> After some back and forth, Ella blocked this person, who then took to News Genius to annotate the article, noting it may be "punching down a little bit here." The editor of News Genius joined in with snarky and hostile comments. Despite having blocked both individuals on Twitter, they linked to Ella's tweets, which is potentially a violation of Twitter's terms of service, but certainly indicates a violation of agency when, say, a political figure isn't involved or some other newsworthy person.
My take:
If Genius wants to succeed in the newspace, its moderators and annotators will need to collaborate and communicate more effectively with the authors of articles.
This debacle reminds me of Yelp Reviews: my colleague who worked there said that Yelp positioned itself early on as neutral and as hands-off as possible, trusting that the community[1] would average out any shadiness or extreme reviews. What actually happened is the small business owners who didn't understand Yelp or who found certain reviews to be very unfair were not engaged by Yelp. Feeling left out, these business owners thought themselves without recourse on the Yelp platform, so they turned to other avenues, like lawsuits and the public space, e.g. the theory that Yelp promotes negative reviews if you don't pay them[2].
Building software that can create value automatically, without constant human intervention, is the lynchpin for a software startup.
Most if not all software problems, however, require a delicate, and perhaps dedicated, human touch. A startup can't simply fall back on the claim that it's just a "facilitator" for a transaction. Users aren't dumb: "facilitator" conveys being a platform minus responsibility, and they will take that negative message to heart.
[1] Sometimes, I feel like you can regex replace "Community" with "mass of users who will do our QA for us and/or fill in the customer support/social problems of our software."
[2] I don't fully know yet if the more extreme claims are true; I have no doubt that at least some Yelp employees felt that corners should be cut in pursuit of growth.
That's an interesting point, though I do wonder whether it's really reasonable to care about whether the author wants their images to be discussed or annotated. Is there a huge difference between doing this and doing the same thing on a site like Reddit or Hacker News? I'm sure quite a few people on these aggregators aren't on good terms with the authors of the articles, or are even banned from those source sites.
I guess you could say Reddit comments don't appear on other sites when you browse to them, but you can get extensions that show them instead of a site's original comments:
And linking to Twitter posts you're blocked from seeing being against the rules? That seems excessive, given how many news sites and articles will link to tweet by people with a hair trigger temper and a very low tolerance for criticism. Should all these sites now have their accounts banned from Twitter?
I see your points, but I'm not sure how something like this is particularly different from commenting about a site on an aggregator or third party blog or discussion forum. The site staff at News Genius getting involved might cross the line (I'd hope the people behind a 'service' like this would stay out of any drama), but you can't stop people discussing your work or actions on third party sites.
The difference here is that Genius overlays its annotations on top of the main article. From a design, and even a business POV, this means the content of Genius and the news website are "merged", i.e. not clearly separated. Disqus Comment Threads can easily be hidden or shown and segmented from the text of an article. Reddit plugins like the one you mentioned are installed by the user's choice.
News Genius however, has aspirations of being your go to site for reading the news. So this adds an additional bar for Genius to clear (i.e. make it work well without pissing people off) than your normal aggregator.
Never-minding the substance of the original article, observe how News Genius says "We’re annotating this not just to discuss Garner’s career and apparent acquiescence to the “minivan majority” but to analyze the way movie stars in general appeal to particular demographics and what that says about society." and then see the annotaters descend into snarkiness and children's fare.
If I was interested in the subject matter, I know which version I would read, and which version I would warn others against reading.
OK, thought experiment: What if you hold two browser windows open, one window to a blog article and another window to an HN / Reddit / forum thread discussing the article. Would the author of this article give you the same level of ire they apply to Genius in this article?
What if you have a program that helps you do the two-window trick, positioning and sizing the windows automatically?
What if you modify the program to hide the URL bar on one of the windows, making it a minimal frame?
What if instead of doing the same UI function at the OS level, you write it at the browser level in a plugin or some custom browser logic?
What if instead of doing it in a browser plugin, you make a website that does the same function so the user doesn't have to go through the hassle of installing a plugin?
At what point do you cross the line from "that's clearly OK" to "you're mis-appropriating the site publisher's content"?
I see this as simply an alternative UI that gives the user more control over how articles, and discussion about those articles, utilize their screen real estate.
Site owners can't moderate commentary on their articles? They can't moderate Reddit or HN threads about their articles today, and nobody seems to be up in arms over that.
