Die, Scribd. Die: You are web -0.5 | Hacker News Reader

Die, Scribd. Die: You are web -0.5

wdr1.com

51 pointsrlm34 comments

While not exactly polite, the post is right on the money.

The biggest usability problem with Scribd is the lack of the access to the actual PDF. In fact, had they put a big fat link to the PDF somewhere in the viewer, it would've actually become a handy online PDF preview tool.

I can't imagine they haven't thought about this feature. Its usefulness to the end-user is damn obvious, but yet it's not in the Scribd. Which makes one really wonder if the goal of locking users in is not that hypothetical after all.

I still don't know what Scribd is for, either. I guess if you had a flash-enabled browser but no PDF reader then it might be useful. That population is probably very small.

However, the author could have been a bit nicer.

EDIT: to those who are downvoting this post, I'd be really interested to hear why you think I shouldn't have posted it.

The place where it could really help is on embedded/mobile devices, where Flash is more widespread than PDF readers. However, the iPhone for example doesn't support Flash, and I suspect most other current-generation phones don't either.

Now, if Scribd converted as much as possible of the PDFs to (X)HTML/CSS and the rest to highly optimised images (tiled, and picking PNG or JPEG appropriately), that would be much more useful. Actually, even a version that just renders the documents as tiles of images would be quite helpful for devices that don't have PDF viewers, as the loss of copy & paste isn't going to be important on those devices.

Extra points for detecting the browser's display area height & width in pixels and getting the server to serve up appropriately scaled images. (where supported by the device of course)

That said, I used to dislike Scribd a lot more when I was having severe problems with Flash (on Linux). Opera 9.5 seems to have solved those apart from the bugs in Flash itself, but at least it's not taken the browser down with it for a while now. (running the plugin in a separate process with high niceness helps, and I can kill that when flash decides it needs 100% of one CPU after closing the page)

I'm still using the Greasemonkey/User Javascript for real PDF links on HN though. KPDF easily beats both Scribd and Adobe Reader in terms of usability and UI.

The iPhone shows pdfs brilliantly as it is though. God I'm glad the iPhone doesn't support flash as well.

I use Scribd for finding copyrighted and stolen books. :-)

It is way easier to type "Linear Algebra Done Right" in the search, instead of installing some eMule, Napster, or whatever is popular right now for this purpose. (don't know, never used P2P networks)

Even if you don't have a PDF reader, there's still Google's chache that will display PDF and Word files in HTML just fine.

Scribd is completely and utterly useless. In two years time we will laugh about the little startup that thought it could improve the internet by displaying perfectly readable documents in a cumbersome flash interface (my biggest annoyance: scrolling using a scroll wheel doesn't work - where's the improvement in that?).

Scrolling with a scroll wheel works for me.

1. Lightweight, in-browser preview of docs.

2. Embeddable docs: you don't have to leave the context in which a doc is referenced to peruse it.

3. Easy way to integrate advertising in docs.

4. Improves browsability of docs by aggregating them and analyzing content for relatedness.

5. Comments/community.

Admittedly, the shortcomings this ranter lists (can't save, can't print, can't copy & paste) are major annoyances. The problem here isn't that Scribd doesn't add any value: it most certainly does. The problem is that it currently takes away enough value to make many potential uses of their services annoying, like the very situation on HN mentioned in this guy's blog post. But why is Scribd necessarily to blame, here? The person who submitted the Scribd version of the document could have linked to the freely downloadable version instead.

Just because there are dumb uses of a service doesn't mean that service is useless.

(On the other hand, it's possible the linker wouldn't have found the document to begin with if it wasn't on Scribd. In which case, the value added from aiding users in discovery of valuable documents clearly outweighs the nuisance of having to find a freely downloadable copy yourself.)

Sheesh, folks. Do a little thinking before you decide to jump on the hater bandwagon.

> The person who submitted the Scribd version of the document could have linked to the freely downloadable version instead.

I think I heard that links to pdfs are automatically converted to scribd. And saying "scribd's service is annoying, but you can't blame them if someone takes advantage of it" is a little silly. You're right about the dumb uses thing, but in this case the dumb use happens to be one of the intended uses. You can't blame HammerCo that their product sucks at driving screws, but they are absolutely responsible for ensuring that it doesn't suck at banging nails.

One dumb use does not invalidate the whole service.

Although I'm not really sure who is driving all this traffic to Scribd (many mention that the dubious and illegal content may be a significant portion of this, although PG has said it is not), I think this boils down to a matter of preference.

For many members of the HN community, it is preferable to download/view the doc via a PDF reader for ease of use, lack of Flash, as well as saving and printing abilities. Obviously, for members of the Scribd community, this is not the preferable way in consuming content. The HN community is probably also privy to hordes of other ways to share and discover docs, while again, the Scribd community, apparently is not.

Personally, I think this is seemingly an argument for why YouTube should have failed back in 2005. Flash. Can already download movies using a desktop player. Embeddable content.

Love it or hate it, we see where it's gotten YouTube (at least in terms of eyeballs, acquisition, and traffic, if not monetization).

I did, however, for some reason find the post to be comical satire, and I laughed as I read it, but in general it's not_that_big_of_a_deal.

