Scribd is one of the 10 most powerful sites on Digg | Hacker News Reader

Scribd is one of the 10 most powerful sites on Digg

harrymaugans.com

10 pointsjobacle7 comments

I'll be perfectly honest: what is popular on Digg is in no way something to be proud of.

Digg is a complete waste of time. The community is one of the most immature you can find online, the content is very poor, and I am disgusted when I see the little 'lynch mobs' that they form up every once in awhile when they feel like vigilante justice is appropriate.

Digg is junk, and I have absolutely no respect for it. Scribd might want to worry if they are becoming popular on Digg...do they really want that audience to be using their site?

In a startup, you can't afford to be choosy about which users you want. If you have a lot of users, you run with it.

Scribd folks are on to something. There is a need for posting short sections of text and getting people to vote on it. Forget about all that other document stuff (thinkfree has you beat there), concentrate on these short pieces of text... like Twitter but more than 140 characters.

scribd works well for people who are too lazy to start their own blog but want to say something publicly.

Do you want lazy people as primary customers? I don't know, but there will always be lazy people.

If their being lazy fuels your business, and there's enough of them to support your business, then, yes! :)

Aren't most successful businesses fueled by laziness?

Actually, it's mostly just other people's content copied to the site without their permission. For instance, the #3 and #4 items on Scribd right now are taken straight from craigslist's best of section. A lot of the other items are from email forwards, but that's a use that I think Scribd is actually good for.

With that said, it seems like the whole point of scribd is to be digg fodder in the first place. It's difficult to build a community around text, because any user who gets that serious will probably outgrow Scribd and start their own blog. Youtube succeeded in creating a community because there's no way for most users to go off and create their own video sites. When YouTube first launched, if you wanted to post video online, using YouTube was pretty much your only option. People have plenty of options for text, most of which are more featureful for publishers than Scribd.

Without a real community, Scribd is basically just a glorified email forward hosting site for digg users. If you look at the issues all the Myspace-based companies are having, you'll probably agree that Scribd could have a difficult future. If digg decides to let users upload content directly using digg itself, Scribd is dead.

There's nothing wrong with being lazy.

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