Biggest Success of Y Combinator? Scribd | Hacker News Reader

Biggest Success of Y Combinator? Scribd

grou.ps

10 pointszurla6 comments

This is an example of stoking the community to drive traffic to low quality content.

At best, this should have been a local discussion link. Otherwise, this is spam.

It would be spam if someone was intentionally and regularly submitting linkbait content of the same format as this... but a one time conjecture about a YC company is fine. It's linkbait because everyone here likes talking about YC companies. This isn't the same slippery slope as the "Programmers and Sex" story. If the front page ends up covered with blog posts about Arc and YC companies, odds are there were just a bunch of good blog posts about Arc and YC that day.

Every time I click on a link which is a PDF file, I feel like I stepped on a dog's poop. Replacing that with Flash is not the solution: give me just normal HTML, my browser deals with scrolling and zooming just fine, don't reinvent the wheel.

Besides, after I switched to Ubuntu as my primary desktop, I actually like PDFs more than Scribd's flash "black holes", because Linux has a much nicer, lightweight and fast PDF viewer that quickly opens in it's own frame without freaking up the browser. And Gnumeric with AbiWord deal with Office files just fine, thank you.

Yes, there is (unfortunately) a lot of data in "non-Web" formats like PDF, Word and Excel. But converting them into yet another proprietary and non-browser (and search engine) friendly "black box" is NOT the solution.

So now, in addition to PDFs, I must learn to avoid scribd links as well. My freaking hot keys won't work if the mouse cursor happened to be over one of those "flash holes", and scrolling is not as fluid and fast. Do we need _another_ startup to solve this problem now?

What the hell has wired done for reddit's traffic? Loopt hasn't had an exit yet, but neither has scridb.

conjecture + YC mention = linkbait

loopt has serious revenue. others might have more potential but that fact alone makes them the biggest yc success so far imo.

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