I’m only on Genius right now. I’ve tried getting into Wikipedia, but it seems daunting—I don’t have that much knowledge in my brain!!! But I’d love to find more knowledge-based communities to join.

Once upon a time I was a pretty obsessive user in Neopets. I had my own guild, I knew the map inside and out, I had tons of neopoints, I did all the sitewide quests as soon as they came out, I chatted with lots of cool people, I think I even had a fake online girlfriend (who was probably a middle-aged man) at one point.

Videos!!! Sound quality is bad, but I think that’s because of the noise in my apartment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1AsRNRav5k&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3cxzGDy67o&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=652aXO0FfKw&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDIIk7QGtIY&feature=youtu.be

Not every line should be annotated. We keep saying this, but we don’t actually enforce it or live by it. So we end up with songs that have a lot of boring tates, so visitors give up after a few clicks/taps and never get to the good stuff. >:(

• I tried my hand at actually applying this principle. See “Hands to Myself” and “Locked Away.” We used these as case studies in the hangout.
• It looks weird to have all these naked lines. True! But I think it’s only because we’re so used to seeing everything highlighted.
• Only having some lines highlighted makes the important stuff jump out at the reader. Let’s stop doing this.
• We pretty much all agree that it’s much better to have 3 good tates than 3 good tates mixed in with 10 so-so ones.
• This raises a big problem: it exposes blank lines to whitehats prone to making shitty annotations! What do we do about that?
• One option is to lock the page. But that prevents anyone with less than 600 IQ from contributing. Do we really want shut visitors out from contributing?
• I thought about this mode where, in a locked page, whitehats could make annotations but only the author and editors would see the tate until it’s accepted. But then I was reminded that this would cause overlapping referents, which we can’t handle technically.
• The best product idea (I think) that came out of this discussion is an editor power to highlight naked lines and mark them as “no annotation needed.” If a whitehat comes by and tries to annotate, it’ll turn into a sort of “proposed edit” on the blank lines. Only eds can see and accept that proposed edit.
• Worse is better solutions: we floated around this idea of a “song guardian.” The guardian would follow the page and be responsible for resolving all new activity—accepting good stuff and rejecting bad stuff. We had mixed results with it, especially when the same user was the guardian for multiple songs or when the user just stopped coming to Genius for a few weeks.
• Maybe we could have groups of guardians, or shifting assignments, or both. E.g., one mod would be responsible for all hot pop songs (someone else for all hot country, rock, r&b, etc). That mod recruits groups of guardians for all the currently hot songs, makes sure things are good, then moves on to new songs as they come out. Sounds a little complicated, but I’d be down to try this system with you.
• As always, even if you weren’t in the hangout, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

So… remember how I said I would record these from now on? Well, I lied to you. Sort of. QuickTime kept crashing, so I was only able to record the last few minutes. Broken up into 3 videos. With no sound. So enjoy looking at our faces. I’ll try to do better next time. Sorry!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cof1Z-VQqh0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXlaZKGK-Vs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdZsmgGcd3M

Mediocre Annotations. If an annotation doesn’t tell me something new and interesting, it shouldn’t exist in the first place! How do we get rid of or improve mediocre annotations? We know that not all lines need to be annotated—but are we really applying that as we edit song pages?

• It’s tricky to draw the line between “this isn’t good and should be rejected” vs “this is a building block that I can come back to later and improve.”
• Overall, we should kill anything that isn’t super juicy and interesting. That’s because the average Genius visitor has to click or tap 10 to 20 to 50 times to get information. If their first few clicks yield only 50% interesting stuff, they’ll get bored and go away. So mediocre tates actually do a lot of harm.
• Blank lines are okay!!! Every editor should know this. But somehow, people don’t feel like they’ve completed a song until everything is annotated. So they end up creating 7 bomb tates and 3 “filler” tates that aren’t even that interesting.
• In an ideal world, we’d have a large pool of editors that care deeply about every popular song. Then these editors would pounce on all new annotations and delete them if they’re not juicy enough (then coach the user who created them). But our editor pool is very small compared to the number of tates created.
• Overall, we’d be okay if in the most popular songs (say… top 500?), only Genius annotations show up by default to non-editors.

Community Staffers. What would you like to see the staffers do more of? What’s good so far? What should we change? How can we improve?

• We didn’t have a chance to talk much about this.
• We mostly talked about how we need to do external outreach (to places outside of Genius) and how staffers should have some role in leading or contributing to this effort.
• So far our outreach has been passive: wait until someone comes to Genius, does something, then ask them to stay. We need to be proactive in order to grow.
• “Where do the smart people on the internet hangout? And why aren’t they on Genius?”
• Reddit, Wikipedia, some twitter hashtags, some facebook groups, tumblr (not the porn parts), linkedin (???), fan sites, fan blogs, KTT, your local library, your IRL smart friends, outside the broadway theater…
• But how do we even approach these people and ask them to build or join a community on Genius?
• Each environment will have a different approach.
• If this week we each go out to one of these sites and try to bring a few people to Genius, most of us will probably fail (because it’s hard and even harder than it looks). But if at least one of us succeeds, we can share what worked and what didn’t work.
• Not trying to sound like a youth pastor, but that’s the only way Genius will truly grow.