The premise behind their big investment round was that they would take their annotation tech to the rest of the web.
The only place I've personally seen it used is for people to snarkily mark-up political op-eds.
It's a cool vision -- I wish I could see, for a given article, the best inline comments or just those of people I find credible -- but it doesn't seem scalable to the wide web, as there just aren't enough people willing to put smart commentary on every article instead of just firing off a few tweets, commenting on the article at an aggregator like reddit (which gives a signal of which things are worth commenting on, and a built-in audience for the commentary) or writing their own post.
There's also the problem that adding the annotation layer on top of the original article can impact performance. I've seen some examples of people using Genius annotation in exactly the segment you mention (political/journalistic), and in every case the annotated version was slow to load and sluggish to browse through. It got to the point where seeing the mention of annotation was enough to kill my interest in clicking through to read more.
"Annotating other people's content" is one of those evergreen ideas that keeps popping up (here's an article I wrote about a startup doing the same thing, way back in 1999: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2006/12/third_voice_wro/), but every time someone tries it implementation issues seem to kill them.
We worked as an embeddable product like Genius as well as a browser extension, and we had similar issues: client-side performance, "how do you anchor things to a page that's probably going to change out from under you," and "how do you scale to serve the combined traffic of every site you serve comments on without spending more money than you make?"
I think web annotation is a good idea but probably needs to live in a moneymaking niche for a while before it can grow to the broader web. Lyrics were an interesting start for Genius but it's tough to make money there. Law, news, internal research, etc. seem like interesting starts to me.
Fermat's Library does annotations for important academic papers. The papers are sent to subscribers at a good cadence - once per week. I enjoy reading them. Not sure if it could ever be a monetizable business, and I doubt the team running it is considering charging.
Not to stray too far off topic, but that Disqus story is ridiculous. What do they do that 2 people charging $10/mo couldn't? "Looks like the freemium thing isn't supporting our fancy office, let's try to sell some data out the back door."
I mean, seriously:
But more recently Disqus has been trying out other things to expand its business. That has included a growing programmatic ad platform based around sponsored comments, which debuted in 2014 (it’s this that makes the company money, as Disqus takes a share on ads that run through its otherwise free platform). And earlier this year, Disqus opted for another traffic gain as it relaunched of its own site as a central repository not just of content and comments from sites that you follow and comment on with a Disqus ID; but also of standalone comment threads that existed independent of these, Reddit-style.
This seems like a lot of digging of one's own grave. Apologies if all of this ground was covered in Dec, but it looks like the story never made it to HN.
I wonder if a first use case could focus in on something like https://archive.org/web/, get people hooked somehow, then generalize it to future changes by pointing back at some snapshot maybe.
I just pulled my old dead-trees copy of the classic Fucked Companies book off the shelf to remind myself of the one I remembered dying in the first dotcom era:
Yep, Third Voice is the one I was writing about in '99.
What's interesting is that Genius seems to have run into the same brick wall Third Voice did: people who make Web sites really hate having randos mark them up. See, for instance, these two articles on Genius from last year:
The complaints in those pieces are exactly the same ones that people were making about Third Voice back in the '90s. Exactly the same. And Genius' defense ("But your blog is public!") is exactly the same too.
I feel like maybe there's just a fundamental issue of empathy here: the kind of person who launches an annotation startup can't understand the complicated emotions the kind of person who writes in public has about their writing. So they keep stepping on toes by barging in too strongly, instead of looping the content creators in early to get them on board (or at least figure out how to make an annotation product that doesn't offend their sensibilities too much).
The last paragraph in that kind of makes me cry a little inside. Apparently if I want to get a normal job at a tech company, I need to be able to implement R-star on a whiteboard under pressure, but if I want to be CEO all I had to do was invent chewy granola bars...
ReFrameIt and Me.Dium were also two annotation startups. It's something that people keep trying over and over again. While neat, I honestly don't expect it to ever catch on.
> The only place I've personally seen it used is for people to snarkily mark-up political op-eds.
