Rap Genius Co-Founder Moghadam Fired | Hacker News Reader

Rap Genius Co-Founder Moghadam Fired

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171 pointsobilgic149 comments

The only stories I've ever seen about Rap Genius have been ones which would make me never want to use their service.

Agreed. Seems they enjoy testing the limits of there's no such thing as bad publicity

even in apology ... "especially since Elliot is talking about my neighborhood growing up" ... it has a bad tone, particularly when you consider the bullying the kid faced. was mahboob the kind of guy to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Yeah, the alternatives to Rap Genius are great... sigh.

songmeanings.net has been around since I was a pre-teen and it's served me quite well. It's full of ads now, but at least the quality is good.

It's full of ads because it licenses the rights to the lyrics, which is quite expensive. Most lyric sites don't.

Oh, are the alternatives to Rap Genius attempting to profit, through pageviews and ad revenue, from re-posting the horrifically, murderously misogynist rantings of a spree killer? And then going beyond that, adding their own misogynistic thoughts to the text, as a cherry on top?

I mean, that's not a real high bar there.

Speculating on the attractiveness of the Elliot Rodger's sister, particularly in the context of Elliot's hatred and disgust towards women that he goes on about at length in this very document, leaves me struggling to describe how utterly disgusting a person I find Mahbod. Even if this was a tasteless attempt at humor someone who isn't a piece of shit would see how wildly and utterly inappropriate that was. Not only not funny, but in the context of Elliot's misogyny just disgusting. I'd hope that Mahbod would take some time for reflection, both on how to act like a decent human being and whether he thinks of women as fellow human beings.

For us, this is yet another startup exec who most likely has a serious problem with women.

I would expect even the btards to not behave like that.

Edit: there is a sorority full of women who where targeted by Elliot and are lucky to be alive today because they didn't answer their thick door when he attempted to get in [1].

   Elliot Rodger pounded on the sorority house front door while, inside, the 
   young women he yearned to slaughter were preparing for another Friday night, 
   authorities said.
   
   The awkward 22-year-old was obsessed with exacting "retribution" for what he 
   experienced as a lifetime of social and sexual isolation, and had planned 
   meticulously to target as many people as possible, according to a manifesto 
   he left behind and a YouTube video since removed. But here again, he was 
   denied access to those he felt should worship him.
   
   So when no one answered after several minutes, Rodger improvised.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/thwarted-in-his-plan-california-...

You're missing the point. The RG founders (especially Moghadam) clearly have many issues. But the actual song lyric database and associated annotations is the best on the internet by far.

The comment you replied to was lamenting the fact that there are no quality alternatives with more respectable people behind them.

Also FWIW, a huge number of news organizations have attempted "to profit, through pageviews and ad revenue" by posting stories or otherwise commenting on the murders in Isla Vista. Should we also be complaining about CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC and just about every other news organization in the United States?

I was talking about the product, I'd never work or partner with Rap Genius, but use their service? Yes, because is the best out there and nothing comes close to it.

Downvoted. Here's why: this comment doesn't add anything to the discussion. It informs us of an irrelevant personal opinion, by adding the marginal extra information that there has been additional bad publicity. A comment actually worth anything would at least have linked to that, explained the stories or explained how they are relevant to this story. It only functions to bask the author in the relative bit of light that appears by casting a shadow on the subject of the discussion.

The suggested motivation is disingenuous: someone actually interested in Rap Genius would at least have to admit that they have something pretty unique: there is no other place where a community actually sensibly annotates lyrics and texts. If you are interested in that, they are interesting to you. If you are not interested in that, the stories about them are irrelevant.

And _that_ is why Maboo stepped down. Tom Lehmen is a much more personable guy, who doesn't have at all the same personality Mahbod does. This one incident was really the straw that broke the camels back.

Here's the thing. I don't know Tom Lehmen, but the mere fact that he'd associate with a guy like Moghadam, let alone found a company with him, speaks volumes to me. I just took a look at Moghadam's twitter feed. Within the first score or so of entries I came across ""your pussy is wet, my floor is slippery" - persian proverb" and "Donald sterling dissed magic cause he's jealous of his aids." This is simply a repulsive individual and there's nothing subtle about it. I don't feel I'm at all off base by judging Lehman and Rap Genius negatively by their association with Moghadam.

Wow, I'm actually embarrassed reading through these tweets, I really hope people don't end up seeing him as the Persian face of tech...

And yet... Moghadam was the one who built Rap Genius (with his partners), when no one else did.

It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations.

Moghadam's behavior, while not one of polite society, isn't necessarily separate from the community that Rap Genius serves. Compare Moghadam to famous and successful rappers who haven't been fired from their jobs for quite similar behavior.

I mean, I don't get all the fuss. One look at his twitter and it's pretty clear that he really doesn't care about being "tasteful." Was this just the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak? Because it's not really that much worse than anything I've seen on his twitter.

