Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
11–20 of 111 posts
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#12Did you try contacting them to clarify ? If so, what was their response ?
He did. From the post:
As a courtesy, I sent a prepublication draft of the above post to Scribd's press team and asked for a response. They were kind enough to reply to me pretty quickly with the following
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#13Sometimes, when reading pieces like this, I think it is time that we as internet users reach a certain point in our understanding of entitlement. There are so many services we readily use, most free of charge, while some of them provide a huge service to us. Some even make us money. But if the service providers themselves try to validate their business by making money out of it in some way, we start bitching... I do…
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Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#14Sometimes, when reading pieces like this, I think it is time that we as internet users reach a certain point in our understanding of entitlement. There are so many services we readily use, most free of charge, while some of them provide a huge service to us. Some even make us money. But if the service providers themselves try to validate their business by making money out of it in some way, we start bitching... I do…
Scribd is not that miserable. They used the free model to pull a lot of buzz and funding.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#15Sometimes, when reading pieces like this, I think it is time that we as internet users reach a certain point in our understanding of entitlement. There are so many services we readily use, most free of charge, while some of them provide a huge service to us. Some even make us money. But if the service providers themselves try to validate their business by making money out of it in some way, we start bitching... I do…
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Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#16I have content hosted there too and value the "open access" spirit, but would also like to see Scribd develop a viable business model. An alternative is the service will close down and everything -- both free and archived -- will go away. Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)
One idea: host a simple document conversion service. Pay money, upload a PDF, download an HTML5 page. Lots of documents on the web are better hosted on the creator's servers, like restaurant menus and research papers. I see they have an embeddable API, but (A) they don't push it very hard, and (B) it has a higher barrier to entry than just downloading a webpage.
Another idea: Cut out the middleman and sell a "print to webpage" plugin for Windows.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#17Sometimes, when reading pieces like this, I think it is time that we as internet users reach a certain point in our understanding of entitlement. There are so many services we readily use, most free of charge, while some of them provide a huge service to us. Some even make us money. But if the service providers themselves try to validate their business by making money out of it in some way, we start bitching... I do…
While I generally agree with your points, I don't think they are particularly apt to this article. The guy isn't saying Scribd owes him anything, he even states that he understands they never promised him a free service in perpetuity.
But when you make a service available for free and take pride in that fact, harvest your users content, and then suddenly flip over to a paid service without even giving your users adequate notice or tools to opt out I can completely understand how users might feel cheated.
Isn't the company partly responsible for creating the sense of entitlement you're talking about?
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#18I don't care if they want to establish a paywall, that's there perogative, what I don't like is taking my content, which I uploaded under the belief I'd be able to host it there at no cost to end users (persumably subsidised by ads) and then charging my readers for it. I post my content (mostly slides from talks and such) for readers, I'd probably even pay to put my content there, it's rather convenient.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#19I think there are a few takeaways here: * You have to charge from the very beginning. If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly. Scribd seems to have been in a hurry to get adoption, so they made it free to host documents; as this guy said though, he much preferred hosting with Scribd over doing it manually on his…
> If you start a free service, and then try to establish a pay system afterward, your users will feel tricked and trapped and they will rebel loudly.
If you lock behind a paywall things previously available for free, sure. And they'll be right too.
An other option is to add features which are only behind a new paywall. Issue then is providing additional services of value and a way for users to discover them.
Re: Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
#20Relevant: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_the_only_consta...
That's not realistic at all. If Facebook really did that to your car, they wouldn't leave the note.