4 ms·

Is Scribd a Porn Document Network?

20 points by moses1400 19y ago

cstejerean 19y ago
interesting. I think that scribd is bound to get blocked by school and work firewalls and other services leading to the site being less useful for the general population. I would propose they create something like adult.scribd.com (or an entire different domain name) that can be easily filtered and enforce that all adult content must be posted accessed from this URL (where they can add age verification if needed).
- palish 19y ago
  That worked for YTMND. Unfortunately, it requires a pretty large army of moderators.
  - karzeem 19y ago
    Do you know how YouTube filtered adult content from early on? They were always extremely effective, so it would be interesting to know how much time they spent on it.
    - palish 19y ago
      I'm not sure, but YouTube initially had a strong community. They might have simply let everyone flag content as inappropriate. That doesn't scale, but it works when you can trust most of your community.
  - paulgb 19y ago
    Maybe a job for Amazon's Mechanical Turk? It sounds like the adult documents are used to advertise adult sites and so they include outgoing links to adult sites. If that is the case, automatic filtering would be a partial solution.
- Goladus 19y ago
  One should note that not all the content in the adult section is porn. In any case, web filters are getting much better at targeting specific content. I've seen filters that can allow you to log in and use Facebook, but its messaging interface is blocked. It would seem fairly trivial for a filter to target the big area that scribd has cordoned off for adult content and leave the rest available.
dpapathanasiou 19y ago
Well, the internet is for porn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvSAoJdMW0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvSAoJdMW0), after all...
ed 19y ago
Oh come on. The adult group is the biggest is because you're required by Scribd to add your adult content to it. You're still free to add it to any additional group too, but this is essentially Scribd's way of tagging the content.
- reidman 19y ago
  "The adult group is the biggest is because you're required by Scribd to add your adult content to it." Huh?
  - ed 19y ago
    http://www.scribd.com/groups/view/7-adult http://www.scribd.com/groups/view/7-adult
  - Goladus 19y ago
    If you want to upload adult content to scribd, it must be added to the adult group. If you want to upload anything else, it doesn't have to be in a group at all. At least, that's the way I understood the comment. If you only measure groups, you're ignoring the vast majority of uploads which are not added to anything.
DanielBMarkham 19y ago
Porn is like the Special Forces of startups. Special Forces were known as "force multipliers" because they can take a small army of native people and make them have a big impact. Looks like porn can take a small company and give it a huge kick in the butt. The question is whether they want to go this direction or not. I know some companies run from it at all costs. Some embrace it. It'll be interesting to see where they go with this, assuming the article is true.
pg 19y ago
What blatant hypocrisy. The author of this article offers no evidence that Scribd has deliberately used porn to increase traffic-- that the proportion of porn in Scribd is any higher than any other large repository, like the Google index. And yet it seems pretty clear that the author himself is using the topic as a way of increasing traffic.
mattmaroon 19y ago
Isn't the internet a porn document network?
jsnx 19y ago
This has a little of the flavor of "Valley Wag" -- subtly slamming innovators for failing to fix the internet/economy/government. Scribd allows people to share content and, lo and behold, people use it to share porn -- just like Facebook, youTube, Flickr... The author can't really make up their mind as to where Scribd is in error: are they using porn to drive up traffic, or do they fail to have right the disclaimer? Going so far as to ask whether it is "acceptable for a VC backed company to drive growth via porn?", the author back pedals and asks for an "Are you OK with this?" dialogue, though the site already has it. (Maybe that changed recently?)
Dauntless 19y ago
What is this "compete.com" site, and why are people believing this bogus data and even cite it? The data from this site is highly irrelevant and false. And the Search Analytics is a joke: For example for wikipedia top keywords are "snape kills dumbledore page" and softpedia.com has "vanessa hudgens pictures", mit.edu has "romeo and juliet", slate.com has "girls gone wild"... huh? What is this bs?
- nostrademons 19y ago
  It's a competitor of Alexa. Their data is gathered the same way as Alexa's - via browser toolbar. Supposedly it's a bit more reliable than Alexa, which isn't saying much.