> It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations.

It's not a "higher" standard. It's the same normal standard of professional behavior I expect from anyone I do business with, and Rap Genius consistently fails to meet it.

In that case you're mistaken for taking an industry that is far from normal and expecting "normal standard of professional behavior."

I'm sorry, but that attitude is gross and only serves to worsen the problem.

You might be able to argue that "professional" behavior is not the standard in SV, I'll give you that.

But making disgusting comments like he did on Rap Genius, twitter, and his blog is not "normal" nor acceptable in any industry. We should all expect and demand better behavior than this from all business leaders- no matter what.

I can forgive someone for making a mistake. 1, maybe even 2 times- make a slip like this, realize you fucked up, apologize, get on with it. But he has a history of comments like this, and that's what has to stop.

With that said, I'm not sure I can get on board with firing someone just for making comments, as terrible as they might be. Is Rap Genius really going to be worse off by keeping him around than by firing him?

I feel like I can't come up with a strong enough argument to fire him, so why do it? The burden of proof is on the other side.

I'm willing to bet it was him that got investors to invest in the startup, and get PR attention, but the rest of his partners did the bulk of the other work in building the product. After awhile, people like Moghadam are useless to your startup.

"It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations."

I don't understand your point here. I can quite easily imagine a RapGenius like service being created by someone who's not an utter dickbag. In other words, I fail to see anything inherent to RapGenius which requires douchbaggery of its creator. Are you suggesting that there is?

> I can quite easily imagine a RapGenius like service being created by someone

I can imagine quite a few things too, but reality has a different take on things. At the end of the day, he did ... and nobody else stepped up.

Is he immature? Yeah. Rather than firing such individuals, I think a bit of social pressure can make them behave like civilized people. Firing them is a bit overkill.

I don't want to live in a society were people lose their livelihood over saying something stupid, even if saying intelligent things is part of their job description.

Frankly, if I had to guess, I think they wanted him gone and used this as an excuse to get rid of him.

I don't think you got what I was saying. The post I was referring to claimed that it is difficult to separate RapGenius from it's douchy creator. My point was simply that I don't think it is at all difficult. I.e. it's quite easy to imagine a RapGenius like service without a douche as creator. The fact that RapGenius was in fact created by a douche doesn't negate my point that a douche was not a necessary condition for the creation of RapGenius — unless you take a sample size of 1 as meaningful.

It seems to me the curse of any company or project that begins with controversy or edginess as a cornerstone of their image. It's easy to have a f--- it all attitude when there's nothing on the line. As the company grows, people's lives and fortunes start to depend on the company. The loose-cannon founder who was great for attracting initial attention starts to become a liability who seems totally willing to crash the whole thing.

It is funny you mention this in regards to RapGenius because I always thought about how difficult this transition is for rappers themselves. If you build an audience as a rapper talking about the struggle then its difficult to maintain that once you've become wealthy. There are only two options that I've seen - 1. Leverage the money and fame to switch to a different line of work. ie. Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Ice Cube. or 2. Disregard the money and stay in the struggle (I think people only take this route if they have mental issues.) ie. DMX. I'd take option 1 everytime but unfortunately its not an option for some.

Yea I think that's true for musicians. I saw a Jimmi Hendrix interview about singing the blues when you are no longer poor. He said that sometimes the more money you have, the more blues you can sing! I thought that was pretty interesting.

This is a story of privileged white Yale alums starting a rap Web site, at least one of whom needs to try to sound badass.

I'm sure mining his tweets and IMs will provide endless entertainment but the two I like best so far are how he blamed his brain tumor for making him act like a dick. Now that it was removed he blames the operation for making him act like a dick.

The poor guy had his skull sawed open and a thing pulled out of his brain. And yet, effortlessly, he sucked all the sympathy out of me. THAT'S genius.

Every time I hear 'white privileged' I detect envy of the upbringing these kids had.

Perhaps you should channel that envy into giving your kids a similar upbringing instead of moping how your parents did not?

My daughter graduated from CMU SCS last weekend. Good enough for you?

So that makes her a privileged [ethnicity] girl in the eyes of less prestigious school graduates? :)

How is it logical to condemn his friends and a company he co-founded because of something _he_ does? There is no point to it. If everyone was judged because they have friends who like to say stupid shit then I'd bet most people would be deemed assholes.

Absolutely agreed. At this point, I don't care if Rap Genius somehow comes up with a cure for cancer. I won't support them and I will never use their service.

Sounds pretty stupid.

Benefit gained from cancer cure is far higher than detriment from some idiotic comments online an a semi-spammy marketing campaign that was swiftly punished. Net effect is very positive.

"I'm not supporting this by principle!" people vary from legitimate and caring to just pretentious and snobby.

