Rap Genius, the startup that wants to “annotate the world,” sees the departure of co-founder Mahbod Moghadam today, owing to Moghadam’s ill-advised annotations on the rambling manifesto of Elliot Rodger. Rodger went on a killing spree this past weekend, injuring 13 and killing seven, including himself. In a blog post detailing the news, co-founder and CEO Tom Lehman describes how Moghadam’s missteps would have been met with decisive action were he a community member, and says the co-founder is no exception.
Moghadam’s annotations were pointed out by Gawker in a post yesterday, in which writer Jordan Sargent identifies some of the particularly horrible comments left by the Rap Genius co-founder on the document. Those include a disgusting, misogynistic guess from Moghadam that Rodger’s sister is “smokin hot” and compliments on the writing style of the killer.
Lehman in the blog post today says that the Rap Genius team debated even uploading the mostly incoherent manifesto on the site, but in the end opted to do so because “understanding the psychology of people who do horrible things can help us to better understand our society and ourselves.” The images of the annotations (since removed) from Sargent’s post are below:
Because other song lyric sites were filled with pop-up ads and ringtone scams, Rap Genius’s relatively user-friendly site climbed in Google search results. Rap Genius currently sees 21.2 million global monthly uniques and 41.5 million global monthly visits according to Quantcast (though these third-party measurement services aren’t always accurate).
But some said the company had gotten its prominent search rank — and subsequent traffic — by using spammy tactics to get blogs to link to its annotations in order to aid its Google PageRank. Google caught the startup red-handed and drastically demoted its placement. The Rap Genius founders apologized and detailed the technical lengths they went to remove or disavow the fraudulent links, and Google restored much of the site’s prominence in its results.
These incidents created a sour perception of Rap Genius and Moghadam, especially amongst many in the tech industry, priming the swift backlash to the co-founder’s inappropriate annotations of Rodger’s writings. Rather than uncharacteristic, Moghadam’s comments may have been seen as the last straw.
Rap Genius’ large casual user base may not hear about — or care about — the scandal. However, the incident could make it tougher for Rap Genius to hire top talent or raise more money, because of the latest stain on the company’s reputation.
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