And for news specifically, there are tools like Fiskkit [1], that offer tags that are used a lot in that context: logical fallacy, untrue/uncited statement, etc. Perhaps these ___domain-specific tools are the only things that will ever catch on (like Rap Genius originally did).
Fiskkit's tags are the way forward for political commentary, because they can educate people on the tools that politicians and writers use to persuade them. As for lyrics, it appears as though Genius never got away from rap. I've always found their lyric analysis to be very poor quality.
1. Have the "right kind" of founders, Ivy League, brash and exciting and magnets for press. Also have the "right kind" of company, lots of coders and claims of having an engineering culture.
2. Have a somewhat successful user generated content site.
3. Mutter some generalities about how we're "not just X man, we're like totally X for the entire internet"
I'm not a huge fan of the founders or the overall biz model (if there was one) but when they raised a bunch of money they did have pretty solid traction with users and that can sometimes be enough for VCs to take a gamble. $15m was entirely too much money. But that was a particularly frothy time. I don't think that deal would get done today.
They raised $56.8 million at a valuation of close to a billion dollars for a site that at the time was basically a lyrics site with not bad UI and SEO.
Not bad UI, but I wouldn't call the site good UI by any stretch. It loads fast and is simplistic, two things I appreciate, but it definitely lacks something. And whats with that logo?
Genius has a "broader mission" to "annotate the world"[0]. That was the pitch that led to a $15M investment from Andreessen Horowitz. This on top of meteoric growth in becoming one of the top lyrics sites on the internet.
"While Facebook’s mission may be to connect the world, Rap Genius' mission is to bring context and knowledge to those connections. Rap Genius is itself a kind of social network, but its a social network based around texts and discussions of texts."
I might sound snarky but it looks it's more important how you sell the idea to investors than to your actual customers. Not that I much care about, investors are the ones losing their money in the end.
Still don't understand how or what they showed about how are they going to make money, I do understand the "great vision".
Remembered that that the book Launch Pad chronicled them - then as Rap Genius - quite a bit. Here's what they said back then:
"This is what a lyrics site looks like now. You go, you get a big ringtone ad. This is terrible! Where can you find the lyrics?" [Lehman] then mocks the site, as the crowd laughs at the absurdity of an ad for breakfast cereal next to the lyrics of Lil' Wayne...
"We're basically going to dominate the lyrics space. We're going to kill MetroLyrics, kill all these sites. After that, all texts. Poetry. The Bible. Literature. Tax code."
Strangely, the other areas are mentioned in a blur, with no mention of what will actually be next after rap lyrics."
I actually like their product but wonder if they just haven't recovered from this: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no.... If they were higher up when a user searches Google for "lyrics" during their critical growth phase they might have had the growth to keep their engineering going strong. Kind of reminds me of Foursquare right now.
Anecdotally, despite the Google incident and their name change, they're still the place I look for lyrics having used them twice this week alone. That said, I haven't the faintest idea about their revenue strategies and how those might work for them, but I wish them well. I think they did the lyrics thing better than anyone previously and often find myself wondering why I can't have it integrated with, say, Google Music and such
> wondering why I can't have it integrated with, say, Google Music and such
It is integrated with Spotify although it seems to pop-up randomly for me. I've never figured out why some songs show info from Genius or how I'd get to it intentionally if I wanted to (but I admit I haven't really tried).
I think they came up with that whole explanation after the fact, as evidenced by the fact they never really followed through on building an actual system that could be used in the varied ways they described
It's still my go-to as well. I really appreciated the idea, but it just seemed to drown in a sea of lyrics sites, and the general fact that most people seem to be disinterested in spending nay real time on lyrics.
I don't think it has anything to do with their engineering. Essentially the global annotation product failed, so they doubled down on rap and turned into a media company. As an early fan of the product, I'm still not sure how to feel about all this, though admittedly you could see it coming even from the outside over the past 6-12 months.
