TechCrunch
10 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2013–2017
24:50 · 73K views · May 1, 2013
Rap Genius founders appear at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 for a joke-filled interview announcing News Genius, with little detail about what it is.
HN mostly cites it as an example of the founders' brash, unprofessional behavior, not as something to watch.
10 comments from Hacker News
Thanks for responding. I can't provide insight into the dislike for everybody, but I can speak for people like myself. University for me was an educational privilege and I honestly really went there just to learn. Social activities were a very distant third in terms of what I wanted out of school. Along the way I made many friends in the classes I took, people who were also there for similar reasons. We self-organized into study groups and helped each other with course selection etc. If we just wanted to hang out, we did that also. Quite a few of those people have stayed life-long friends. So the social-network aspects of fraternities always seemed kind of unimportant to me as I left college with a pretty robust social network. It's simply not an appealing pitch to join. I know there's stories of people who went to the same fraternity recognizing each other's 20 year old rings in an interview and getting a job or some similar scenario, but that too seems like a scenario I'd rather not be involved in. I'd like to be hired and I hire based purely on job qualification, not having a shared hazing history. Again, not an appealing pitch. > I got what I wanted out of it (my wife). As it turns out, quite a few of my friends (including myself) also found their spouses in college, outside of the greek system. As it turns out people find ways to socialize without the need for a structured system. I'm glad it worked out for you, but it's not really appealing to people like me. > You have
These guys are loud, belligerent, arrogant and outright absurd [1]. But they are doing something incredible. They have a product with widespread adoption and a massive scope of new verticals to tackle, and they (I think) have a vision for this technology to make the web a better place for all of us. Just as Facebook was brilliant to attract the love of the cool kids (first Ivy league, then all college kids, then high school + college, etc.), which led to worldwide adoption, RapGenius is taking a far more creative approach than to just build an annotation layer over the entire web without any common beliefs, passions or interests to galvanize the community. I'm excited to see it pan out. Edit: I probably shouldn't call someone loud, belligerent, arrogant and outright absurd without a link. :) [1] this video
If they were annotating Opera Librettas My tastes are pretty middlebrow and all I could think to search for was Non piu andrai , which I couldn't find, but as far as poetry goes they've got works like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , Rime of the Ancient Mariner , and Ode to a Grecian Urn , and for literature they've got Joyce's amazing short story (and set at Christmastime) The Dead , The Cask of Amontillado , and with annotations by the founder Mahbod, War and Peace (he also says one of his favorite books is Nicholas Nickleby , which is not really an obvious choice: this video ).
>> there's this undercurrent of hatred for baller/rap/black (so-called "douchebag") culture Sorry, but the hatred for RapGenius doesn't come from programmers hating black culture. It's from the founders being fake, and as you said, douchebags. They're three white Yale graduates trying way too hard and ultimately being inauthentic. That's what's off-putting -- saying things like "baller-sourced" [1] just is an obvious ploy, appropriating words to give themselves fake credentials and personalities as rap aficionados. [1] this video (~1:30)
I found ridiculous so many things here: 1. Their black SEO practice around Justin Bibier as they call themselves RapGenius (LOL) 2. Those are the guys we're talking about. this video (show me love ...yes) 3. They were 100% illegal, beside the big investment they got, they didn't pay copyrighters for using their lyrics. [LINK] Now that said, why the hell someone like Google has to negotiate with them ? b