20 points by moses1400 19y ago

interesting. I think that scribd is bound to get blocked by school and work firewalls and other services leading to the site being less useful for the general population. I would propose they create something like adult.scribd.com (or an entire different domain name) that can be easily filtered and enforce that all adult content must be posted accessed from this URL (where they can add age verification if needed).

palish 19y ago
That worked for YTMND. Unfortunately, it requires a pretty large army of moderators.
- karzeem 19y ago
  Do you know how YouTube filtered adult content from early on? They were always extremely effective, so it would be interesting to know how much time they spent on it.
  - palish 19y ago
    I'm not sure, but YouTube initially had a strong community. They might have simply let everyone flag content as inappropriate. That doesn't scale, but it works when you can trust most of your community.
- paulgb 19y ago
  Maybe a job for Amazon's Mechanical Turk? It sounds like the adult documents are used to advertise adult sites and so they include outgoing links to adult sites. If that is the case, automatic filtering would be a partial solution.
Goladus 19y ago
One should note that not all the content in the adult section is porn. In any case, web filters are getting much better at targeting specific content. I've seen filters that can allow you to log in and use Facebook, but its messaging interface is blocked. It would seem fairly trivial for a filter to target the big area that scribd has cordoned off for adult content and leave the rest available.

dpapathanasiou 19y ago

Well, the internet is for porn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvSAoJdMW0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvSAoJdMW0), after all...

ed 19y ago

Oh come on. The adult group is the biggest is because you're required by Scribd to add your adult content to it. You're still free to add it to any additional group too, but this is essentially Scribd's way of tagging the content.

reidman 19y ago
"The adult group is the biggest is because you're required by Scribd to add your adult content to it." Huh?
- ed 19y ago
  http://www.scribd.com/groups/view/7-adult http://www.scribd.com/groups/view/7-adult
- Goladus 19y ago
  If you want to upload adult content to scribd, it must be added to the adult group. If you want to upload anything else, it doesn't have to be in a group at all. At least, that's the way I understood the comment. If you only measure groups, you're ignoring the vast majority of uploads which are not added to anything.

DanielBMarkham 19y ago

Porn is like the Special Forces of startups. Special Forces were known as "force multipliers" because they can take a small army of native people and make them have a big impact. Looks like porn can take a small company and give it a huge kick in the butt. The question is whether they want to go this direction or not. I know some companies run from it at all costs. Some embrace it. It'll be interesting to see where they go with this, assuming the article is true.

pg 19y ago

What blatant hypocrisy. The author of this article offers no evidence that Scribd has deliberately used porn to increase traffic-- that the proportion of porn in Scribd is any higher than any other large repository, like the Google index. And yet it seems pretty clear that the author himself is using the topic as a way of increasing traffic.

mattmaroon 19y ago

Isn't the internet a porn document network?

jsnx 19y ago

This has a little of the flavor of "Valley Wag" -- subtly slamming innovators for failing to fix the internet/economy/government. Scribd allows people to share content and, lo and behold, people use it to share porn -- just like Facebook, youTube, Flickr... The author can't really make up their mind as to where Scribd is in error: are they using porn to drive up traffic, or do they fail to have right the disclaimer? Going so far as to ask whether it is "acceptable for a VC backed company to drive growth via porn?", the author back pedals and asks for an "Are you OK with this?" dialogue, though the site already has it. (Maybe that changed recently?)

Dauntless 19y ago

What is this "compete.com" site, and why are people believing this bogus data and even cite it? The data from this site is highly irrelevant and false. And the Search Analytics is a joke: For example for wikipedia top keywords are "snape kills dumbledore page" and softpedia.com has "vanessa hudgens pictures", mit.edu has "romeo and juliet", slate.com has "girls gone wild"... huh? What is this bs?

nostrademons 19y ago
It's a competitor of Alexa. Their data is gathered the same way as Alexa's - via browser toolbar. Supposedly it's a bit more reliable than Alexa, which isn't saying much.