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Comment by zain | Hacker News Reader

Man, you guys are harsh. Even if it isn't a service you yourself would use, why bash a service useful for others? The first goal of many Y Combinator startups is to make something people want, and Scribd clearly fits the bill if millions of people are using it.

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Of course we're harsh. Start-ups are almost all extremely competitive, and the people who use start-ups are cutthroat capitalists. Everybody's looking for the absolute best things can get. I remember, two years before Tumblr launched, I would go between blogging platforms at the rate of one a week, pounce on every update, install and test every beta and every plugin, looking for a platform that would work well for me. I still do it with certain things. Any time a social network claims it's got something Facebook doesn't, I check it out. I'd like to think this isn't entirely unusual behavior here. People in this field are very often perfectionists.

With Scribd we're a mix of benevolent and indignant. Benevolent, because it's YCombinator. Indignant, because it renders text in Flash.In both cases, though, the response is the same. Benevolence isn't being kind and wishing good luck. Look at sites with that attitude, or real life institutions, and there you'll find the places where progress becomes stagnant. In order to encourage progress, it helps to have a bit of an edge. And it attracts the right people. I plan on launching a beta preview of my current project to members here, because I want to be ripped apart before anybody else sees this. I figure it'll do me and my partner a world of good.

I disagree.

ONE person decides to use scribd to show some text on techcrunch, and suddenly the whole readership of techcrunch are "users" of scribd? Measuring success in terms of pageviews in a passive widget isn't a good measure.

I highly doubt comscore is claiming to be tracking embed/widget traffic. Those numbers are supposed to be for the site itself.

They are quantified, and quantcast shows the vast majority of their traffic is to their destination: http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com

see scribd.com vs The Scribd Network

True, so people are linking instead of embedding. But the point is the same... If one person makes the decision to link to scribd instead of the pdf, and 100 people follow that link, it doesn't really mean 100 people value the service.

The traffic isn't just from people following links. What about the people uploading 50,000 documents every day?

Source: Scribd says so, according to washingtonpost http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12...

True, although I'd guess a fair amount is webmasters trying to cross promote their content. Seems like if you own a porn site, you may as well post some "tasters" to scribd with your web address on, etc etc

That's true and so was your original argument, and both are true of YouTube as well. That doesn't make their traffic any less impressive. It's just using good viral spread mechanisms.

How about the 50k documents uploaded every day? Can you really question that Scribd is a product that a lot of people want to use?

From a quick look at the "most recent" page:

  20 docs per page, 50 pages covers last 18 hours.
  =1,000 docs in last 18 hours
  =approx 1,333/day

Maybe that page isn't showing every document, but I don't see why it wouldn't. And sure, it's new years, but even so...

Also you can't deny its used by webmasters promoting their websites....Posting endless tips etc with their link at the bottom. Take a look at some of the recently posted docs.

I don't believe they'd claim 50k a day if it were 1.33k. Something is wrong there.

Yes, millions of people are using it for reading pirated ebooks.

PG didn't say "build something legal that people want".

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