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Comment by jowiar | Hacker News Reader

VC Money is a helluva drug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWccN_uu0gY

Here I thought at first "well that looks relatively reasonable even though it's a big space." and then the go carts....

Same here. I was prepared to say "Okay, that's silly, but they still work", but the zip line was a tad too much. Why would you have that in your office?

Edit: They did a follow-up some years later (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7v51le0lc) and somewhat surprisingly they were still pretty similar! I guess they really know how to balance themselves, since they do seem to be putting out a good product.

Yeah I caught that, too. Also had nothing against Scribd because I came onto them later and liked the platform. I wouldn't have guessed that's what the place was like. Though I'm not sure I'd personally like it. But I understand @jowiar's point a bit.

How familiar are you with the early history of Scribd?

They were a darling of HN(YC financed the early rounds) here at first in the late 200Xs following the classic Youtube/Kim Dotcom growth strategy of allowing pretty much any content on Scribd.

The "any content is good content" strategy seemed to work and Scribd grew in popularity but profits remained elusive.

Then Scribd went all dark-patterns on users locking content behind paywalls. This was content that users had submitted themselves.

Finally the inevitable pivot to ebook subscription services happened.

Scribd seems somewhat respectable now although how profitable?

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