
Scribd and Quora considered harmful - ctoth
http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/quora-scribd-considered-harmful.html
======
NelsonMinar
I want to highlight one part of my blog post no one's picked up on: "some
engineer actually wrote code to deliberately break document sharing on the
web." Think of all the things an engineer can do with the skill to program
computers, to make amazing things on the Internet. And he or she spends that
time developing new ways to make it hard to read text on a web page. Ugh.

Frankly making fun of Quora and Scribd is like shooting fish in a barrel, but
sometimes it's helpful to articulate the obvious.

~~~
dangelo
You say our motivation is "to force users to pay or share advertising data or
some such bullshit". Actually, we don't charge users anything, and we don't
run ads or sell user data or anything like that. We only try to get users to
sign up because they have a better experience when they do and in the long
term they write more answers and more knowledge gets shared that way.

You may not want to sign up yourself, or you may disagree with this tradeoff
on principle, which is fine, but I want people to understand the motivation.
We just want to increase the total amount of knowledge shared. In the short
term requiring signups means some people don’t join. But a lot of people do
join and start to use Quora regularly, a lot more than if there was no
requirement, and those people end up contributing so many more answers that we
judge this to be the right decision for the long term.

In fact, at this point, most of the answers written every day would not exist
if we had not had the signup requirement. I realize that this choice makes the
product worse for people who refuse to join. But in the counterfactual world
Quora is a product with much less coverage of any topic, and that is a much
lower quality experience for users. We are trading off a little annoyance at
first for a much better experience and the ability to access a vastly larger
base of content in the long term.

~~~
NelsonMinar
Thanks for the thoughtful response, I'll link it in my blog post. My apologies
for mischaracterizing Quora as running ads. [http://www.quora.com/Quoras-
Business-Model-and-Monetization/...](http://www.quora.com/Quoras-Business-
Model-and-Monetization/Is-Quoras-revenue-literally-0-Does-Quora-generate-any-
revenues)

------
bsenftner
Quora is dangerously close to being a nuisance with all the pointless emails
they send. I think I browsed the site a half dozen times max, and contributed
to two-three questions. Now I get daily emails about distant friends activity
on Quora. LinkedIn this the only site I've been tricked into joining that is
worse with their spammy emails.

~~~
pyronite
I never get daily emails, but regardless, they provide fine-grained control
over unsubscribing to these emails. If you receive them daily, you might want
to take 5 minutes and opt out.

~~~
lucb1e
> you might want to take 5 minutes

If an opt-out takes more than ten seconds (find opt-out, click it, close tab,
alt+tab back to email) I add it to my spamfilter. And that means I will never
read email from that sender again, not even in my spam folder, unless I am
expecting e-mail and (temporarily) remove it from my blacklist.

------
weinzierl
While I usually find the businesses funded by Y Combinator awesome I think
Scribd is a bad apple. Not only is the user experience terrible it also has
the smell of a bad neighborhood with all the pirated content it offers.

Today I incidentally read the current (March 2014) "Gutenberg 3.5 - Ebook
Piracy Report"[1]. It seems to be from an anti-piracy lobbying group, so its
obviously biased, but it mentions Scribd even before Library Genesis.

That being said: Scribd seems to be (or has been?) one of the most successful
Y Combinator companies[2] and is sometimes called "YouTube of documents"[3].

    
    
       [1] http://www.abuse-search.com/Gutenberg%2035h.pdf
       [2] https://www.google.com/#q=scribd+ycombinator
       [3] https://www.google.com/#q=youtube+of+documents

~~~
lolnope
This is somewhat off topic, but I've always thought of Library Genesis as a
modern-day Library of Alexandria. Both contain vast stores of priceless
knowledge, and both employ(ed) somewhat less than optimal means of obtaining
their books.

I wonder if the individuals who wrote that report can see the similarities
too. It's going to be a sad day if they manage to raze LibGen as well.

~~~
dredmorbius
Interesting insight. I've only recently found LibGen, and it's simply amazing
for conducting research.

I expect it will be attacked, possibly successfully, but other alternatives
will rise to take its place.

