I love the artist-provided annotations when they're available, but they really need to take a good look at the low quality of the vast majority of their user-generated content. It doesn't help that so much of it is pure speculation, highly subjective, or plain wrong.
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by acjohnson55 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:12PM
(#28555947)
Agreed. The quality is spotty and just not great, on average. Every now and then, I hear a lyric and go check Genius, but most of the time, there are no annotations at all for a given lyric. No disrespect, it's extremely challenging to get quality right for user-generated content, and even if they had, it's not obvious to me that it would have been a great business.
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by colecut on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:55PM
(#28559372)
I'd be happy if they just consistently got the lyrics right.
It's amazing how all lyrics websites have the same incorrect lyrics to so many songs. It's like a microcosm of how the whole world works.
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by nathanvanfleet on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:22PM
(#28553738)
That's funny because I saw that too and they came off as charlatans to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pLRa-ZiTg "RapGenius-dot-com is white devil sophistry. Urban Dictionary is for demons with college degrees. Google ad technology is artificial karma, B. Rick Ross on the radio at the pharmacy."
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by rrbrambley on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:47PM
(#28554093)
Awwww, I forgot about this album. Gonna spend all day relistening.
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by Graziano_M on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:42AM
(#28552444)
Check out genius on a mobile browser. It's literally unusable. Rapgenius was great but its decline was very obvious.
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by athorax on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:33AM
(#28553118)
Seems to work fine for me. What exactly makes it unusable?
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by Graziano_M on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:39AM
(#28553197)
You're right. It seems to have been fixed. Mere weeks ago when you clicked on a line to see its annotation you literally could not see it behind all the ads, as in it was impossible to get to the annotation.
Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M
by johnmaguire on Thursday September 16, 2021 @01:06PM
(#28554329)
Just wanted to say you're not crazy - the ads have gotten bad even on the desktop. Ad blockers obviously solve the problem, but the UX is terrible if you're in the majority that doesn't use one.
I took this as an early sign of the website's eventual demise.
It's still broken for me half the time. And ad-blocker does help.
It's the interpretations that will be difficult to replicate elsewhere, I used it a lot studying literature. It's difficult to extract money and gather a large audience/contributors from something like that.
I’ve been a fan of Genius since they were featured in an episode of Small Empires[1], a series by the Verge presented by Alexis Ohanian (an investor in then-named Rap Genius), eight years ago. While I’m glad they expanded beyond annotations for rap music into other genres, it doesn’t surprise me that they struggled to expand beyond music.
Reading the article, I wonder if layoffs mean they’ll stop producing their artist Lyrics & Meaning video series on YouTube[2]. I hope not because it’s a unique angle. Either way I’m sure the website will live on, I just hope the new owners don’t destroy it through monetization.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T92-MTJYmFc [2]: https://www.youtube.com/rapgenius