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Comment by gnu8 | Hacker News Reader

How about a link to the document instead of some fly-by-night web host with a cheesy flash PDF viewer?

Scribd isn't exactly a "fly-by-night web host". They've been around for almost 10 years already.

That is exactly the problem with Scribd? No growth no pivots, so all that is left do to is plaster the thing with ads and have someone keep it running at night.

It's terrible exactly because it is too old now.

But it's a ycombinator company, so it doesn't matter. People will blindly support it due to the nature.

Anecdotally, I've never heard from anybody who didn't resent Scribd. At best, people use it because of entrenched habits.

The whole business of "you must buy a paid account to download this PDF" is pretty galling.

I had a pretty easy time reading it. Was it difficult for you?

There's a large orange "Download" button directly to the right of the document.

Which forces you to login and then pay. Just link to the damn PDFs. Scribd is a parasite.

Scribd is a Ycombinator company. All pdf links are converted to Scribd links.

Not quite, all PDF links posted have a [Scribd] tag appended to their titles that links to a scribd mirror. However in this case the original PDF is hosted on scribd, the OP got the link from an Arstechnica article.

Usually I can click the left part of the URL for the original PDF, in this case it is just a scribd URL and when I go to it the contents is blank in this browser sadly and I can't read it. My hunch is that if a PDF URL is submitted to HN it automatically adds a scribd link to the right if it can leaving the original to the left, which is snazzy and nice for those that use scribd, but that in this case it was the scribd URL itself that was submitted.

I have just successfully created an account with a bogus email address and was then able to download the PDF without payment. Still Scribd is a PITA, especially since Firefox and Chrome got integrated PDF readers.

Please upload it somewhere for us, for example at archive.org

Here's an archive.org link: https://archive.org/details/netflix-response-to-verizon-dema...

Direct link (not sure if this is the best direct link you can get from them): https://ia902509.us.archive.org/21/items/netflix-response-to...

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