------
nhangen
When you take an investor's money and lack the ability to generate revenue,
you're forced to use shady 'growth hacking' techniques in order to fake hockey
stick metrics for the purpose of finding additional investors ad infinitum.

~~~
infinitone
Well, you keep doing this until you get 'acquired.'

~~~
ddw
Yeah, I think Quora only makes sense if they are bought and a piece of it is
implemented within one of the giants like Google. It's an interesting new
business model I guess.

~~~
cordite
Yahoo Answers is already scary enough.

~~~
colordrops
oh yes it is. example:

"Can anyone tell me if Optoma is the best brand making projectors?"

Best Answer Selected by Voters: "Nigga, I saw in a previous question that you
havin a baby. what the fuck you spending money fo bitch, save that shit"

------
joshstrange
I couldn't agree more. I have long though Scribd was toxic and a terrible idea
in an age where browsers render PDFs flawlessly and that was before I knew of
the find issues and DRM font. I have avoided Scribd links like the plague as
every time I have accidentally go to their website I have found navigating
(scrolling) the PDF to be nearly unusable and I despise how small the view
port is. To be honest I have no clue what other content surrounds the document
which I attribute in part to "Ad blindness" and I won't be checking now
because I don't want to give them the page view.

As for Quora it is Experts Exchange 2.0. Hiding community sourced knowledge
behind a login is shameful and disgusting. Especially since, if memory serves,
they started out allowing you to see all the content then later added the
blurring and popup. Thankfully I didn't pay much attention to Quora prior to
this change and so I don't have any knowledge of mine locked up in. If I had I
would delete my responses and repost the question and my answer to the
appropriate Stack Exchange site.

I'm on mobile right now but once back at my computer I plan on adding both of
these sites to my hosts file as I refuse to be an accomplice to or support
their shady practices.

Thank you for highlighting what I have long thought about Quora and fully
opening my eyes to the sins of Scribd which I have long disliked but lacked
the interest to fully investigate.

------
Karunamon
Scribd seems unambiguously terrible (DRM fonts? That's a whole new level of
garbage), but I find it really hard to say the same about Quora unless you're
confirmation-bias-ing your way to portray them in a bad light.

So i've got this website. You have to log in to post things there. Other
people have to log in to see the things you post there.

Someone please explain to me again how this arrangement is evil? Seems pretty
straightforward and fair to me.

Spam emails?
[http://gyazo.com/f4752783f03276b654dd3f7044cb6766](http://gyazo.com/f4752783f03276b654dd3f7044cb6766)

Seems to me like they give you pretty comprehensive settings on what you can
turn on and turn off. And it's not like this screen was hard to find. It's in
an "Email preferences" link on the same general settings page you set your
password on.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Quota is evil (your word, not mine) because they make it seem, though eg
Google, that you can access the information immediately. Further, they are
breaking the norms of Q&A sites that viewing information doesn't require more
than passing interaction with the site (a norm many people who provide Q&A
content tend to agree with). Finally, it brings back strong memories (as
mentioned in TFA) of Experts Exchange, which was uniformly hated.

Spamming is just an extra incentive to dislike them.

~~~
Karunamon
So they do something slightly different from Stack* and they're "considered
harmful"?

The screenshot I linked should be enough to immediately disprove any
accusations of "spam".

~~~
shadowfox
> The screenshot I linked should be enough to immediately disprove any
> accusations of "spam".

Really? You have to uncheck something like 20 checkboxes to avoid spam. And
they used to have a tendency to re-enable all of them each time they add a new
option; so you had to repeat the process on and off. (Hopefully that last bit
has tapered down)

~~~
Karunamon
Your spam is someone else's notification from a service they use.

Can we stop torturing the definition of words, please? Spam is unsolicited
commercial email. A service you registered for emailing you when one of your
questions is answered or commented on, or a digest of interesting questions
from the week, and so on is _not_ spam by any possible definition.

Now, where have I seen that behavior before? Is this spam too, by your
definition?

[http://gyazo.com/df79d094acec54257a6d06b331664f5a](http://gyazo.com/df79d094acec54257a6d06b331664f5a)

And here's the control UI

[http://gyazo.com/db7e83881331c7dde7f028af3411f917](http://gyazo.com/db7e83881331c7dde7f028af3411f917)

This is something I _wish_ i could do over on Stack* - I'd love to be emailed
when a question is answered or commented on. But alas, I have a newsletter,
and a single checkbox that turns a bunch of stuff on and off. But you don't
earn hate on hacker news for having too few features, apparently you earn it
by having too many?

The worst thing you can accuse Quora of is being very, very granular as to
what you can turn on and off... Hence why I call it confirmation bias. People
have been told the site is crap and so go looking for reasons to confirm it.

Behold! The email settings UI is over-engineered! Let's imply a huge amount of
mustache-twirling negativity into their motivations for doing so! The horror!
They send an email once a week with interesting questions! It must be _spam_!
Nevermind the fact that Stack* does the _exact same thing_!

All of this Quora hate is really, really unjustified for the simple difference
of having a registration requirement to view their content.

