Scribd and Quora considered harmful • Hacker News Board

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#31

Post by Theodores » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:20 PM UTC

Scribd has not been going anywhere in recent years. I remember five years ago when their product was slightly innovative in that you could embed a PDF in your web page and, at the time, that was useful for me as I had some content that was PDF only and I did not want to recreate it. However, they soon added adverts and spoilt that mild utility that their service had.

I personally tend to avoid PDF files or, if a HTML version is available, I will go to that. I just don't like the format and avoid it. Sure my browser renders it fine but I avoid.

Similarly, with Scribd, I avoid. Others do to, and, in time, people will learn not to bother with Scribd. They will avoid it from both ends - uploading content and viewing content.

I believe you can just upload a PDF to a GDrive share and set it to be world viewable. Or you can restrict it. It all ties in to one's Google account, so why would you want to go to Scribd for that? Imaginably people will come to that conclusion and, before too long, Scribd will become even more irrelevant than they are now.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#32

Post by click170 » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #15

I don't like Quora, and yet I find myself on Quore surprisingly often because a lot of the questions and answers highlighted in the emails that I still get in my inbox are so interesting. Does anyone know of a less unpleasant site with Quora-like content?

If you haven't already, I would highly advise browsing some of the Stack Exchange sites. http://stackexchange.com/sites

Maybe they don't overlap 100% but, you don't have to pay or login to view questions and answers, and if you post a question in the wrong SE site it can simply be transferred to the correct SE site where the people familiar with that topic can answer appropriately.

Once upon a time I found myself contributing to StackOverflow and Programmers sites just to spite Experts Exchange, which to my dismay kept coming up in my search results instead of questions on a Stack Exchange site. It's consistently been a source of answers to questions that I thought were going to be hard to search for.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#33

Post by mercer » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:27 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #22

mercer wrote: post #15

I don't like Quora, and yet I find myself on Quore surprisingly often because a lot of the questions and answers highlighted in the emails that I still get in my inbox are so interesting. Does anyone know of a less unpleasant site with Quora-like content?

Okay, but if you didn't get those emails, would you ask those questions? I end up at Stack Overflow after seeking answers to questions I'm actually asking. Quora is just entertainment, and a very evil version of it. It's funny (in a sad way) that YC which wants to "kill Hollywood", presumably because of DRM and such, would end up backing up properties like Scribd and Quora.

Hmm, that's an interesting comment. In the 'grand scheme' of things I suppose Quora is mostly useless, and for the past week's I've been paying more attention to my information consumption. That said, I have found some very valuable stuff on Quora.

One example was the link to the summary of Irvine's book on stoicism: https://booknotes.quora.com/Notes-on-A-Guide-to-the-Good-Lif...

It prompted me to read the actual book.

I've also found a lot of the 'wisdom to younger self' type Q&A's to be very valuable, to the point where I store offline versions in my information thingamajig (DevonThink).

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#34

Post by k-mcgrady » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:28 PM UTC

bsenftner wrote: post #10

Quora is dangerously close to being a nuisance with all the pointless emails they send. I think I browsed the site a half dozen times max, and contributed to two-three questions. Now I get daily emails about distant friends activity on Quora. LinkedIn this the only site I've been tricked into joining that is worse with their spammy emails.

All I did was sign up so I could read some answers. Over the next week I was bombarded with emails. I checked the settings and when I registered they had signed me up to be emailed about a dozen different things.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#35

Post by ecesena » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:33 PM UTC

My opinion on Quora is totally different (note, I have no interest, nor I think my point of view is right or wrong, simply different).

I don't 100% support the idea of putting a barrier before content, but I understand their need to grow in terms of registered users (i.e. users for whom they have email or social account). It's a mere strategy for fast growing, a sort of compromise that they chose to do. I don't see this particularly different from the initial Reddit's strategy of fake posts to grow the community (from an ethical point of view, is hiding content so different than creating fake one?). My hope is that this will be just the initial strategy for acquiring users.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#36

Post by benrapscallion » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

leorocky wrote: post #13

sandstrom wrote: post #8

I agree in the case of Scribd. Quora is not as clear-cut. While I dislike their 'login-wall', it doesn't feel like a company focused around short-term profits. I think their aim is noble, only that they are struggling somewhat to find ways to increase engagement and scope. Although subjective, I feel they are still on the right half of a good-insidious scale (Scribd less so).

Quora's case is very clear cut. They derive all of their value from their users, the user created content. They then put protective barriers in place to prevent access to content others created. For example Quora's robots.txt explicitly prohibits the wayback machine from crawling anything on quora.com. The &share=1 is a hack to trick googlebot, if Googlebot were capable of indexing registration required content, Quor…

Quora deleted my account for not providing a real name and asked me to provide a photo of my driving license as proof of who I am.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#37

Post by overgard » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:37 PM UTC

ecesena wrote: post #35

My opinion on Quora is totally different (note, I have no interest, nor I think my point of view is right or wrong, simply different). I don't 100% support the idea of putting a barrier before content, but I understand their need to grow in terms of registered users (i.e. users for whom they have email or social account). It's a mere strategy for fast growing, a sort of compromise that they chose to do. I don't see t…

Kind of a dumb strategy in my opinion. A lot of times I'll see a post on quora I want to share on facebook or whatever, but I don't because I know I'll just be irritating my friends when they see a "Signup to read this article" page.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#38

Post by ecesena » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:44 PM UTC

overgard wrote: post #37

ecesena wrote: post #35

My opinion on Quora is totally different (note, I have no interest, nor I think my point of view is right or wrong, simply different). I don't 100% support the idea of putting a barrier before content, but I understand their need to grow in terms of registered users (i.e. users for whom they have email or social account). It's a mere strategy for fast growing, a sort of compromise that they chose to do. I don't see t…

Kind of a dumb strategy in my opinion. A lot of times I'll see a post on quora I want to share on facebook or whatever, but I don't because I know I'll just be irritating my friends when they see a "Signup to read this article" page.

I agree, it seems to conflict with sharing.

However, for 1 person like you that thinks about not sharing, I'm sure there are many that will share without thinking. Moreover -on this point I'm totally sure- if you force users to signup vs you leave the option, no matter how good is your landing page, you will have more signups with the first option.

The point would be to understand how many share they lose vs how many signup they still get, but I guess the math is on their side (note: I'm assuming the most important metric here is number of signups, which is totally an assumption).

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#39

Post by nhangen » Sun, May 25, 2014, 7:47 PM UTC

When you take an investor's money and lack the ability to generate revenue, you're forced to use shady 'growth hacking' techniques in order to fake hockey stick metrics for the purpose of finding additional investors ad infinitum.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#40

Post by michaelt » Sun, May 25, 2014, 8:05 PM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #29

chanux wrote: post #6

I think my continued use of these sites rigged with all dark patterns are just a nod of acceptance. Deleted Quora app from phone long ago and logged out. It's probably time I delete my account. Update: Oh well. There's no delete feature implemented. You have to email Quora support. https://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora...

they do delete your account after this though... so its worth it.

Only after several requests and several months.