I would understand not supporting a lot of the biggest hardware OEMs for prioritizing machine production cost over the quality of human life (Foxconn and other very popular, very cheap Chinese production manufacturers that employ some really sketchy tactics to keep that production cheap). Obviously for you to make such a strong decision, I'd expect you to have read a lot, way more than whatever Apple-scapegoating bullshit you've read in mainstream media and on Reddit (the whole Foxconn thing is very popular with, like, every OEM, by the way, not just Apple), making sure you knew who and who wasn't actually breaking your very strong principle and to what extent you can expect a company to provide "quality of human life" and what that even means, etc.

But when you boldly declare you won't support a company, no matter what they do, because a co-founder made some stupid and tasteless comments (said company later fucking fired said co-founder) and because they unwittingly executed on a really spammy marketing campaign (which caused them to get kicked off of Google for WEEKS as punishment)?

Where were you when RapGenius made apparent some glaring inefficiencies in Heroku? Where were you when RapGenius was building the most accurate, most well-designed, most comprehensive repository of lyrics and text annotations on the web?

You're really deciding to wave your huge "muh principles. I HAVE STRONG BELIEFES" cock on the Internet because of a couple insensitive comments?

As for the general culture on HN regarding hating the general culture around RapGenius ... so what if their general behaviors are different than yours. What's unprofessional to you is just fun to them. Everyone behaves in different ways; ivy tower academics from researcher academics from front-end web developers from game developers from humanities majors from STEM majors from musicians from DJs from ... there's nothing objectively worse about the rap culture behind RapGenius.

Sure, that culture may sometimes throw around otherwise offensive remarks. But remember that the context behind a word is infinitely more important than the word itself. The context behind the usage of the word "faggot" is much, much more important than the meaningless combination of the letters 'f','a','g','g','o', and 't' and the pronunciation of those combined letters. If an immature 13 year old were to input "faggot" in a text-to-speech program, the text-to-speech program would very clearly say "faggot". You wouldn't blame the program : it's just executing on a pronunciation algorithm. The context is just the manipulation of bits and bytes on a stream. It's harmless. You wouldn't exactly flog the kid, either, he just has a poor sense of humor, and you'd just roll your eyes at that.

The problem we have with the word "faggot" is that, in the majority of cases, it's being used in a pretty offensive context, and said context says a lot of things about the person using the word.

But when the RapGenius cofounder says offensive stuff (I heard one of them insulted Mark Zuckerberg at a conference?), often the context is just lighthearted jabs.

They may be unprofessional and insensitive jabs, but given that they're A) just meaning harmless fun and B) building one of the most comprehensive and well-designed text annotation sites on the Internet, we give them some cultural license to have their shitty taste in humor. In this specific case, obviously, they really overexploit that cultural license by saying such insensitive things on such a raw , emotional topic, but again, the guy got fucking fired.

I actually enjoyed these series of articles:

http://rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annota...

I did too. Learned a hell of a lot from them that's for sure, lol. Their Engineering team does a lot of, in my opinion, cool things and I really appreciate them taking the time to write about it.

The takedown on Heroku's dyno scaling was impressive. But also funny how they got themselves in that situation to begin with. If there's one thing about this world, RAP music will pay for $20k worth of Dyno's a month! Sad sad world.

edit - I like rap music.

This one is one of their less commendable efforts: yes, there was a discrepancy between what Heroku's docs said and the actual behavior of Heroku's routing. No, RapGenius's simulation is nowhere near correct: multi-tenant resource allocation is a pretty difficult stochastic optimization problem, and their simulation does not take this into account at all.

Heroku should own up to - and has owned up to, in my opinon- their communications fiasco. But I really, really hope the linked RapGenius article doesn't mislead folks to believe intelligent routing is easy (Tom Lehman, the then CTO of RapGenius, admits that he himself is a novice about distributed locks and such: http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/1361210233_heroku-adam-con...)

EDIT: minor grammatical clarifications

People are too sensitive. We're basically at the point where nearly any mistake can destroy the rest of your life. e.g. "zero tolerance" in schools, stories like this, and the recently ousted CEO of Mozilla.

Case in point, the amount of downvoting happening in this thread: Someone says something you don't agree with so they must be the devil incarnate.

The reaction to his comments and the comments here are laughable.

> nearly any mistake can destroy the rest of your life

This, this, a thousand times this. What kind of world do people think doing this kind of crap is going to create?

And yet when I suggested naming and shaming the real assholes of our industry, the patent trolls, everyone lost their shit and began defending those low-lifes.

edit: downvoted again; I will never understand this community

This isn't the 'hacker' community to badmouth patents (or legislature within the united states, usually) I've found personally.

Perhaps it's an indication of how the hackers here make their living.

More than likely this is the straw that broke the camels back and not a knee jerk reaction to uncommon bad behavior.

