Comments on: Scribd, the Followup

By: McDozer

McDozer — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:44:29 +0000

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!”

By: jman

jman — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:19:22 +0000

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!

By: mookstar

mookstar — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:37:36 +0000

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.

By: McDozer

McDozer — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:31:29 +0000

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?

By: luke

luke — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:09:57 +0000

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.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:42:58 +0000

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.

By: Rares

Rares — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:10:23 +0000

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.

By: yammy

yammy — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 07:43:11 +0000

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.

By: matt

matt — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:58:21 +0000

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.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:53:04 +0000

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)

By: ben

ben — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:31:23 +0000

Scribd is to internet as fat chicks are to hardons.

By: josephkenyon

josephkenyon — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:25:48 +0000

Dude you kick ass!
Keep up the good work.

By: wdr1

wdr1 — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:45:04 +0000

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?

By: Phillip Winn

Phillip Winn — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:02:03 +0000

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?

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:01:33 +0000

I think Griffin spent most of his time training Amir on the proper use of self-deprecating, dry humor.

Well done, young padawan!

By: -craigt

-craigt — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:01:42 +0000

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.