Like 8 years ago, I began annotating a Cormac McCarthy novel on Genius, and I quickly got a DM from a site admin who offered me a “Poetry Genius editor” position — tons of free karma and the ability to make edits without review — and encouraged me to keep writing. I didn’t pursue it very far and a few years later, I got another DM from a different admin saying that they were reducing the number of editors and:

> While reviewing your stuff, I noticed that you’ve got some really high quality work, but there are a few areas that could use a bit of improvement. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to be de-editored, it just means we need to work together on improving your annotations/acceptances

That sounded like work, so I declined :) And thus was my editorship revoked. I am going to guess that they had trouble ever getting a volunteer-editor model to stick.

P.S. the original DM thread offering me an editor position contains this gem:

> The deal with usage is this. We of course want to work on as much stuff in public domain (we have A LOT up there now). But if a newer text is elsewhere on the web we feel like it’s fair game.

Translation: if someone else shares content illegally, we can too

P.P.S. I think their SEO shenanigans [0) set them back a lot. Genius results still don’t come up very high when I google lyrics sometimes.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/amp/