81–90 of 146 posts
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?
Frankly making fun of Quora and Scribd is like shooting fish in a barrel, but sometimes it's helpful to articulate the obvious.
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…
For avoiding using Scribd for public PDF hosting, I've been looking at http://pdf.yt/ (I keep wondering when the powers that be at HN will finally remove the Scribd autolinks on submissions, and keep being disappointed.)
YC owns part of Scribd. (Scribd took part in YC S06.)
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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
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.'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I had the impression that Google penalizes websites for giving its crawler substantially different information than a visitor would receive, and that it has done so for quite some time. I wonder why Quora is not penalized in to irrelevance.
More than anything, people who have issues with this feel entitled to have unfettered access to content because Wikipedia and other sites have been world changing and useful resources without a barrier to entry for reading content.
There was a time when using an anonymous remailer was considered bad taste, but now an email address isn't sacred, things change a lot on the internet over time and it has more to do with how the general public uses it and perceives it than to do with how highly technical people think it ought to be.
I have yet to find a free or open source solution that's incredibly easy to implement and embed (for bloggers). To get PDF content showing nicely inside of a scrollable iframe, you need to convert the PDF to HTML, and host images somewhere. That's not easy for people who just want to jump right into publishing blog content. DocumentCloud seems totally awesome, but their hosted platform is restricted to journalists; specifically, "newsrooms."
I use Scribd for legal research; there's a lot of attorneys who post PDFs of case pleadings, since (a) PACER is expensive to use, and (b) RECAP has terrible searching. To that end, it really is the YouTube of PDFs, and I love it for that. Of course, YouTube is ad-supported, so perhaps that'd be a better option for Scribd, but that tends to draw ire too.
For what it's worth, you don't need to pay for a Scribd account if you regularly upload content. I haven't uploaded anything in a few months and I was able to download, for free, the Declaration of Independence link that the author highlighted. Of course, you wouldn't know that unless you stared at the little text on the bottom of the page, so that should change.
Earlier 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