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My impression has always been that it was a service to make PDFs less useful.

Might you have said the same thing about YouTube?

YouTube made it easier to upload and watch short videos. Much easier. Scribd is an automatic Close-Tab for me. A usability nightmare.

I don't want to subscribe to Amazon's service, and have very little expectations for Scribd.

I'm amazed that the investors doubled down on such a poor end user experience, but I guess they are seeing good paying customer growth. Paying customers growth will fade away unless the end user experience is fixed.

> I'm amazed that the investors doubled down on such a poor end user experience

Sunk cost fallacy.

The only thing I've seen Scribd used for is embedding legal filings on various news and e-rag sites. Getting into legitimate publishing distribution is going to be tough. Licensing content is a pain; and once the sweetheart deals expire, there go the profit margins.