Although I'm not really sure who is driving all this traffic to Scribd (many mention that the dubious and illegal content may be a significant portion of this,

Although I'm not really sure who is driving all this traffic to Scribd (many mention that the dubious and illegal content may be a significant portion of this, although PG has said it is not), I think this boils down to a matter of preference. For many members of the HN community, it is preferable to download/view the doc via a PDF reader for ease of use, lack of Flash, as well as saving and printing abilities. Obviously, for members of the Scribd community, this is not the preferable way in consuming content. The HN community is probably also privy to hordes of other ways to share and discover docs, while again, the Scribd community, apparently is not. Personally, I think this is seemingly an argument for why YouTube should have failed back in 2005. Flash. Can already download movies using a desktop player. Embeddable content. Love it or hate it, we see where it's gotten YouTube (at least in terms of eyeballs, acquisition, and traffic, if not monetization). I did, however, for some reason find the post to be comical satire, and I laughed as I read it, but in general it's not_that_big_of_a_deal. The one thing I would suggest, however, is that PG and co. remove the auto-Scribd PDF rendering. Clearly, by the position of this article on the front page, and the several comments below, this is not the preferable way to the HN community to consume PDFs, and we'd prefer not to be sent to Scribd to read PDFs. (And, as someone who has been here for a couple hundred days now, I'm really interested to see if a founder will respond, or if PG will comment).