Off topic: Why does Scribd have a perfectly functional mobile site that allows me to read half the PDF before rudely graying out my screen and insisting that I download their app to finish? I was reading with my phone rotated to landscape so at first I couldn't even see the pop up, the PDF just went gray. I call that borderline psychological abuse. At the very least I'm going to subconsciously associate the Scribd brand with that horrible experience.
I believe it used to be quite useful when your only option to read PDFs was Acrobat which was slow and would often lock up your browser while the plugin loaded.
Now that both Firefox and Chrome include built in PDF readers and we've also got other options like SumatraPDF, I see little value in Scribd any more.
The software used to put an additional link to Scribd after each pdf link, but we stopped that a long time ago. I assume that's what you're referring to, because there was never (and isn't) anything else along those lines that I know of.
Some years ago, while helping a relative out, I saw this first hand with a bunch of Joomla documentation that had been removed to behind its paywall.
(Not that I hadn't already reached this opinion, on a more general basis.)
P.S. I would welcome a non-Scribd link to the letter. I've reached the point where I refuse to run/use Scribd. The monetization is one thing; the horrible UI and my lack of trust in it is another and is the basis for this decision.
I've always associated them with horrible experience. I groan whenever I see Scribd instead of just a link to the PDFs. I have a good PDF viewer, thank you. In fact, I have several.
You must have a much lower expectation of "Hacker News" quality than I do. Has scribd ever had a good user experience? I've come across them once in a while for years and never liked it at all.
For years I've been avoiding Scribd. They are like experts exchange or quora: doing anything they can to get you to sign up and become beholden to their well furnished cage. Many times I've been in search of an odd PDF, found it on Scribd, only to have 99% of it unreadable.
Scribd is a terrible service and never once in my life have I said "oh good a Scribd link!". Every modern browser has a PDF viewer built in and I would hope people on HN are using updated browsers. It continues to baffle me as to why people use Scribd.
Perfectly functional? Not for me [1]. I had to open the document on a laptop because all I got on mobile was pixelated half-rendered gibberish. Attn: dang, HN should pop a dialog recommending against a submission to scribd.
There's also weighing that against getting the content onto HN if scribd is the only place it is found.
[1] Android 4.2.2, Firefox Android 33.1, Opera Mini 7.6.1
> Scribd is "Hacker News" quality. They're one of the HN venture capital funded companies.
I agree with @nsomaru that it would be great to submit PDFs rather that Scribd links, especially since the HN guidelines say the original document should be submitted. On the other hand, I'm not sure if HN wants to bypass a YC-funded company.
I don't think it should make any difference what relations the companies have. Scribd was less bad than Adobe plugin lockups. Scribd is more bad than current solutions. They can improve their experience, or not. Right now, I don't see the usefulness.
I opened it on my desktop, and I for one thought the 720 point font was a lovely and refreshing departure from the standard web-presented text so many sites seem to lazily impose on us. :/