It's always been a little confusing to me how annotation could be a defensible product. A large and active user base is, of course, inherently defensible, but the user base of people who will make animated GIFs to explain Jay-Z lyrics has very little to do with the user base you want to explain the AHCA.
I like the idea of annotation and I even sort of like Genius's implementation of annotation. There's a pretty decent annotation of Gatsby on the site. Virtually every line of The Waste Land has a good annotation there too. But, not to put too fine a point on it, this stuff all seems like, from a platform perspective, something Dustin Curtis could have built solo.
If you could turn the whole web into a vibrant, engaged, participatory community and do it all on your platform, then suddenly you're rivaling Facebook. That's a $100B business right there.
It's just that annotations, by themselves, fail to do that. Their VCs must've been betting either on some new killer feature that would come out, or that users would react to the existing annotation product differently than they did. For a VC, though, "could rival Facebook" is often more important than "has a small chance of doing so".
I don't think the userbases are really that fragmented. The popularity of meme annotations slowly faded away to more quality comments and official annotations from rappers, producers, etc. Personally, I annotated rap songs, tech news, as well as "boring" documents.
But the annotations community outside of rap songs didn't take off in the same way.
I think its because outside of rap there isnt many songs with the lyrical density and complexity required for anotations to work. Even most rap songs are very up front about what they are talking about.
Their only other major play is annotating things like scientific papers but I cant see the market for that being big enough to make money.
Scientific papers is actually the very first market I had in mind when Genius launched as at the time I was doing research and ramping up on image processing / computer vision literature. There'd be so much value in having annotations on research papers to speed up that process.
Google fucked them hard. But they kept their engineering going for many years afterwards, and their business model (from what I can tell) involved partnerships with media companies like newspapers, which are a channel for interactions that aren't mediated by Google.
I think Google fucked them hard just to prove a point.
99% of lyrics sites are utter trash littered with popups, redirects and extremely obnoxious ads. Genius was the first lyrics site I ever saw that broke that mold.
Sure, they also broke Google's arbitrary rules, but they had a better product that genuinely deserved to be at the top of the rankings. I still wince when I click on a link to any other lyrics site.
I worked for a pre-Genius lyrics service [1] with a website that also broke that mold, at least in my opinion. We didn't have very many ads, and the site design was simpler and far less spammy than most lyrics websites were at the time, probably because the website was just a hook to get people to install their mobile apps.
The lyrics licensing industry is absolutely brutal, and I will be pleasantly surprised if anyone that isn't owned by a music publisher is able to succeed in this market.
> It was simpler and far less spammy than most lyrics websites were at the time, probably because the website was just a hook to get people to install their mobile apps.
How long till the same thing happens to Pintrest who spam google image search results then don't follow through with the actual image and instead lock you off from all the content with a signup window.
Web annotation standards should not be a proprietary format, owned by a private company.
Not sure if this W3C spec[1] is in the right direction, but at least it's an open standard.
Personally, I liked the WebMention[2] model better (rel="webmention"), where you mark up HTML. But it would require someone to take up the banner and make it easy to distribute and deploy.
That first line is the reason something like this is doomed to fail. The second is that the people who would actually use annotations for something constructive are greatly outnumbered by people who will use it to post the same comment spam we see in regular comment sections. Without that being solved this is just another spam delivery vector.
I'd imagine you could start by whitelisting domains. This wouldn't help commercial sites but if you "followed" a ___domain it would be no worse than Twitter notifications.
If you have to start whitelisting participants, you have a very hard time creating a critical mass across the internet.
Annotation in a weird way is even harder than a "boil the ocean" problem; you have to have the exact right number of participants, across all the enormous complexity of the Internet, or at least, a very huge chunk of it. If you have nobody on some page, the annotation system is useless, and if you have thousands of people pounding away at the same page, it's pretty useless too. You have to hit this window of reliably having just the right number of users on a page, on an Internet that intrinsically tends towards power law page viewing, somehow across the entire Internet. After ~18 years of watching the space, I simply believe the entire vision is unsolvably flawed, especially in the presence of successful link aggregation and commentary sites.
