3 ms·
Great. Now I might not cringe every time I see a Scribd link. A flash PDF reader is worse than useless. I can't use flash on my iPhone, and the Scribd reader u
by jacoblyles 17y ago
Great. Now I might not cringe every time I see a Scribd link.
A flash PDF reader is worse than useless. I can't use flash on my iPhone, and the Scribd reader used to break back when I used an Ubuntu machine. And it certainly never ran great on my Mac. When you consider that I already had perfectly fine, and free!, PDF readers on all three devices, Scribd was actively harmful.
But an HTML 5 PDF reader could actually be useful! It may be more lightweight than downloading a whole PDF. It will certainly be no worse than what I can currently use to render and read a PDF.
This is good. Scribd may change their image as a widely hated startup.
- jacoblyles 17y agoI get it, we'll ignore the fact that Scribd makes the web a worse place when the founders are in the thread.
- BrandonM 17y agoWell that's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. How can a website make the web a worse place? A website either provides something you can't get anywhere else, which is intrinsically valuable, or you can just ignore the site.
- jacoblyles 17y ago>How can a website make the web a worse place? It's easy. Someone sends you a Scribd link. Scribd is written in Flash so maybe you can't read the damn thing. Before Scribd, people would just send you PDF links. Everybody can read PDFs. Scribd harms the web by reducing the number of people who can view its content. That's what I call "providing negative value".