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Scribd and Quora considered harmful

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Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#71

Post by davidgerard »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #50

For at least a year, links to Quora and Scribd have been considered, by me, to be non-existent. Every experience with them in the preceding six months had been awful, so I refuse to interact with them again (at least, until I hear how they fixed things).

Quora is casual fun. Like Reddit with text. Ephemeral.

(I am told by Quora investors that they really didn't try for the inane comparisons to Wikipedia, but that this was made up by the press; much as the comparisons between Wikipedia and Knol were. [I am a long-time Wikipedia press volunteer and watched that last one being made up out of nothing.])

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#72

Post by mplewis »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #34
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.

It's almost as bad as LinkedIn. After I turned off all newsletters from LinkedIn, I still got 2 a week that I had to filter in Gmail.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#73

Post by hnnewguy »

Karunamon wrote: post #42

Scribd 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…

>Someone please explain to me again how this arrangement is evil?

Well, if they let you know ahead of time that you needed to sign up to access the content, that'd be no big deal. And, of course, I wouldn't bother to ever visit the site.

Instead, through Google, they make it appear like the information is accessible, then nag you to sign up to see it.

From the article and the look of this thread, it appears quite a few people think that it's a crappy way to do business; so who is "biased"?

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#74

Post by LordIllidan »

psychometry wrote: post #41
LordIllidan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF hosted anywhere? Dropbox for instance, or github.

Now imagine I know very little about computers and just want to upload and share a PDF file, i.e. click "upload" and get a link--an imgur for PDFs. I don't know of a solution like that.

Again, this is why I love Dropbox - I don't even need to upload, just rightlick and get a link.

As mentioned, it's not suitable for large audiences - but it's perfect for other stuff.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#75

Post by hnnewguy »

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).

>I think their aim is noble

That's about as fast and loose a a usage of the word noble as you can get. It's a Q&A site; what is "noble"?

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#76

Post by gwern »

LordIllidan wrote: post #17
spindritf wrote: post #16

What is a good alternative to Scribd? One that allows viewers to download the source file without too much hassle and displays the text properly? Google Drive?

PDF hosted anywhere? Dropbox for instance, or github.

Dropbox doesn't expose your PDFs to search engines, so it doesn't work as a public reference dump. (Github does, I think, but it's not so easy to use - can you imagine ordinary people trying to use git to expose documents to the world?)

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#79

Post by shurcooL »

tambourmajor wrote: post #27
shurcooL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I told you that already exists, and you can be giving $10 a month or whatever to many websites or individuals right now? Most people who say "wouldn't it be great" like above end up changing their minds about donating after they find out it's actually possible. Anyway, if you're still interested, feel free to reply here and I'll forward you to what I'm referring to. FWIW, I do think it would be great and I'm…

It would be great if it all was bundled in a single place and not many separate services I need to keep track of.

I had Gittip in mind, and it is a single place.

Re: Scribd and Quora considered harmful

#80

Post by infinitone »

nhangen wrote: post #39

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.

Well, you keep doing this until you get 'acquired.'
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