It seems like something that should be constrained to social network circles. It might be useful to post graffiti on any site on the Internet - within my group of friends.
Unless your friends are very, very, very similarly minded, that falls under the "everywhere you go, nobody is there" class, and you quickly stop using it in favor of some sort of centralized comment stream like a chat channel or Facebook posts.
The power-law distribution of web pages wreaks havoc on almost any attempt to distribute people well here. Your solution basically would make it so the annotation works OK on only those pages that are on the high end of the local power law distribution, but that is probably fewer pages than you might think as you'd all have different long tails.
I don't think it's unsolvably flawed. It's just hard as hell. If you take a structured data approach to annotation and commenting, you can use analytics to weed the naturally-occurring power law distribution of comments down to just the best ideas on any particular sentence, for example.
Then you fail to activate one of the most important aspects of community building when people post comments, which is people feeling like they're participating and making a difference because other people respond to them. Take that engagement away and you're going to have a hard time building a user base.
The problem isn't that any given aspect of the annotation problem is unsolvable. The problem is that you can't solve them all at once to build a successful system.
Recall that I said I've been "watching this space" for 18 years now. That's no exaggeration; I was the first to hack Third Voice back in the day. It's not like people haven't been trying. Speculating about how it might work someday is really kind 10 or so years too late. In 1999, theorizing about how cool annotations might be was adequate. In 2017, a theory about how cool annotations might be needs to not just explain how they might be cool, but why all previous efforts have failed, and why yours might succeed. That's a much higher bar to leap now.
And one obvious solution is to trim away bits of the problem, but you end up in the local maximum of "link aggregation site with comments" pretty darned fast.
I know the guys who worked on the W3C spec. They worked their butts off. I'm hopeful they'll have some success. But my system (Fiskkit.com, if curious) can't consume W3C annotations because we have more narrowly constrained parameters to enable analytics. But maybe we'll be able to export in a standard readable format? We'll see. Too broke to build that right now! :-)
Let's not forget the elephant in the room: [Rap] Genius rose to popularity by flagrant copyright infringement. They were forced to settle with music publishers in 2014, after receiving a generous round of funding (in the millions). See https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius....
Around the same time they were pitching colleges for classroom use, but were embarrassingly unprepared to address the copyright problem. Their "platform" involved republishing texts to which they had no rights. They did not even have a good story about claims on student (author) contributions. Who owns the annotations? They had no coherent answer during a demo at my uni. We passed.
It is beyond me as to how smart investors threw money at such incompetence.
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly (IANAL) but that article left me thinking the mistake was signing the original deal with Sony. Does fair use actually cover what the platform did at at the time?
In my reading of the law they clearly broke fair use. According to the letter of the law, factors in consideration of fair use include:
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107)
Rap genius was/is a for profit corp and they reproduced the copyrighted work in full, on their own servers. I don't see how they could argue fair use. In addition, their use is arguably non transformative, in that they leave the original intact.
The writing was on the wall, Sony deal or not. It was just a question of copyright holders noticing/acting on the violation. The initial round with Anderssen Horowitz for 15 million in 2014 prompted swift response.
Were I a lawyer I would argue that they are covered under points (1) and (4). For (1), even though they aren't nonprofit, they aren't using the work directly to gain profit. Rather, they are using it as a base on which to annotate. For (4), I would argue that the primary market for lyrics is not the lyrics themselves, but instead productions of those lyrics in song form. This can be seen by the fact that any number of websites reproduce them at little cost.
I don't know if this is sufficient grounds to argue fair use, but it is clear that the case is not cut-and-dry.
The four factors are ALL considered in determination of fair use. You are not "covered" under any one of them. It is the opposite: violating any one of them can be used as basis for challenging fair use exemption.
The gold standard for fair use is academic citation. Genius use of the lyrics was clearly commercial (because it benefited financially and is a for profit organization). The terms "direct" or "indirect" are not in the language of the guidelines. In (4), it would be enough for copyright holders to show potential for future harm.
