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Comment by vladmato | Hacker News Reader

And Scribd.com, exact same model, scrape content regardless of copyrights, straps adsense on it, makes money.

Agreed. I think Merlin Mann has the best take yet on Scribd: http://tinyurl.com/yzl3mod

And pg capriciously blacklisted his domain from news.yc in response

You are free to question PG's motives and cry censorship, but to me, that blog post was malicious, tasteless, angry drivel that I really wouldn't want to see on here, whether it was about a YC company or not.

That's why we have the "flag" button. It doesn't blacklist sites that are mean to YC companies.

Even a casual search of ScribD content will reveal the motives for Mr. Mann's post. He has every right to be angry. The malice has been well-earned by ScribD's repeated actions with other creator's content for nearly its entire history.

While it's true there's no accounting for taste, I suggest you consult the dictionary on the definition of 'drivel'.

At the end of the day, PG can do, essentially, whatever he likes with the content, routing (or lack there of), and posting permissions on Hacker News. It's HIS site.

It's a shame that ScribD doesn't seem to play by an equivalent set of ownership principles. Namely, hosting and making money off other creator's content without so much as asking their permission; let alone proffering any ad-revenue sharing.

>I suggest you consult the dictionary on the definition of 'drivel'.

I meant drivel. The linked post starts with:

> So, I went with, “fuckyourwhoremotherinheronegoodear.”

Drivel is "childish talk" (mom insults, anyone?) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/drivel

As to your other points, I think they are good. For me, intelligent debate does not talk about fucking anyone's whore mother in their ear. If that is what I was looking for, I'd read YouTube comments.

edit: admittedly, tptacek does have a point re: the flag button vs. blacklist.

Kudos indeed. I'm glad Tptacek brought up the often-neglected 'flag' feature.

Again, there's no accounting for taste, but offhand I'd say labeling curse words, and their creative use, as "childish" is quite overreaching. Have you read any David Mamet, Frank McCourt, or Larry McMurtry lately? Do you honestly feel a child would have sufficient skill to structure prose in that fashion?

I never said anything about cursing. I said mom insults were childish. So yeah, if I had said that, that would have been overreaching.

Merlin is blacklisted from Hacker News? Link to discussion about this?

I just tested this by submitting that same Scribd rant. My account sees it as having been submitted, but if I'm not logged in the story doesn't appear at all.

Can I add that Paul's method of making things disappear without telling users is shit? It was a lot of fun realizing my account was dead and I wasn't just going crazy. Same with this story. I almost posted a comment defending him until I thought to test the story logged out.

Wait, you had to start a new account because he hell-banned unalone?

That's low, even by pg's standards.

You forgot related search queries, which is basically bogus search queries that produces even more visits and bogus search queries.

Scribd ceased doing related search queries some time ago. Their CEO described it, to Techcrunch, as "reducing the aggressiveness of our SEO, which reduces total traffic in the near term but increases the relevancy of Scribd links in search engine results."

Scuttlebutt among SEOs whose opinion I respect suggests that it is highly probable they got a backchannel from Google telling them that either they could drastically reduce the footprint of their pages in the SERPs or that Google's search quality team would assist them in doing so.

Anyhow, their traffic went down by about 50% in a month, if you trust Compete et al.

Search for [Scribd "aggressive SEO"] if you want the whole tale.

Directly measured @ quantcast:

http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com

The big falloff end of June I assume.

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