I don't know what he said, but are we really in the business of defending people who are against human rights and make jokes in the face of tragedies? These are founders and CEOs we're talking about, I wouldn't want to work with them regardless of public image.

What leads you to believe Brendan Eich or Mahbod Moghadam have had their lives "destroyed"? What leads you to believe downvotes mean someone thinks you're the devil incarnate?

a thread full of people from the community someone is a part of calling them a disgusting piece of human trash is a pretty good indication of a life being ruined.

Just read this thread for a few minutes for a full dosing of that.

Then 95% of the people on Reddit have had their lives destroyed.

He has said a lot of disgusting things, but is still young and can do whatever he wants going forward (he's got enough shares to live many lives). Of ways to have your life ruined, this sounds like a great way to go.

It appears that the whole team needs to grow up. They come off as something right out of HBO's Silicon Valley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

Each case is different, and I (personally) do not see a pattern emerging. In this instance, all signs point to this being the "last straw". In the case of Eich, it was the unique relationship that Mozilla has with it's community and the community believing that someone with his views should not be running the face of Open Source IN PARTICULAR.

You really don't know what happened in this instance and all signs point to "started to view him as a liability that outweighed his value as an asset as company outgrew founders". Eich I'm sure the HN community can argue about all day, but that seemed like a REALLY unique situation to me.

>> "We're basically at the point where nearly any mistake can destroy the rest of your life."

I think in the past people could make these 'mistakes' in private and nobody would ever know. We're giving up more and more of a privacy and even if you 'have nothing to hide' you could very easily make a 'mistake' eventually. I think it's inevitable that in 50 years, when people have grown up without privacy and with making embarrassing mistakes in public people will be much more likely to forgive as they have their own errors publicly available.

The rest of your life? Some rich dude in a very public position got fired for doing stupid things in public. Boo-hoo. How very, very tragic.

He will manage, no doubt. He will not die poor. Maybe not a billionaire, but no one’s entitled to that. What’s with all the unending sympathy for rich people in public positions with lots of power making stupid mistakes and having to face the consequences for those?

The supermarket cashier being fired for picking up change from the floor, now that’s tragic. This? Doesn’t matter. Do you really believe his life is in any way ruined? Maybe because he won’t be able to become a billionaire in the future because of choices he made?

I have exactly zero sympathy for rich people in public positions of power being scrutinised. That’s the price you pay.

Really, I want someone to explain to me why it’s somehow not ok to critically examine things who are working in public do in public. I really don’t understand the argument for that.

Should some lowly employee be fired for what they do in their own time public? No, of course not, it’s none of the employers fucking business. Should leadership in public positions (representing the company to the outside) be fired for what they do in public? Yes, of course, how could you ever think otherwise?

How do you know he's rich?

> He will manage, no doubt. He will not die poor. Maybe not a billionaire, but no one’s entitled to that. What’s with all the unending sympathy for rich people in public positions with lots of power making stupid mistakes and having to face the consequences for those?

Because he was judged in the court of public opinion. You may point and say "What this man did was obviously wrong! He deserves everything he gets!" And then someday, maybe you make one small, innocuous mistake. One off-the-cuff comment taken out of context. And the internet lynch mob will come for you.

(Please understand that I'm not saying what he did was said out of context or could be misinterpreted. It was pretty obviously a dumb thing to do. People have been "executed" in the court of public opinion for infinitesimally smaller gaffes, and it is this we must work to stop.)

Freedom of speech is important. I do not want to drag everyone in front of a judge just because of what they said. Moghadam should no doubt be legally allowed to say what he said.

However, whether or not someone is fired is not a decision a court has to make. And when someone who is in the public pisses parts of the public off the company is perfectly justified in firing that person. Isn’t that just common sense? They also can not fire the person, of course, and deal with the consequences of their actions. I’m really not sure why companies should ignore the public. I mean, they can, if they want to, but there is no good reason to ignore them just because.

Also, hey, if you are in such a public position of power your error margin will always be extremely low. No one said it’s an easy job. That’s just how it is. If you don’t like it that way do something less public and scrutinised.

The supermarket cashier being fired for picking up change from the floor, now that’s tragic. This? Doesn’t matter.

The starving unemployed father who just lost his job is sad. This? At least the cashier is not going to starve to death with her family.

You've missed my point.

No, I did not. This ain’t gonna screw up anyone’s life. Oh, it might cost him a few millions, sure (as doing dumb things in public tends to if you are working in a public position), but he will never ever live in poverty.

How are people too sensitive in this case? The things he said were absolutely horrific. Making flippant comments about a disturbed kid who went on a murderous rampage within the last week is absurd for someone in this guys position. If I had vested interest in the company I would want him fired just because this incident proves he has terrible judgement.