Completely unmoderated commentary becoming a haven for the worst sorts of people trolling in all sorts of ways, illegal activities, etc.? If you run this UI, you're opting into a community that has whatever level of moderation it has -- if it's moderated lightly or not at all, users will likely soon be accosted by something they offensive, and make an appropriate decision about whether this community is right for them.
This isn't the sort of thing I would use, but it seems mildly innovative and relatively benign (or at least not any more offensive than any other social networking startup that underestimates the moderation burdens of running a large online community).
I take it there is a business idea in there for Genius to pursue this. Extensions that stick ads on other people's web sites are one of the most common form of malware. That's a line they can not (but will be tempted to) cross.
What makes business sense for them narrows what they can do more than what is legal. This idea sounds conspicuously like something that's been tried over and over again and they will need the support of authors to make their outcome any different from those before.
The fallacy is the idea that everyone who reads a news article should discuss it in the same forum. That just results in a big cesspool. It makes far more sense for each community to discuss a news article in its own forum (as we do on Hacker News).
The tool actually comes in three different forms: a Disqus-like Javascript library, a Chrome Extension, and the proxy server the article mentions. In that context, the proxy server sounds much less like "We're sticking your content in our site" than a clever way to imitate the Chrome Extension with a service.
They seem to be running the service on Digital Ocean. At least one of their proxies are located at 107.170.156.120 and uses a most-useless user agent of "Go 1.1 package http"
if you go via the genius.it prefix it proxies via AWS and doesn't set a useragent, so it is tricky to block. It also doesn't respect robots.txt
So I made a little bit of js to redirect back to the origin site for people who don't want that view:
I always thought this was fascinating and makes me think of the implications of happenstance. A company called Genius whose first domain had the word rape in it, which was promoted by a poker player who once created his own personal TV commercial and ran it via Google TV ads-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocekqhrmPNo
But give them $20 million and say they are pioneers in a general space that's decades old, and suddenly Genius is pioneering annotations and redefining fair use.
> I always thought this was fascinating and makes me think of the implications of happenstance. A company called Genius whose first domain had the word rape in it, which was promoted by a poker player who once created his own personal TV commercial and ran it via Google TV ads- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocekqhrmPNo
So what?
> But give them $20 million and say they are pioneers in a general space that's decades old, and suddenly Genius is pioneering annotations and redefining fair use.
$20million came after they got traction. Sure, maybe some of the founders are annoying characters, but that has nothing to do with their business. They built a popular website, people came, they promoted well. More people came. Investors got interested because of their traction. So they invested. Now they're doing better. I don't see anything wrong with this story. You just sound jealous man.
Well, it's a commonplace that complaining about what happens on the Internet is useless, and typically counterproductive. So hey, "fair use". But as Glenn Fleishman notes, fair use tends to get tested in court.
But whatever. For me, it's mostly about pigs and mud ;)
https://ellacydawson.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/how-news-geniu...
Interesting snippet:
> After some back and forth, Ella blocked this person, who then took to News Genius to annotate the article, noting it may be "punching down a little bit here." The editor of News Genius joined in with snarky and hostile comments. Despite having blocked both individuals on Twitter, they linked to Ella's tweets, which is potentially a violation of Twitter's terms of service, but certainly indicates a violation of agency when, say, a political figure isn't involved or some other newsworthy person.
My take:
If Genius wants to succeed in the newspace, its moderators and annotators will need to collaborate and communicate more effectively with the authors of articles.
This debacle reminds me of Yelp Reviews: my colleague who worked there said that Yelp positioned itself early on as neutral and as hands-off as possible, trusting that the community[1] would average out any shadiness or extreme reviews. What actually happened is the small business owners who didn't understand Yelp or who found certain reviews to be very unfair were not engaged by Yelp. Feeling left out, these business owners thought themselves without recourse on the Yelp platform, so they turned to other avenues, like lawsuits and the public space, e.g. the theory that Yelp promotes negative reviews if you don't pay them[2].
Building software that can create value automatically, without constant human intervention, is the lynchpin for a software startup.
Most if not all software problems, however, require a delicate, and perhaps dedicated, human touch. A startup can't simply fall back on the claim that it's just a "facilitator" for a transaction. Users aren't dumb: "facilitator" conveys being a platform minus responsibility, and they will take that negative message to heart.
[1] Sometimes, I feel like you can regex replace "Community" with "mass of users who will do our QA for us and/or fill in the customer support/social problems of our software."
[2] I don't fully know yet if the more extreme claims are true; I have no doubt that at least some Yelp employees felt that corners should be cut in pursuit of growth.