What is the motivation behind this? It strikes me as something like an anti-ad-blocker tool, except instead of serving to protect your sites ad revenue it's just trying to suppress free discourse about your content through a third party tool that happens to be exposed to this kind of suppression, but isn't actually invasive, and is only used by people who opt-in to it anyway. Basically it seems to me like a tool for…
Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#42Folks blocking, curious your motivations? (I can think of a few but am curious about the specific issues with Genius vs. the platonic ideal of a universal web annotation layer)
They probably don't want hostile/parasitic services profiting off their content for free, even though that seems to be the business plan of every other startup. If Genius wants to act in good faith they should let people opt-out of annotations on their sites / pages.
Also, it's just another walled garden for content from a company with past ethically questionable business practices.
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
>she's literally complaining about people discussing her work on other sites Things like this don't become a problem until it is so easily organized. A bunch of tweets, FB posts, HN, reddit or other social comments are so scattered they don't have as much impact. The comments aren't visible on the the same page as the content. I'm going to have to think more about this. I've had this thought a couple of times now but…
They are not visible on the same page as the content unless you have news genius installed or have navigated to the news genius proxy for that page. You need to opt in to see the comments. God forbid people can post organized opinions you disagree with...
Or if the proxy shows up in search results higher than the original site.
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not visible on the same page as the content unless you have news genius installed or have navigated to the news genius proxy for that page. You need to opt in to see the comments. God forbid people can post organized opinions you disagree with...
Or if the proxy shows up in search results higher than the original site.
Search indexing is disabled.
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#45What is the motivation behind this? It strikes me as something like an anti-ad-blocker tool, except instead of serving to protect your sites ad revenue it's just trying to suppress free discourse about your content through a third party tool that happens to be exposed to this kind of suppression, but isn't actually invasive, and is only used by people who opt-in to it anyway. Basically it seems to me like a tool for…
https://genius.it/8917326/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11406...
Haha, I get it. I was too quick to defend Genius as a proxy for the universal annotation platform of my dreams. But the idea is that, in wide adoption, such a platform would be much more resilient to comments like your example. Sort of like HN's commenting atmosphere!
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#46If Genius were actually acting in good faith, they'd allow some sort of 'robots.txt' like functionality, which would solve this whole thing in a nice way.
But that's unlikely.
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#47In case you were wondering how it works, this library is a rack middleware wrapper around this JavaScript: var annotated = window.location.href.indexOf("genius.it/") != -1; if (annotated) { window.location.href = window.location.href.replace("genius.it/", "") }
Leftpad all over again.
In this situation, genius will probably try to circumvent a bunch of these techniques. You could imagine this library adds more techniques to fight genius, genius adds work arounds, the library adds different techniques, and it goes back and forth. For users of the library, they just have to update the gem to stay ahead.
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#48If Genius were actually acting in good faith, they'd allow some sort of 'robots.txt' like functionality, which would solve this whole thing in a nice way. But that's unlikely.
It would be nice if they made it even easier for users on hosted services who can't necessarily change robots.txt so you could opt out on a per-page basis. But I don't think anyone expects Genius to act in good faith.
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://genius.it/8917326/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11406...
Haha, I get it. I was too quick to defend Genius as a proxy for the universal annotation platform of my dreams. But the idea is that, in wide adoption, such a platform would be much more resilient to comments like your example. Sort of like HN's commenting atmosphere!
Genius is also definitely not a company that would provide anything approaching HN-quality comments. The company's cofounder & CEO had to be removed for completely tasteless comments [http://recode.net/2014/05/26/rap-genius-co-founder-moghadam-...].
Re: Code to block unwanted News Genius annotations
#50I'm no JS expert[1] but this doesn't look correct: # https://github.com/marlabrizel/genius-blocker/blob/master/lib/genius/blocker.rb#L11 var annotated = window.location.href.indexOf("genius.it/") != -1; if (annotated) { window.location.href = window.location.href.replace("genius.it/", "") } Wouldn't this match any instance of "genius.it" throughout the URL, not just at the beginning? For example it'd match " https://…
Hey koolba, OP here.
Thanks for the code review - it's always good to see suggestions on how to improve things. If you have ideas on how to make the code better, please feel free to submit a pull request. Thanks for sharing your feedback!