations for things that I added myself.
genius.com is also associated with explaining the lyrics, which I suspect only a minority of bands with lyrics worth explaining would actually do.
Meanwhile, most of Genius's featured content involved artists explaining their own lyrics. It's a minority of artists, to be sure, because curated content isn't going to feature a majority of artists, but it comprised most of their branded work.
if Genius was actually creating more value than the licencing deals, then i'm sure the labels would have been happy to work something out. But what's the value for the content owners to have their lyrics on Genius?
I'm a huge fan, and would be willing to pay to have companion books, that explained his books to me while I was reading them.
- Grandiose visions of product brilliance ("we're changing the world" = "we want to annotate it all")
- Flashy "bro culture" https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/rap-geniu...
- Breaking the "rules" and not getting penalized for it (Google reverted its penalty): https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/
I rarely want companies to fail (I'm very critical of start-ups, but generally am happy when good people succeed), but it's hard for me to root for company that operates like this.
They also had a famous fight with heroku
https://genius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annotate...
They produced an intelligent, thorough, and fair exposè of poor engineering practices by Heroku which were otherwise not documented (or worse, misleadingly documented), and which also benefited Heroku financially, since users would have to purchase many more dynos to get the expected performance - up to 50 times more if I recall correctly.
Genius didn't have to share any of their analysis. They could have simply shown it to Heroku and probably received a bunch of "hush" benefits to forget about the whole thing. The fact they bothered to polish it and open source it allowed others to benefit from their work and meant that even 8 years' later, someone like me can better plan hosting requirements and avoid falling into the trap they did.
Yes, Heroku's load balancing works the same way to this day, resulting in much higher costs to medium-large apps as well as huge degradations to end user experience as some users will randomly be routed to dynos with long queues despite others being completely idle! This is a huge waste of energy and bad for the environment too.
As a heavy Heroku user, I'm incredibly grateful for Genius's work on this issue!
Or it’s simply that Heroku didn’t provide customers great visibility into a the issue at hand, that the best-in-class at the time 3rd party add-on that gave that visibility was misleading, and that architectural changes required to support a broader set of languages in a more distributed fashion introduced a change in behaviour that was not documented. The engineering best practice continues to be the same, which is why it is unchanged 8 years later: push long-running requests into an async flow. It’s both more scalable and more durable.
Consider Genius's checkout analogy: busy markets are efficient because customers sort themselves into the shortest queues. If customers were randomly allocated queues, some customers will wait in lengthy queues while others queues remain empty!
Critically, the same logic holds whether customers have lots of items (long-running requests), or very few items - one is slightly worse, but customers are still waiting unnecessarily while other queues are free to be used (but aren't).
So it's a problem even for applications with no long-running requests. Suppose a user's request falls in a queue with 10 users being served first, while other queues are idle, also assume requests are reasonably fast - 3000ms - then you still have to wait 33 seconds (!!) for the "3000ms" request to be served (!!) - I think that will error because heroku times out requests at 30000ms. This is a disaster for UX.
Someone made a simulation to show how incredibly wasteful it is: https://gist.github.com/toddwschneider/4947326
Note that while it would be great for it to be improved, I in no way demand/expect that, I just don't think it's fair that Genius aren't given credit for their analysis - analysis that Heroku ought to have provided. It shouldn't have been Genius or other customers to expose that Heroku had misguided them, even if it happened accidentally and without intent.
The original “intelligent” routing was possible because the router effectively had a single shared state to track all these things which was also a single point of failure. And because the state of the art of web servers for Ruby back when it was implemented was Mongrel and it was single threaded.
Add in support for nodejs (and other multi-threaded languages to soon follow) and suddenly each dyno can process multiple request concurrently and the request accounting isn’t as valuable. Make the router more fault tolerant and the overhead in trying to manage that accounting at scale becomes almost impossible without adding significant overhead to every customer request and degrading performance for everyone.
I bristle when people seem to think there was some nefarious revenue incentive from Heroku here. They were well reasoned platform changes to improve availability and increase performance for more efficient languages. In the process the marketing got disconnected from the implementation.
A browser extension or something would liberate people from these walled social media gardens of interacting. Just not attractive and a hard sell.
I remember seeing a cringy interview of the founders. Candidly, I'm not surprised they couldn't convert their idea and make it happen with something bigger. Who knows though they did raise the cash.
I still think there is room here though.
There have been many other initiatives, some listed here [1]; Wikalong was interesting but riddled with spam. Maybe a personal system (not shared) would help prevent content abuse? But then it would probably offer too little value to really take off.
See "Notes for an Annotation SDK" from a couple weeks ago <https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/09/03/notes-for-an-annotation...>
I'd thoroughly recommend it to (or as a gift for) any CS-interested teenager in your life.
- Very few original content on the platform (and a lot of relevant content is already old and exists elsewhere), and trying to get that content on the platform is a huge copyright minefield.
- If you as a website owner wanted to allow your users to annotate your content, you had to include their script snippet to the website. I wouldn't be suprised if a brower extension based method would have been better for bootstrapping that side of the business.
For everything else they'd have to create a market from nowhere. And people would have to be willing to donate their time and content to Genius to make it work.
Then of course theres the copyright issues.
They are competing with Wikipedia?
Even the entry 'On Computable Numbers[ with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem]' for example, redirects to its entry in a list. [0]
where the entire annotation, as it were, is:
> Description: This article set the limits of computer science. It defined the Turing Machine, a model for all computations. On the other hand, it proved the undecidability of the halting problem and Entscheidungsproblem and by doing so found the limits of possible computation.
As I alluded to in a sibling comment to yours, [1] the potential as I see it would be something more like (a less thorough version of) Petzold's The Annotated Turing - line by line annotations of the actual paper, explaining anything non-trivial the reader might want to hover-over.
I'd love to read more academic output, and I honestly think I would if there were an easier Genius/Petzold-style way to be taught the bits I'm missing as I work through it. To my regret I didn't stay for a PhD; I don't have a supervisor to nag or whom who can guide me through easy to harder to grok works.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications...
Removing the co-founder, who had so much passion for the business?