4 ms·
They’re responsible for the existence of scribd. Not aware of any other obviously socially net negative companies.
by barry-cotter 6mo ago
They’re responsible for the existence of scribd. Not aware of any other obviously socially net negative companies.
- transcriptase 6mo agoFor the uninformed what’s the deal with scribd?
- tim333 6mo agoScribd are quite annoying. The pitch was "the YouTube for documents" allowing stuff to be posted and shared but they tend to try and get subscription money off you to see anything unlike the likes of YouTube.
- CamperBob2 6mo agoScribd scrapes the web of all the .PDFs that it can find, then gates them behind a paywall and SEOs their way to the top of Google's rankings. That's it, that's all they do. They run a zero value tollbooth with other peoples' IP, taking advantage of users who don't have the search-fu to hunt down the documents themselves. They should pretty much die in a grease fire.
- energy123 6mo agoReddit
- Zak 6mo agoI think when making the claim a company is a net negative, it's necessary to explore what would have happened if the company hadn't been founded. I find it unlikely, for example that there would not be a dominant centralized forum platform. People would have certainly started problematic communities on the dominant platform, and it's unlikely a platform with strict moderation would have gained dominance before 2015 or so. I do think a dominant player would have been established by 2015. Do you think whatever you see as harmful about Reddit would not have occurred if the company didn't exist?
- energy123 6mo agoIt would have happened more slowly at least, delaying the increase in populism, nihilism and depression in the Western world, the anglosphere in particular.
- toyg 6mo agoThat's mostly imputable to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Reddit is a footnote in the mainstream, which is dominated by those 3.
- energy123 6mo agoGiven the number of Reddit users across the Anglosphere, I disagree that Reddit is not a major contributor.
- Zak 6mo agoWhat traits specific to Reddit as opposed to a hypothetical generic alternative forum platform do you think are major contributors to those social trends?
- energy123 6mo agoRecommendation engine pushing users into ideological bubbles, public voting mechanism creating incentive for conformity which then creates purity spirals, lack of moderation.
- Zak 6mo agoEarly Reddit had a recommended tab, but that didn't last long. The current recommendation features are relatively recent - this decade at least. It would surprise me if the winner in that space didn't have a public voting mechanism. Digg, Reddit's early major competitor had one, and heavy-handed moderation surrounding the HD-DVD decryption key leak was one of the major inflection points that drove users from Digg to Reddit. Stricter moderation during that time period would have been a losing strategy.
- monsieurbanana 6mo agoAirbnb
- roysting 6mo agoFlock
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]