Also, what is the deal with people's obsession with rapgenius? Its a lyrics site. I don't understand how they got all of this funding for a lyrics site. There are like hundreds of them that work fine. In face, songmeanings.com is particularly good. People can say rapgenius is the best designed site blah blah blah til they are blue in the face, but I bet it doesn't matter for 99% of the people who use these sites. I would guess most people who look up lyrics do what I do and just Google the song/lyrics and click the first link. I have literally never used a lyrics site's interface, and I have never thought, oh man I wish there was a better lyrics site out there for me to use. The valley is crazy.

It's interesting to see how this founder firing was handled so much better than the guy who nearly beat his gf to death recently. In that case, the founder, VC's and board paid the girlfriend off and then tried to cover up the whole story before the press ripped into them and finally forced his firing.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/Indian...

Nearly beat his gf to death? Bad dude? Yes. But he didn't nearly beat her to death, why are you making things up?

I remember when RapGenius had the Google penalty a lot of folks were ranting about one of the founders and his bad behavior. Is this the same guy?

Yeah. He has blamed some of his behavior on a brain tumor:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507360/Rap-Genius-M...

Can someone tell me why this isn't a bigger part of the story? Brain tumor and brain surgery can both severely alter behavior. He could be a totally different person if it wasn't for his fucking brain cancer.

I have nothing but pity and compassion for him after learning that, if it is in fact true.

At the same time, if he can't contain his impulses, he probably shouldn't be helping run a company.

I do have a lot of sympathy for him as well, I did not know this. Agree with the commenter below, he shouldn't be the face of the company. If he does have intrinsic value to the company perhaps he should just do what he does best (code, design, etc) but definitely not anything PR related.

> Mahbod is the most brilliant community creator we've seen since Caterina Fake's heyday at Flickr.

-Marc Andreessen

http://news.rapgenius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-andreessen-hor...

Was Marc wrong, or is Moghadam just creating the wrong kind of community?

This comment is crass and tasteless. I guess some people never really get out of the middle school locker room.

But firing somebody over this? That's totally an overreaction. People may be outraged now, but in a month nobody will even remember this happened.

Almost everyone is guilty of black humor.

I have no inside knowledge of any of the people involved but from the looks of it I'm guessing they've been wanting to get rid of him for while and decided that this was the excuse they needed.

Exactly. I've a feeling he was already on his way out, but there wasn't a clear path to do so.

This is more-or-less a duplicate of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7801028

Ok, we'll weight this one off the front page, but not bury it as a dupe completely.

The other discussion seems a little more substantive. (Edit: now having scrolled through both, I don't know about that.)

I hate that we're still talking about this, but this is vastly different than the Eich incident. In Eich's case, what he did happened 6 years ago, and with no intention of making it public. In this case, he's openly telling juvenille jokes in an environment with a hightened intolerance to this kind of rhetoric and behavior.

After enough of these cases happen, it just gets to the point where if you don't realize the need to censor yourself, then you are not a very smart person. I, for one, am encrypting all of my communication from here out, and only telling tasteless jokes with close, trusted friends. It's sad, but you have to ask yourself if it's more important to run a major company, or have the freedom to tell tasteless jokes. One of the reasons why running a startup sounds less attractive to me by the week.

> "I hate that we're still talking about this..."

Well me too, but I hate it because people are still shits to each other, and we need to keep talking about it so that we're not sending the message that it's ok to be shits to each other.

Yeah, you probably should only tell tasteless jokes with close, trusted friends. I don't mean "as a CEO", I mean, in general, because your tasteless jokes are probably making people feel shitty, and you might as well restrict that as much as possible.

> "if you don't realize the need to censor yourself, then you are not a very smart person"

Or you're not that interested in being a good person.

I see no problem in exchanging harmless humor between two friends in the context of a long history of friendship and understanding that no party has any ill will towards each other or the outside world.

I don't believe it's any of your business what I talk about with my friends in the privacy of my home. In fact, I find your attitude ignorant, dangerous and a little scary.

I'm not saying the Rapgenius guy's joke was any funny or appropriate it at all. It honestly didn't seem that funny to me. But I don't think "making bad jokes in private" and "being a good person" correlate very well. There are other things I prioritize, like doing actual good.

While I have no particular comment on the Rapgenius case, I think starting a startup in general gives you much more freedom to express your opinion (tasteless or otherwise). Generally, you can say much more than you could working in the corporate world and you will only be punished by the market if it was so extreme that your vendors or customers would actively boycott you, which is a pretty high (or maybe low) bar.

I don't understand why tasteless jokes are so important to you. I would much rather eat a nice sandwich or go for a hike, or tell a joke that makes light of some bullshit. Tasteless jokes are about just sort of reifying bullshit. I don't understand why people want so badly for that to be a key part of their professional lives, let alone their personal lives.

