
News Genius Picks Up Again Where Failures Left Off - danso
http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2016/3/25/citation-appropriation-and-fair-use
======
hitekker
Original article here:

[https://ellacydawson.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/how-news-
geniu...](https://ellacydawson.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/how-news-genius-
silences-writers/)

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.

~~~
CM30
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:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/reddit-on-
you...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/reddit-on-youtube/)

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.

~~~
hitekker
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.

Compare this: www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/jennifer-garner-minivan-
majority

Versus this:
[http://genius.com/8863764/www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen...](http://genius.com/8863764/www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/jennifer-
garner-minivan-majority#.kpxXnRPGD)

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.

------
csense
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).

~~~
xorcist
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.

------
skybrian
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).

------
mshenfield
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.

~~~
look_lookatme
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"

------
notthegov
Rap Genius was originally called RapExegesis.com. Then they made a public post
asking for better company name ideas-
[http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19/high-stakes-pl-nl/ot-
he...](http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19/high-stakes-pl-nl/ot-help-me-pick-
name-my-rap-website-614162/)

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](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.

~~~
galistoca
> 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](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.

~~~
mirimir
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 ;)