A strong case of fair use needs to clear each of the four factors. For example, just posting the lyrics online (without profit) violates (2) in that it is not transformative, (3) in that the work is reproduced in its entirety, and (4) in that it harms the "existing or future" market for the product.
By contrast, an academic citation, a sentence of a novel, for example, is non-commercial, transformative, partial, and non-damaging. Incidentally, things get more complicated with poetry---scholars working on short-form lyrical poetry often need to clear the rights for publishing their research. Poems are short, it is therefore difficult to avoid reproducing them in full, which violates (3). Courts prefer partial reproduction for fair use.
But if the effect of RapGenius's hosting of lyrics led to them being the first results for all searches of lyrics, whether the lyrics were significantly transformed or not, it could be argued that they are directly profiting from unfair use of those lyrics. Else, what would stop any site from copying and republishing any material wholesale and claiming that users come to the site to comment via Disqus?
Yes. Note that direct or indirect is not in the language of the guidelines. copyright.gov says:
"Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes: Courts look at how the party claiming fair use is using the copyrighted work, and are more likely to find that nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses are fair. "
If you enjoy Hip-Hop or any other lyrically dense music, Genius is absolutely the best place to dig deeper and enjoy it. But they spent a ton of time and effort to branch out to other genres, and to be honest, there is almost nothing gained there.
Followed them for a while because I do think their core competency had a lot of value (having a rap lyrics site with no pop up ads alone pretty much did that...)
Kind of a bummer that they raised at such a high valuation and repeatedly set their sights on scaling to areas with minimal chance of success.
Also always thought about how the need for annotations is probably a lot lower in other genres / types of text content. I rarely need an abridged Wikipedia-level explanation of who Donald Trump is, but these kinds of clues tend to be key in interpreting the wordplay of hip hop.
The site was always great; the business seemed over sold to investors when looking at internal resource investment.
They're frankly turning into a hip hop publication at this point, much to my dismay. I don't find their content very attractive beyond their core competency of verified artists.
It's not about the lyrics being deep almost no lyrics in any popular music are deep except in a im14andthisisdeep sense. It's usually about not understanding regional slang or inside jokes.
For example I really like grime but I haven't lived in England for over a decade so I have no clue what a lot of their references mean when I first hear them because I never hear them in my day to day. Genius helps with that and a lot of other cases.
Mainly related to web annotation: does anyone here use Hypothes.is? (its goal to do web annotation correctly, versus Genius' desire to do the same (eventually, right?))
climatefeedback.org is a good implementation of Hypothes.is They get scientists to check climate-related articles. Check them out and support them if you can. Good people doing good work.
Easy lesson here: don't raise a ton of money just because you can. The valuation that was set and the terms that come with it limit their exits by an inordinate degree, and I don't imagine for a second their plans required the amount of capital they raised.
Also, if you're an LP of a16z, don't let Horowitz waste $40m just because he wants to hang out with rappers.
I met several members of their engineering team in Jan 2015 in Brooklyn after their first dev meetup where Tom debuted global web annotations. Every engineer there was top notch. You could tell by how much attention they dedicated to very meta level stuff.
I never heard of Genius until I got into listening to Hamilton a few months ago. Its a great resource for getting historical explanations for the dense lyrics of the songs and even Miranda himself wrote a lot of the snippets. Its the only thing I've used Genius for so far.
I put some transliterations and metadata on Genius.com and I think it's the best lyric site on the internet. They just need to figure out how to stay alive and grow the catalogue further, test things which don't cost them millions of dollars to fail at.
They are the best lyrics site on the net, period. The annotations are... not always that great.
The annotations that journalists do on speeches can be super useful.
But in general... I'd like to have a portable system to annotate PDFs, textfiles, etc. Local files. Take notes and cross-link against multiple files & multiple notes.
