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Scribd and Quora considered harmful
61–70 of 146 posts
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can turn off these emails though, surely? At least, you can with linkedin, as I have. I am not a quora user, so I can't talk there. That said, I usually go with the email-alias trick. Not all websites like emails with a + in their name, so I have a postmap file on my server to map service@domain to my real address. If I want rid of that sites email because they won't respect my unsubscribes, I just remove that al…
Yes, you can turn off those emails. All you have to do is un-click 25 checkboxes! http://cl.ly/image/3J2Q3o1M213h/quora-email-settings.png
Holy shit, I thought you were kidding. I am glad you included the screenshot!
For lack of better words, Quora has always struck me as expertsexchange 2.0. There is nothing wrong with being the reincarnate-2.0.-site, but Quora seems to be resurrecting demons and zombies and death we'd rather stay in the ground.
(For comparison, I consider Reddit, with its thousands of subreddits to be a form of usenet 2.0)
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#63Scribd seems unambiguously terrible (DRM fonts? That's a whole new level of garbage), but I find it really hard to say the same about Quora unless you're confirmation-bias-ing your way to portray them in a bad light. So i've got this website. You have to log in to post things there. Other people have to log in to see the things you post there. Someone please explain to me again how this arrangement is evil? Seems pre…
Quota is evil (your word, not mine) because they make it seem, though eg Google, that you can access the information immediately. Further, they are breaking the norms of Q&A sites that viewing information doesn't require more than passing interaction with the site (a norm many people who provide Q&A content tend to agree with). Finally, it brings back strong memories (as mentioned in TFA) of Experts Exchange, which w…
So they do something slightly different from Stack* and they're "considered harmful"?
The screenshot I linked should be enough to immediately disprove any accusations of "spam".
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#64Numerous Scribd uploads, which we needed for our business, were fine one day and irretrievable the next. The response from tech support was to re-upload the content, which wasn't possible. Haven't left, yet, because I'm not sure where else to go to host thousands of documents quickly.
What exactly is your use-case? Are you trying to host paywalled documents, or just host the docs for internal use?
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can turn off these emails though, surely? At least, you can with linkedin, as I have. I am not a quora user, so I can't talk there. That said, I usually go with the email-alias trick. Not all websites like emails with a + in their name, so I have a postmap file on my server to map service@domain to my real address. If I want rid of that sites email because they won't respect my unsubscribes, I just remove that al…
Yes, you can turn off those emails. All you have to do is un-click 25 checkboxes! http://cl.ly/image/3J2Q3o1M213h/quora-email-settings.png
Don't forget you'll have to re-un-click them every time they add another point to the list!
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#66[deleted]
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#67Scribd 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…
Google Drive, AFAIK, doesn't allow you to monetize/paywall your content, which appears to be the draw of using Scribd - not as a superior hosting/viewing platform, but as a distribution platform.
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#68While I usually find the businesses funded by Y Combinator awesome I think Scribd is a bad apple. Not only is the user experience terrible it also has the smell of a bad neighborhood with all the pirated content it offers. Today I incidentally read the current (March 2014) "Gutenberg 3.5 - Ebook Piracy Report"[1]. It seems to be from an anti-piracy lobbying group, so its obviously biased, but it mentions Scribd even…
This is somewhat off topic, but I've always thought of Library Genesis as a modern-day Library of Alexandria. Both contain vast stores of priceless knowledge, and both employ(ed) somewhat less than optimal means of obtaining their books.
I wonder if the individuals who wrote that report can see the similarities too. It's going to be a sad day if they manage to raze LibGen as well.
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#69As a technical fix to the Scribd copy-paste problem you could implement a user script to perform frequency analysis on the text of the document and to correct the text as it is being loaded substituting the DRM font for a regular one. (You can't easily perform the substitution at copy time with JavaScript and put the modified text into the clipboard.)
Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful
#70Quora 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.
I never get daily emails, but regardless, they provide fine-grained control over unsubscribing to these emails. If you receive them daily, you might want to take 5 minutes and opt out.
Stealing five minutes of the lives of each of thousands or millions of people is why spammers are scum.