There are other jokes. There are other people to date. There are other experiences in the world. Why cling to these few? Especially when other people are straight up telling you it's harming them.

Terrible comment, but for an industry built on fringe ideas and people it seems the guillotine of public or consensus opinion seems to act quicker and quick with extreme finality. I don't endorse what he said, and agree that he has down some clown'ish things in the past, but the 98% perfect of the non-offensive stuff he does gave Rap Genius a brand in a hyper competitive space and helped establish a brand.

I don't know much about the internal situation at RG and can only imagine he was on thin ice if he was cut so fast, but this trend of public hanging really doesnt give much confidence in unpopular ideas being discussed in public forums.

"My guess: his sister is smokin' hot" is not really "discussing an idea".

Plus it's a private company. They don't owe you or anybody tenure.

This was childish, offensive annotations on a murderer's manifesto days after he killed several people.

I'm sure we'd all enjoy discussing great ideas, but this was neither great nor an idea.

Honestly, the only thing a murderer's manifesto deserves is to be laughed at.

I agree, but I think it's just part of the beast. Investors don't want garbage like this (clear lapses in judgment that have little to do with the business itself) affecting their prospects of a return, and quiet discipline allows the Gawker/Tumblr/Reddit/Twitter/blog complex to spiral out of control in a positive feedback loop of outrage and speculation.

And while you say Moghadam has been 98% perfect, that doesn't really change the fact that the other 2% of his behavior would have had him instantly fired multiple times over in any other setting. I think his removal will allow Rap Genius to clean up its image a bit.

He has had a pattern of this stuff and I can;t really think of another way they could have done it, but all of these stories are starting to read like TMZ.

I'm not a Rap Genius user, so I may misunderstand their mission, but that text does not belong on a sincere literary analysis site, at the very least, so soon after the incident.

Bummer, I generally liked Mahbod's eccentric tomfoolery. He also was extremely passionate about RG (and poetry genius & news genius).

Second this. "Passion" is most certainly the right word, and I'd be lying if I said his relentless dedication to the brand didn't inspire me in other ways.

original statement in case anyone's interested: http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-a-statement-about-mahbods-an...

Well, it was only a matter of time with this guy.

Startup founders are like samurai: quicks to fall upon their swords (or be pushed on them).

Relevant: http://valleywag.gawker.com/rap-genius-frontman-blames-brain... (2013)

I'm especially liking the title's wording.

This seems like quite the overreaction. Why wouldn't an apology suffice?

The co-founder of a company uses his own company's service to display his misogyny and mock a recent tragedy. He should be lucky the let him 'resign' and didn't very publicly fire him.

I assume this is cofounder privilege. If one of my employees got my business this kind of bad press, I'd lead him/her out by the ear immediately.

This was just the latest of many incidents involving Mahbod. Google his name and you will see why he was fired/resigned.

A highly visible man in tech praised the writings of a mass murderer. The writings in question encouraged and led to violence against women through the viewpoint that women should pay attention to men and given men what they want all the time, along with a barrage of woman hating comments. This problem of entitlement and misogyny from societal influences is also well known, and is pervasive, in tech. Mahbod praised the writings of someone who represents problems in society that lead to violence against women. He threw in his own misogynistic comments for good measure. He's not only encouraging dangerous behavior, but adding to it. Women, both in technology and outside of it, feel a real danger because of comments like these. No amount of apologizing would have sufficed here to keep his job.

I was personally disappointed that he was allowed to resign, as that's not sending the right message, which would be "this is a real problem, we acknowledge it, and we won't tolerate behavior leading to violence of women." The firing is more appropriate. However, when you have someone like that leading a company, chances are it's already worked its way into the culture. I never had a reason to use this service before, but now I have a reason to actively avoid it.

> A highly visible man in tech praised the writings of a mass murderer.

Really? The snippet they showed looked like he was mocking the mass murderer. Is there a link to a copy of what was written?

> This problem of entitlement and misogyny from societal influences is also well known, and is pervasive, in tech.

I think that's a pretty bold statement. Eliot Rodger had much more going on than simple misogyny, his writing depict an insane amount of narcissism. It seems like you're trying to equate his attitude with whatever problems the tech industry/culture has, but come on, the problems of the industry are clearly different than this guy's severe mental issues...

What would you expect from something rap related? When over half of all rap songs contain inappropriate comments and defamation of women? Why is anyone surprised here? do you think that people who write and analyze these rap lyrics should be admired?

Rap is the most misogynistic genre in the history of music, it is not surprising at all that a rap enthusiast would share the views of the artists whose music he listens to.

Classic racism.

Is rap really more misogynistic than rock? Or is it perceived as such for obvious reasons.

Yes, it is more misogynistic than rock.

Where does zenbowman mention race? His comment had nothing to do with it. Your assumption that rappers are all of one race and that it is perceived as misoginistic 'for obvious reasons' on other hand scream racist.

