[dphnx]

This is sad news, genius.com is still my go-to website for lyrics and interpretations.

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

[gfaure]

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.

[acjohnson55]

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.

[colecut]

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.

[nathanvanfleet]

That's funny because I saw that too and they came off as charlatans to me.

[Lammy]

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."

[rrbrambley]

Awwww, I forgot about this album. Gonna spend all day relistening.

[Graziano_M]

Check out genius on a mobile browser. It's literally unusable. Rapgenius was great but its decline was very obvious.

[athorax]

Seems to work fine for me. What exactly makes it unusable?

[Graziano_M]

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.

[radlad]

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.

[ratww]

It's still broken for me half the time. And ad-blocker does help.

[runj__]

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.

[EvRev]

My guess is that the content will be generated and produced in an automated manner. Or the new company will bring in their own production team for content.