Scribd, the Followup
I’ve learned a few things in the last few days.
1) If you submit a CPAN module with unit tests that require a module not in the standard core, you will get over a lot automated emails telling you the tests fail on various platforms. (For the record, this is extremely useful. Seriously, CPANTS rocks.)
2) Amir Sadollah is the real deal, winning this season’s Ultimate Fighter.
3) The wp-cache plugin does a great job of reducing server load.
4) When you taunt their beloved Scribd, the Internet trolls will come out of their myspaces caves and fill your blog with various forms of droll.
The feedback on Scribd was pretty interesting. There were too many comments to respond to individually, so I thought I’d recap a few things in a separate post.
First, about half the comments or so were able to see the big picture and agreed that Scribd was a bad idea. DRM-controlled text files is not something the web wants nor needs.
The other half seemed to either fully or partially disagree.
Those who partially disagreed either acknowledge “but yeah, it still sucks” or seemed to think one detail won the argument.
If you’ve dealt with geeks, you’ve probably had arguments before were the forest is lost for the trees. E.g., Paris Hilton is a vapid waste of space, and with her MTV reality show, constant media coverage by outlets that attempt to pass drivel for news, horrible songs and the rest, it would really would be for the best of society if we feed her into a wood chipper. The response by these idiots would be “PARIS HILTONS REALITY SHOW WUZ ON FOX, NOT MTV!!! EPCI FAIL!!!!!!!!1!!!! PARIS RULES!!!!!!!!!!”
Which was the spirt of a whole series of comments.
“YOU IDOIT!!! YOU CLICK THAT BOX BETWEEN THE OTHER BOXES TO COPY AND PAST!!!! YOU ARE FAIL!!!”
“U USED THE WRONG LINK!!! U DON”T DUE THAT IN FULL SCREENZ MODE!!!!!!! EPIC FAILZ!!!!!!!!!!!”
Seriously, it’s like there’s a whole new generation of biff babies run around.
In every app I use there is a set paradigm on how to copy & paste. I select text, Cmd-C, and it’s copied. It works like this with text files, with Firefox & IE for HTML, Preview for PDFs… even Google Spreadsheets, a web app, does an amazing job following this paradigm.
Scribd does not.
Instead, you apparently either need to be told or fish around in their app for a while and become a power-user to figure it out? You have to click an icon, then you can select text to copy?
There’s one app that I know of that works like that: the Microsoft command prompt.
They mimic the UI of Microsoft’s command prompt (circa 1990?)
I hardly call that progress.
If that’s not Web -0.5, I don’t what is.
Which leads into another batch of comments — that some how it’s my fault for Scribd having a bad UI. That I should have known the URL provided to me restricted functionality & instead should have visited another URL. That it’s my fault they cut off functionality in one mode but not another.
(And so much for their ever doc having a unique URL slogan, eh?)
Listen, kiddies, it’s not the responsibilities of your users to become power users. It’s your job, as app developers, to make the damn thing usable. Stop blaming others for your faults.
The other batch that baffled my mind where people who advocated Scribd where that it didn’t require a non-standard PDF plugin. How’s that again? Scribd is better because instead it requires a non-standard flash plugin? Listen a non-standard plugin is a non-standard plugin. It’s like saying “PDFs suck because it kicks you in the left nut, Scribd rules because it kicks you in the right nut!”
Nobody cases if they get kicked in the left or the right nut. A kick in the nuts is a kick in the nuts.
Add to the fact you can view PDFs on the rapidly growing iPhone, but not Flash, means that all of the documents posted on Scribd is now blocked off from one of the fastest growing drives.
Which is always going to be case with proprietary formats.
Which is why they’re a bad idea.
Which is why Scribd is a bad idea.
In a way, I have to admit I’m somewhat surprised by Scribd’s popularity. But then again, I’m surprised by Paris Hilton popularity.
Which perhaps is fitting, as they both have another thing in common: they’re both a waste of space.
June 22nd, 2008 at 4:01 pm
A note on #2, Amir is excellent. I don’t think he should have even had to fight CB again. He should have fought Tim, would have a been a much better fight plus I think he beat CB in their fight.
CB was over-rated and it showed in the finale.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 am
I think Griffin spent most of his time training Amir on the proper use of self-deprecating, dry humor.
Well done, young padawan!
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:02 am
Again, Adobe’s Acrobat also defaults to not allowing copy-and-paste.
Other than that, yes, Scribd is abysmal. I seriously cannot understand why anybody every uploads anything there. Why? Why? Why?
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Phillip, I’ll take your word for it, as I don’t use Adobe Reader. (I use Preview on OS X which works as I described.) Still, that hardly sounds like good UI. Why not just do what the user means? Why click a button?
November 15th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Dude you kick ass!
Keep up the good work.
November 15th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Scribd is to internet as fat chicks are to hardons.
