Hacker News Reader

IIRC, the lyrics site Genius started life as one in the long line of “hey let’s let people share annotations on arbitrary web pages around the world” projects that went nowhere. They pivoted to using their annotations to let people provide extensive footnotes on song lyrics.

“_why the lucky stiff” had one of these for a while too, I can’t remember the name.

View on HN

Annotating other websites was a side quest along the way for Genius, but its original creation was focused on annotating rap lyrics. It took them 5 years to drop "Rap" from the name "Rap Genius". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(company)#History

I am incorrect!

Though Wikipedia makes it sound like there was a lot of pressure from investors to pivot into that side quest:

In 2012, the company received an additional $15 million investment from Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z),[1][3][11] prompted in part by partner Marc Andreessen's own past effort to build a group annotation feature into a web browser.[1] Ben Horowitz described Genius as "one of the most important things we've ever funded"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com