Scribd Goes Straight, Bans Porn | Hacker News Reader

Scribd Goes Straight, Bans Porn

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24 pointsraghus18 comments

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Interestingly, I am revisiting Tim Brady's interview from Founders at work. Tim talks about the early days of Yahoo's traffic and says "The sex category was probably 25% of web traffic, just like the VHS industry when it first got going, and the Internet was no different in that respect".

A year and half or so after launch, Yahoo pulled out all their porn links, in that sense Scribd seems to be doing the same thing.

Porn seems to provide the impetus for early traffic, and, once you get a bit of legs under your business, move away from it seems to be the strategy.

and, once you get a bit of legs under your business, move away from it seems to be the strategy.

And as soon as someone buys your startup, the porn comes back (see nsfw reddit and Condé Nast)

That was a more personal initiative, though. As in, a user created the reddit again after people were allowed to make their own.

From what I've heard, x-rated stuff was never that big a component of Scribd's traffic. Porn is so ubiquitous that it becomes a component of any general purpose Internet service (e.g. the most popular search queries tend to be about porn), but I don't think Scribd got any particular boost from it.

BitTorrent started the same way, with a request for porn in NTK.

Maybe Scribd is going to be acquired and porn is a big red flag for most companies that want to buy them.

Can someone refresh my memory, when did reddit remove their NSFW page -- before or after the CondeNest acqusition?

I think it was shortly after, but it's since been reinstated. They said at the time that they removed it because it wasn't being used as they wanted. People just submitted porn, rather than normal content that happened to be NSFW. (Looking at the page now, that still seems to be the case.)

"Should we expect Scribd’s traffic to take a nosedive? Unlikely. Porn may have helped Scribd gain momentum in its infancy, but the site has long since proven its use as a blogging tool and a document repository. If anything, it’s surprising that it took Scribd this long to make the switch."

so will Justin.tv ban illegal broadcasts as well?

seems the somewhat successful strategy for building content on these community apps is allowing either illegal or unscrupulous behavior to build traffic, and then nix it when you're big enough to survive on your own.

Is this the strategy PG recommends, or the YC founders just think of it on their own?

seems the somewhat successful strategy for building content on these community apps is allowing either illegal or unscrupulous behavior to build traffic, and then nix it when you're big enough to survive on your own

It worked for YouTube, didn't it?

Is this the strategy PG recommends, or the YC founders just think of it on their own?

I think it's a bit too obvious to say that anyone "thought of it".

I don't think anyone pursues copyright infringement as a strategy, though they clearly turn a blind eye to it as one. I've never heard PG endorse this, but it's incredibly common in the Valley.

>> seems the somewhat successful strategy for building content on these community apps is allowing either illegal or unscrupulous behavior to build traffic, and then nix it when you're big enough to survive on your own.

I think that's purely coincidental. :)

In an essay published in the Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams said something about how every new medium starts out as porn, and the other genres move in afterwards.

Heh. And this happens just one day after PG releases an essay about disconnecting distractions. Coincidence? I think not, my friends!

This was the right decision for Scribd. Most of the "adult" content on Scribd was spammy crap anyway, feeble attempts at trying to get people to sign up to Adult Friend Finder or whatever.

Is porn a huge problem for scribd? I've never really looked at scribd before, so I just went to check out the Adult section. I'm seeing a lot of PDFs written in Cyrillic, "Soft Drink Awareness - How Coke and Pepsi are HELPFUL" and then further down "PUMPING women - are you running out of gas?." I'm not seeing a lot of porn here. However the stuff that is here seems pretty weird and hopeless. Scribd should have no problems removing it.

Good for them.

Porn sucks. Porn is to sex as chocolate life savers are to an artisanal chocolate cake.

Yeah, good point. Scribd should ditch the porn and introduce new features to provide their users actual sex, now that would be a killer app!

That would be bigger than Google.

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