Rap very obviously was created by and is to this day dominated by black people. Saying so is not racist.

And zenbowman's comment can be racist without mentioning race. I might be upset because the U.S. has a black president, and say "our political system has gone to hell!" and that would be a racist statement even if I didn't explicitly spell out that my reason for thinking so was the existence of a black president.

Popular rock could be crude (on a level with "Baby Got Back" or whatever), but it was rarely degrading in the way that a whole lot of rap is.

I don't think that's an inherent quality of the genre, though. But it is a fact of many of the popular artists.

I really don't think this has anything to do with racism. There are rappers from every race probably.

Rap is misogynistic, no doubt. Sure it has some positive sides to it (protest) but most rap today is not about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny_in_hip_hop_culture

Topic has its own wikipedia entry...with 71 footnotes.

Edit: Sample

Misogyny is prevalent in hip hop culture.[38] Overt misogyny in rap music emerged in the late 1980s, and has since then been a feature of the music of numerous hip hop artists.[2] A survey of adolescents showed that 66% of black girls and 57% of black boys believe that rap music videos portray black women in "bad and offensive ways".[39] Gangsta rap, the most commercially successful subgenre of hip hop,[40] has been particularly criticized and associated with misogyny.[7][41]

Even if this subject was "simply debatable", there is at least a prima-facie case that it should not be disissed out of hand. Nor in such a careless manner.

Okay, I think the grandparent post was a little off-base trying to lay blame at rap music, but I think he's talking about the pure surface-level content of the lyrics.

I mean, the rock music scene has problems with treatment of women - both in the fandom and the bands themselves - and if you start going back to the heydey of rock music you find utterly horrifying actions, but if you're talking about pure lyrical content? It's hard to say that any genre comes close to the proliferation of mysogyny in mainstream hip-hop.

Yes, yes it is. There's simply no comparison.

http://rapgenius.com/Dr-dre-bitches-aint-shit-lyrics "Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks / Lick on these nuts and suck the dick / Get's the fuck out after you're done / And I hops in my ride to make a quick run."

This is pretty tame by today's rap standards where rape and violence are glorified. Don't excuse the violence by claiming that it is racist to point out the obvious truth.

For the record, Afrocentric rap is much less misogynistic than gangsta rap, which is relatively race-neutral.

No, not really. Saying rap is misogynistic is an overgeneralization. It really depends on the subgenre which rap has many of. In the case of misogyny, it's primarily contained within the small gangsta rap subgenre, which has almost completely died out.

The "Gangsta rap" subgenre was heavily misogynistic, but as you say, it has completely died out. Most rap these days is about how rich the rapper is (Jay Z) or about racism (Kanye).

NOT ALL RAP

YES ALL INDIE POP

Partially agree, but you still have rap/hip-hop club-bangers with misogynistic undertones that hit the mainstream every so often by the likes of Weezy, Lil' John, Flo' Rida, A$AP, Snoop, etc.

Eminem has "songs" about literally kidnapping and murdering women. Lil Wayne and Drake have a song called "Bitches Love me." Misogyny in rap isn't "primarily contained" within a subgenre of the past.

Almost completely died out? Have you heard Kanye's new album?

Yeezus is nowhere even near early 2000's gangsta rap, sonically or lyrically.

Compare this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc0zKB88XPM

To this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--824JnSx7U

Ha. One of the faces of rap music (Dr. Dre) started in a gangsta rap group (NWA) and featured misogynistic lyrics in both his group and solo career. And, according to sources, is about to become an executive at the largest technology company in the world.

If you honestly think misogyny–or, at a minimum, objectification of women–isn't easy to find in modern rap genres, I'd say you're seriously misinformed or delusional.

Eminem has the #3 album on iTunes right now. Here's one lyrical excerpt[0]:

Snatch the bitch out her car through the window, she screamin’ / I body slam her onto the cement, until the concrete gave and created a sinkhole / Bury this stink ho in it, then paid to have the street re-paved.

[0] http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/eminem-hip-hop-we-shouldn...

Speaking of Dr. Dre and misogyny... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dee_Barnes#Dr._Dre_incident

[Dr. Dre] picked her up by her hair and "began slamming her head and the right side of her body repeatedly against a brick wall near the stairway" as his bodyguard held off the crowd with a gun. After Dre tried to throw her down the stairs and failed, he began kicking her in the ribs and hands. She escaped and ran into the women's rest room. Dre followed her and "grabbed her from behind by the hair again and proceeded to punch her in the back of the head."

N.W.A.'s MC Ren later said "bitch deserved it", and Eazy-E "yeah, bitch had it coming." As Dr. Dre explained the incident, "People talk all this shit, but you know, somebody fuck with me, I'm gonna fuck with them. I just did it, you know. Ain't nothing you can do now by talking about it. Besides, it ain't no big thing-- I just threw her through a door."