I've been making notes sporadically for a decade about such a thing, with occasional bits of code that don't really solve the problem. Currently I'm playing with a neo4j backed proto-prototype. :: shrug ::
There is no way that Genius ever can, nor ever will, achieve their vision. This is a money pit funding overgrown children from day one, and nothing else. This is throwing money at an idea before it's proven, and trying to force an idea no one wants on people. It's an embarrassment of the valley.
I'm assuming "growth" meant meaningless users just writing comments, and it was pitched as DAUs convertible to profit. If my assumption is correct this sounds like fraud to me.
What contributed the most to kill their business is that now Google displays lyric results inline. Your are in great risk if Google can just replace your business by displaying it inline when people are searching.
This doesn't come as any surprise to me. Over the years, I haven't found Genius to be significantly better at annotating lyrics than any of it's competitors. Genius takes longer to load and doesn't provide any more value in its annotations than does azlyrics, youtube comments, facebook, reddit, or anywhere else discussions are occurring. A lot of the time, its annotations are just straight up wrong or embarrassingly shallow, and attracting actual artists to write about their own lyrics didn't excite me. Furthermore, the lyrics themselves are often wrong.
The reason I'm complaining about this isn't to be a wet blanket- I just can't believe this service got the amount of funding it did. If their musical annotations are so cringeworthy and poor, what made investors think they could annotate other websites so well that a $58.9 million dollar investment would produce any reasonable return?
Genius reminds me quite a lot of last.fm in terms of what kind of service it was and how well it has fared as time has progressed. Both were reasonable ideas to begin with, but is there any reason these ideas needed millions of dollars in funding to operate? I am really getting the impression that these tech VC's are just out of ideas and are consistently trying to monetize internet toys which in reality should remain small web services for dedicated user-developer types.
Perhaps Ben Horowitz was blinded by his own passion for rap music and relationships with artists themselves and knowing how much was left to be explored and explained... except perhaps most of the world often doesn't share that interest in depth or possess that depth to share in the first place.
I'm someone with a lot of passion for music (especially rap/hip-hop) and its interpretation, and I can't stand Genius. I think that it isn't that people lack the depth of Ben Horowitz, it's that Ben's vision for sharing and cultivating that depth in others isn't very good. Interactive browser line by line annotations are not a silver bullet for achieving rap nirvana.
> do they have competitors? Other lyrics sites look and feel like static html sites from the early 2000's
If I'm looking for song lyrics, and not some collaborative social information-exchange medium, then that's exactly what I want it to look like (and pretty much be.)
Genius is slow loading and slow scrolling and has bigger ad blocks than most lyrics sites. If I'm not specifically looking for annotations rather than mere lyrics, it's strictly worse Tha the competition.
Since when was annotating lyrics a competitive business?
Edit: Since I've been downvoted at least once, I want to clarify. I'm unsure what monetary value can be extracted from the ability to annotate third party websites, or in this case, specifically, lyrics. As others have mentioned, if I want lyrics, I typically just want the lyrics, as uncomplicated as possible. Perhaps I'm missing something.
I should have been more specific- I meant to refer to their competitors in the analysis of lyrics, not just annotation. For this purpose, I feel that Genius is overall quite poor and that there are much better discussion boards and services.
With regards to annotation specifically, songfacts and lyricsmode are competitors in that they support the same kind of annotation Genius does. In this sense, they are certainly competitors, though Genius has far more annotations and is winning the competition.
My main point about the failure of Genius is that it's Jedi mind tricked people into thinking annotation, and not just annotation in general but Genius' specific implementation of it, is the 'best' way to discover the 'objective' meaning of individual songs. There is no objective meaning and Genius' annotation feature is hardly as powerful as people give it credit for. Genius is just a discussion board with annotations enabled- another iteration of the many discussion boards which VC's have foolishly pumped tons of money into and not received a payout from.
I don't think having a more modern design could be classed as a unique selling point. Users often aren't that bothered from what I can tell, if you just want lyrics the fact that the site isn't hyper modern doesn't matter as long as the lyrics are accurate.
