Ask HN: Relationship between HN and Scribd?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124940

by nkurz • 16 years ago

49 39 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I recently submitted a link to a PDF paper. It first appeared as I submitted it, but after some time the title had been changed to include a Scribd link. I found this off-putting: it implied either that I was encouraging the use of Scribd, or that the author had already chosen to use Scribd as a publisher.

What is the relationship between Hacker News and Scribd? Are all PDF links modified to link to Scribd automatically, or is this done by hand on a case-by-case basis? And why is the use of Scribd officially encouraged, while primary non-framed links are preferable for HTML content?

jmount2• 16 years ago

I think Scribd is a Y-combinator funded startup (hence the Hacker News connection) and some of the Hacker News admins by-hand edit other people's posts. I am very against copying PDFs into a walled-garden like Scribd, but this isn't my website.

cglee2• 16 years ago

If true, that seems downright unethical to me. I've actually met (and possibly drank with) some of the Scribd founders and they seem like really nice, smart fellows, but this practice really shouldn't be encouraged (unless there is a good reason behind it other than to promote Scribd).

DTrejo• 16 years ago

PG wants scribd to do well, and so HN auto-adds Scribd links (I believe this is how it works).

aminuit• 16 years ago

Initially (or at least a couple of years ago) if you submitted a PDF, the link would only be available through Scribd. It was a topic of much discussion. See here for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195431

sounddust• 16 years ago

It's certainly there to promote Scribd. I don't believe that HN has ever claimed to be an independent, impartial site. It's on a subdomain of ycombinator.com, it is heavily frequented by people who are either involved in YC, or people who want to be. Any story that is linked to a YC company is going to get a disproportionate amount of attention here, and I doubt that YC will hesitate to integrate links/widgets from YC companies as they've done with Scribd, CO2stats, and others.

I'm pretty sure that one of the purposes of the site is to attract people to YC. If you want to know why people like myself (who are just here for the hacker news/discussion) stick around, it's because it has some of the most interesting and civil discussion of any online community, and if you know about the YC bias then it's not a big deal to filter it out in your mind when browsing/reading the site.

Zak4• 16 years ago

I've found clicking a PDF link on anything but Mac OS to be rather unpleasant. Many people (me included) consider the scribd link a more pleasant experience.

Tichy• 16 years ago

As long as they don't change the link to the original PDF, it seems fair to me (if you accept scribd as fair in principle - they simply gobble up all PDFs they can get, I suppose). Meaning I think it is just a helper to include a viewer in a link to a PDF.

angelbob• 16 years ago

Scribd is definitely a YC-funded startup. When I interviewed there, the founder mentioned it.

jackowayed• 16 years ago

Yeah, Scribd is YC funded. I always figured HN automatically scribd-ed PDFs, but I guess admins might do it manually (though I'd guess there'd have to be something special anyway, since normally the whole title links to the story link).

I think the rationale is that some people don't like PDFs. They don't want to download something when they're just going to skim it now and probably never look at it again. I don't really get it, but I guess it would make sense for very long PDFs so that you don't have to wait to download the whole thing when you might take one look at it and decide you don't care.

jmount2• 16 years ago

Now I remember what Scribd reminds me of: Steven Brill's Brill's content (the web site, not the magazine).

tptacek• 16 years ago

I don't like Scribd, but I also don't like it when I click on a link and a file appears on my filesystem, which is what happens when I click PDF links in NetNewsWire.

akkartik2• 16 years ago

If anything, HN scribd posts seem to turn into straight pdfs. I think the admins search for posts with [scribd] in the title and link to a pdf version instead.

nkurz• 16 years ago

No. I say this with absolute certainty, having just submitted a link to a PDF, to which the [scribd] portion was added, either by the system or by an HN administrator.

If you click on the title, it still goes to the original URL, which in my case was a straight PDF. If you click on the [scribd] portion, you are taken to a copy at Scribd.

falien2• 16 years ago

Oh, from the original post I took it that it replaced your link with a scribd link (rather than adding a second link). I still think it is a questionable practice, but find it much less objectionable than I did at first.

akkartik2• 16 years ago

Oh I see. I always assumed when I saw that, that somebody had uploaded a scribd link and an admin had modified it to go to the straight pdf. Thanks for the correction.

sundarurfriend• 16 years ago

The consensus here seems to be that it's an effort to promote Scribd, but I had always assumed that it was an attempt at trying to be helpful to those who prefer to remain within a browser, and to those who hate opening PDFs. At least, it serves that use case to me.

mooism2• 16 years ago

I think it's both.

diN0bot• 16 years ago

how about we submit pdf's inside google's pdf viewer?

https://docs.google.com/viewer

just mention the real domain in the post title

imurray• 16 years ago

Submitting the original pdf link is best for pointing to the real source and giving people the option of how to deal with it. Those that like Google viewer links can always fix that themselves. Details in this sub-thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1115897

Ask HN: Relationship between HN and Scribd?

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