It seems likely that he would have done the same to a male in the same situation, so I fail to see how that relates to misogyny rather than a general culture of violence.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I also avoid books by Thomas Harris because they glorify cannibalism.

Gangsta rap has been dying out, but other genres are ebbing and flowing all the time.

Drill [1] for instance, is without a doubt more violent, misogynistic, and 'real' than any gangsta rap ever before.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill_(music_genre)

Orchestral music over the years has probably been worse.

There are plenty of celebrated female rappers, whereas Last Night Of The Proms had their first ever female conductor only last year and they've been going since 1895.

There's a world of difference between patriarchy and misogyny.

As far as I can tell the main difference between a patriarch and a misogynist, is that with a patriarch the women haven't successfully rebelled yet.

Patriarchy is a system wherein women are not predominant.

Misogyny is a system wherein women are subject to mistreatment.

Note that I am not advocating either system, and am an ardent feminist.

Misogyny isn't a system and patriarchies don't persist for long without misogyny, for fairly obvious reasons.

I don't believe that is accurate. There are plenty of patriarchal societies where women have high status and are not subject to mistreatment or violence, but no political or economic control.

Name three.

cite the source

http://misogynisticlyricsthatarentrap.tumblr.com/

Since he was not claiming that only rap contains misogynistic lyrics, I am not sure what your point is.

That comment isn't even offensive. People get offended way too easily.

Calling that offensive is a real stretch, IMO.

I am fascinated that it warranted a firin'

Can you explain why you think that it's a stretch to call that offensive?

I guess I would describe it as insensitive and unconstructive (to the service and the document in general)

It is definitely insensitive, and it is clearly not constructive.

I dont think that insensitive is the same thing as offensive?

I must admit, I am completely failing to understand the apparent outrage.

I keep feeling like I am missing something, would anyone be willing to explain it while they downvote me?

His being fired isn't necessarily in response to outrage. The current CEO explained it pretty well: that behavior wouldn't be tolerated by a community member (moderator would remove it), and if a moderator made the comment, they would be removed as a moderator. At the co-founder level, breaking community standards (and probably other issues in the past) carry higher consequences.

The community standards of Rep Genius aren't necessarily the standards of any other community, though clearly there were members of the public who found the comments to be insensitive and out of line, their desire to call this out and the large response could be called outrage, but it's probably more appropriate to call it widespread disappointment.

One could just go to the dictionary definition of outrage though: arouse fierce anger, shock or indignation. or violate or infringe flagrantly (a principle, law, etc.). In this case, the community standards of Rap Genius or even just the standards of the general public.

I would say it meets both definitions, 1) it aroused anger and shock, in particular because it was done by someone with such visibility and done in such an insensitive way so close to the time of the actual event (this is something that is often important to consider, rage is proportional to closeness of the event, is that OK? I don't get to decide that.) 2) He infringed, and flagrantly, again, because of his visible position, and the infringement, again, is one of a community standard, which isn't necessarily defined in black and white.

edit: I didn't downvote you in this thread, at the root or otherwise, and I hope that other HNers do the same, civilized discussion is the only way that these kinds of issues can be (if possible) understood. There is no universal standard for human behavior, so there will always be disparate opinions and views.

My favorite twist on the Golden Rule: Do not do unto others as you would have done unto yourself; You may have different tastes. Do unto others as they would have done unto themselves.

I can only say that this is a fitting response. From the farce of Men's Rights, PUA & brah culture to general misogyny, I'm getting a little tired of many of the youth of my gender. Has anyone seen any studies on why we're seeing this surge of ignorance?

Yeah, just look in the Greek and Roman classics sections of your local university library.

I'm sorry, I don't understand your meaning.

Young people being assholes isn't exclusive to this generation, it's just nowadays we are so connected you can see & hear them a lot more.

We aren't special, it's been happening for millennia.

It's not an unreasonable point, but I feel like this is different. Either way, we'll have to see how this turns out.

Well one person's surge of ignorance is another person's surge of exaggerating ignorance. Perhaps you should ask the question "Has anyone seen any studies on whether there really is a surge of <something>"

My source, a leading mens rights site. http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/government-tyranny/gain...

Your source was for a surge in men's rights activism, not ignorance. Perhaps the surge in ignorance that you're seeing is your own biased opinion on the matter?

No, I've read the propaganda, it's illogical at best. Just seems to be a surge in butthurt little boys running around.

Wow, "little boys"? "Butthurt"? Sounds like you are really biased on the matter, and I'd suggest you don't flaunt it as anything remotely resembling "logical".

Wiser men than I will choose to not name-call, though I live to no such standard. If you are a male and feel your rights are being impinged, you're as much of a loser as you are delusional. Get your head out of your ass and stop being a little bitch.

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