Its a testament to a site like ohhla.com . I think they've had one site design refresh since 2000, but I don't think there have ever been lyrics on genius that I didn't also find on ohhla.
Do semantic discussions actually occur on those places? My stomach turned with the idea of just sorting through a single page of what people have to say about lyrics.
Nobody else has anything like verified artist annotations.
Just because you can raise money doesn't mean you should. I find video extremely distracting on a daily basis and avoid it at all costs. You may not feel the same.
That's the sort of snarky dismissal we've been trying to cut back on here. There's nothing special about predicting the failure of a venture. That's like predicting normal weather, only in a cynical voice to make it sound contrarian. You will be right 99% of the time, and your cynicism will have its return on investment, a smug chortle. But this game is of no (intellectual) interest. If you could predict a tornado or an earthquake, that would be interesting.
Yeah, I'm not trying to say I am a genius (no pun) to predict them bombing. I just thought it was funny in context to have pmarca chime in on the topic. And props to him for actually engaging with snarky a-holes on internet forums.
(And my linked comment did contain a juxtaposition about a16z's purported investment strategy and their Genius investment, so I don't think the retroactive chiding is entirely called for.)
I don't mean to be a pill, yes it's fun to read pmarca's reply, and I appreciate your being a good sport. But I still think your comment deserved its chiding.
When a thing happens 99% of the time, its happening again doesn't mean there was any truth, or even any information, in your reasoning. You might just as easily have linked it to A16Z's cafeteria as their consumer strategy. Whether or not they have a cafeteria.
(I'm not assuming this startup has failed, of course; the point about snarky dismissals holds either way.)
"Nope. We don't do those. It's the real deal. One of the fastest growing consumer properties of all time with huge market opportunity." is not heckling.
That's true of so many things getting funded in SV today. And a bigger problem than SV wasting money is that these SV backed companies can cut off the air supply for more sustainable bootstrapped businesses in the same space.
I could actually see SV being an impediment to innovation by "salting the fields" in so many product categories with hugely overfunded companies that will eventually flame out.
This is exactly what I've been thinking, thanks for sharing. For example, I've been so angry at how bad YouTube has gotten as of late and I feel that it's dominance is getting in the way of creating a better video service. I would gladly pay $20 a month for a more customizable and ad-free service which respects its users. It was my favorite website from around 2008-2011 and it's since become a disaster.
As someone who was a full-time YouTuber - I agree. Monetization changes really hurt animators and anyone building high quality but short duration content.
Besides the obvious lack of advertisements, most my the improvements would come from resolving my main issue with YouTube, which is how aggressively the service directs you towards content with ads. I feel that this was not the case many years ago and that YouTube has actually gone backwards in terms of having a reasonable interface for navigating through the vast amount of information it hosts. I feel channels, suggested videos, subscriptions, searching, and even monetization were more user-friendly back in the early 10's.
The problem is that, as far as I know, YouTube has not been wholly profitable for Google at this point, so they've really been trying to squeeze all the money they can out of it, and I feel it's come at the expense of the service itself. I spend far less time on YouTube these days.
I would be much happier spending money directly on a service which treated its users as customers rather than the product.
As far as other features, I think it's naive to say that YouTube has every feature someone could want a video hosting service to have. I feel YouTube could improve quite a bit in plenty of areas, particularly in how people 'watch' music there.
Don't worry. When the macro cycle changes - it always does - big burn ventures won't find any water hoses handy and the lean bootstrappers will have their day again.
Oh man, when I first saw this I was actually going to ping you and ask to remove the "quietly" - I cannot stand this new clickbait term of choice! Thanks!
The only place I've personally seen it used is for people to snarkily mark-up political op-eds.
It's a cool vision -- I wish I could see, for a given article, the best inline comments or just those of people I find credible -- but it doesn't seem scalable to the wide web, as there just aren't enough people willing to put smart commentary on every article instead of just firing off a few tweets, commenting on the article at an aggregator like reddit (which gives a signal of which things are worth commenting on, and a built-in audience for the commentary) or writing their own post.