The one thing I would suggest, however, is that PG and co. remove the auto-Scribd PDF rendering. Clearly, by the position of this article on the front page, and the several comments below, this is not the preferable way to the HN community to consume PDFs, and we'd prefer not to be sent to Scribd to read PDFs.

(And, as someone who has been here for a couple hundred days now, I'm really interested to see if a founder will respond, or if PG will comment).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175378

A majority want a change in the HN Scribd implementation A majority want Scribd available in some way

3/4 choices posed (I'm ignoring 'other', verb, and user site preference) had to do with keeping Scribd in one way or another (what you call 'available in some way') so I'm not really sure that's an accurate representation of what the community wants.

Certainly more say "get rid of the scribding" than say "keep the Scribding"which is about all I need to know, although, if PG did not change it then, I doubt he really cares.

Also, hoping that those from the poll show their support in the comment because so far I haven't yet seen it ...

I can see the point of being able to 'embed' a document inline, and I've seen that used on techcrunch with pdf docs via scribd. That sort of makes sense. Although I'd still rather just have a link to the pdf at the end of the day.

They also display office docs. While viewing office docs isn't a common thing for me, I'd much rather see them in a flash widget than boot up OpenOffice.

Really, if you have an office doc that you want to put online, then why not export it as a pdf?

1) You want people to eventually download and re-edit, but in the mean time (or for some people) you just want to allow them to see it in their browser. 2) The adobe pdf plug-in is less than spectacular, even if you do go to all the trouble to export your office docs to pdf. 3) I'm not sure, but the pdf conversion from the 3 Office document formats must be fairly lossy. Then again, I don't know that the office document conversion to ipaper is any better. 4) The user might not have Office or a suitable clone handy.

Also, this is only slightly related to what you're saying, but you could imagine Scribd supporting more obscure document formats which are not readily converted to pdf's.

Good points. Especially no. 1. However, the eventuality of it makes it unlikely IMO. The web is about here and now. Why not just use a wiki?

That is pretty much the only thing I can see scribd being useful for, but, as I said elsewhere in this thread, Google's cache is now making those available in HTML as well, so it's not a unique selling point for Scribd.

I think they are in the beginning stages of what they eventually plan to offer. I am hoping they open up their API so developers can access the documents, change the way documents are displayed and how they inter-relate/handle being searched. I am assuming all of the data is held in a db rather than post script files meaning there is a lot of potential for cool parsing/analysis and novel ways of displaying the docs.

But at the same time I can see why people who only see it as "a new pdf" hate it. I really think/hope they have a much larger scope than that but it's obvious that portraying that on first impression is difficult.

It's good for hosting and distributing documents of dubious copyright.

And yet it seems to be pretty damned popular...and growing rapidly. I noticed when I checked earlier today that it has passed reddit in hits, by some measure (Compete.com, specifically, though Alexa has scribd surpassing reddit at least a year ago--at least one of them is horribly wrong). If I had a website that measured success in traffic, I'd probably be pretty happy with that kind of popularity and growth.

Which makes the phenomenon even stranger - nobody here seems to be able to come up with a good explanation of scribd's success, yet somehow they do succeed.

Given this - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/17/scribd-goes-straight-ba... - it was good for porn sharing. It still probably is, because I doubt they have a reasonably good "flesh tone detection" software in place to fully automate the process.

Incidentally, this may also explain their steady traffic growth. It'd be interesting to look at their traffic numbers once all porn is eradicated.

hahaha, I couldn't agree more. Scribd = way to place documents on the web, that are then not really on the web. It's too bad that one cannot scroll with spacebar on scribd either.

PDF has some sort of huge licensing fee attached to it for document creation. I'm working on a project where I needed to buy a redistributable PDF ripper component. I couldn't find one for less than $1500 because of the Adobe licensing fees.

Still hate Scribd.

Adobe has several patents covering various areas of the PDF spec, but they "are licensed on a royalty-free, nonexclusive basis for the term of each patent and for the sole purpose of developing software that produces, consumes, and interprets PDF files that are compliant with the Specification:"

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/support/topic_leg...

The Adobe PDF specification is also freely available at:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.p...

Not sure where the $1500 is coming from, but it's certainly not a requirement for any PDF generator.

It's built into every Mac OS X installation: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Con...

I'm not sure it does. Doesn't OpenOffice export to PDF for free? And you can script it with Python.

dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217682

Instead of swearing I believe he could write a post titled "How to improve Scribd" and share his frustrations with the Scribd team. That may have a better outcome. If someone has put a certain amount of energy and passion into a product noone should undermine the result.

Luckily the team is made of smart folks and they won't ask the author to go chill because they have nearly 3 million happy uniques to worry about.

All feedback is useful, and if the feedback is a swearing rant, it doesn't make it less so in my view. Swearing rants are far more useful feedback than fluffy "it's nice" comments.

Getting any feedback at all is hard enough sometimes, without trying to get people to suggest solutions as well.

The swearing is a bit too much, I agree, but I think his point is that scribd is a completely useless service that can't be improved because its basic premise ("sharing documents on the internet") is wrong.

What, a rant about Scribd, and nary a mention of the fact that it runs on Rails (and hence all its problems must be due to that framework)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com