November 15th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Why does scribd get so much traffic? because their content is indexed by google and other search engines and people unknowingly click on it. Of course when you get to the scribd site, you automatically click back and look for the real source. (there is a lot of copyrighted material on there too)
November 16th, 2008 at 7:58 am
sites likes scribd make me wish google had personalized search preferences. I never remember to subtract scribd and experts-exchange from my programming searches. Scribd is especially bad since it tends to crash my browser.
January 17th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Absolutely right on. Said everything i was thinking about.
Another thing to add, flash currently works only for one OS (MS Windows)
on one architecture (Intel Architecture x86 processor) as of beginning of year 2009.
You might say, FAIL, there is flash plugin x on OS y for platofrm z, but please,
look at the compatibility list and API provided…
There are willing programmers that can port the flash player in say, 6 months time
to other platforms, like x68 series, PXA270, etc,etc…
on other OS’s like beos, unix, linux, bsd…if they are allowed.
After a sloppy bug fix form macromedia every once in a while;
So far, the flash player to linux does not work. period. It segfaults after a while.
In Microsoft terminology, that might be ok, but for other platforms, it must stay
up for a month. Segfault is simply not acceptable at all.
And API’s should work as expected. Having same or similar API function on different
platform is called a proper port,
placing a stub or not even having a API is called ‘in development’
Last but not least, let flash pass the security certificate or work better with SELinux…
There is practically no security what so ever on the flash plugin… Sure, sandbox, right?
Why do i need css+javascript+AJAX+flash(buggy) just to look at a document.
– form a user that still views things on w3m/wget, and rarely uses firefox.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:10 am
I am yet to find a document on Scribd that does not allow you to copy the text. Also, in all my time using scribd, I have not come across more than a couple documents that do not allow you to download the PDF.
I should add that if you take the time to navigate the site, go through related documents etc., you will see that Scribd is an incredible resource of content that would be otherwise very hard to find online. Good stuff like scanned books, piano scores and interesting reports. Granted, there’s copyrighted content that is not legal. But if you are against DRM by principle, then I think Scribd is actually a strong blow to the idea of limiting access to proprietary content – in the same way that Youtube is. And for the few docs that you can’t download, what is to keep you from reading them online, in the fullscreen viewer ?!! – it’s much faster than that bloody Adobe Reader anyway. I personally think it’s shameful that it took Adobe 9 versions to come up with a thing that loads under 8 seconds.
Crashes? Upgrade your browsers and Flash Players and it will not crash. I’ve never had a crash except in Google Chrome, which is endemically bad with Flash.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:42 am
I hate scribd. I find a document that will be useful and go to print it out. Guess what? A regular browser print preview shows nothing because of their jacked up format.
Then I go to the little icon in the corner and it has an option to “save to pdf” Oh, yay, I can do like 3 steps to print the damn thing out instead of 1. That’s progress? Instead of File > Print. I can do icon > Save as PDF. Then I can open it. Then I can print it. Btw, there is nothing that looks like a regular print icon on top of the document where I can find it.
So it’s a hassle, but I figure I can get what I want. Well, guess what? The jackasses as Scribd are going to force me to register so I can save the file so that I can print the file. Die, Scribd, die. I didn’t want the document that much and I’m sure you just went and pirated it from someone else anyway. Someone who did the work to make it and probably put it up in PDF or some more accessible format to begin with.
Now you’re going to force me to give you my information and hassle with all that crap just so I can print out your jackass format?
And yeah, maybe there was some other way around this. But I don’t care. There are standards in place. I don’t need another one that offers nothing particularly compelling and forces me to give away my information and be your groupie to access the content you stole from everyone else and put into your format.
You suck balls and I hope you die.
May 26th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I also hate Scribd.. it’s a complete and utter waste of time and space. If the application was half decent it might be okay -> but it isn’t half, or even quarter good. It’s bullshit.
July 18th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
As with other online services that get too fat and heavy to carry their own weight, scribd – on top of all its other disadvantages, such as the darn messy appearance of documents (since there’s no feature to sort them by name), they’re now randomly deleting documents (without warning or notice, of course) on copyright infringement claims, even if you’ve written every single word yourself…
Isn’t there a law yet that allows you to do nasty things to dweebs who waste everybody’s time with their online rubber dolls?
August 11th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
They’ve made a lot of changes since the original article was published… it is a lot better now and I find it useful to get documents seen and out there.
December 8th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I got mad wondering if scribd would be in my search results again for finding technical documentation, so I decided to search google for “I hate scribd” to see if any others out there shared my feelings. I fucking hate that website. It redundantly frames content that already has been created, as if trying to overlay itself and become greater than the document it is presenting. Obfuscation and irrelevant search results just piss me off!
December 24th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
As one of the idiots who has regretted repeatedly wasting his time on Scribd, I can only agree (once again): Scribd SUCKS!!!
What’s worse is that they keep making “innovations” that end up in rendering the whole bloody mess of a site dysfunctional…
Scribd is what happens when a bunch of coke heads get together to play “Let’s get rich quick like Bill Gates!”