~~~
gergles
A service emailing me _anything_ I did not explicitly ask it to is sending me
spam - unsolicited commercial email - by your own definition. Just because you
find the spam useful doesn't mean it isn't spam.

~~~
Karunamon
By that definition, Stack Overflow's weekly email is "spam". You signed up for
it the same way you signed up for Quora.

~~~
colordrops
Yes. Most mail from corporations at this point is spam. That is completely
true.

~~~
Karunamon
Your definition is so broad as to be utterly meaningless.

------
csandreasen
Scribd is a nightmare to use on a mobile device as well. I can't count the
times I've open an article on my phone and wanted to view the linked PDF, only
to get a brand new web page whose text is too small to read, can't be resized,
and zoom buttons are unclickable because they overlap. Oftentimes there's a
tiny "download PDF" link located in a the upper right corner which is
incredibly difficult to press; after repeatedly attempting to press it for an
inordinate amount of time, I can usually finally load it into a native PDF
viewer.

In short, just supply a PDF link.

------
chanux
I think my continued use of these sites rigged with all dark patterns are just
a nod of acceptance. Deleted Quora app from phone long ago and logged out.
It's probably time I delete my account.

Update: Oh well. There's no delete feature implemented. You have to email
Quora support.

[https://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-
Quora...](https://www.quora.com/Quora-product/How-do-I-delete-my-Quora-
account)

~~~
justincormack
they do delete your account after this though... so its worth it.

~~~
michaelt
Only after several requests and several months.

------
ryanwhitney
I tried using their "find" function (as it hijacks command+f) today in Safari,
Chrome, and Firefox. It didn't work in any of them.

I wondered why Safari's own find wasn't working on the embedded pdf, but I
guess that's because of their DRM font hack.

Icing on the cake was a tall ad that took over the browser window with a video
when hovered over that was positioned tight to the right side of the page,
completely blocking my ability to click and drag the scrollbar.

No more clicking on Scribd links.

------
gergles
Wow, I had no idea about the font on scribd. That's outright asshole.

------
mkempe
It is quite puzzling that YC invests in and promotes companies that implement
essentially DRM for documents and DRM for Q&A, with all the evil techniques
that DRM requires and incites.

It appears that the movie and music industry are considered harmful, but
imitating them in other domains is wonderful.

------
sitkack
Both sites just feel wrong. Not only is there an impedance mismatch in how
they operate, there is a cognitive mismatch. Manipulative walled gardens which
add negative value. Internet fast food.

------
tonywebster
I hate pay-walls and even login-walls, so I genuinely disagree with Scribd's
payment model. However, I do think the service provides value in that users
are able to upload a PDF and it renders in a pretty widely-compatible viewer
format (in HTML5). Embedding PDFs across multiple platforms are still a
terrible native experience, and on some systems it launches tons of painful
Acrobat toolbars or just doesn't show up at all.

I have yet to find a free or open source solution that's incredibly easy to
implement and embed (for bloggers). To get PDF content showing nicely inside
of a scrollable iframe, you need to convert the PDF to HTML, and host images
somewhere. That's not easy for people who just want to jump right into
publishing blog content. DocumentCloud seems totally awesome, but their hosted
platform is restricted to journalists; specifically, "newsrooms."

I use Scribd for legal research; there's a lot of attorneys who post PDFs of
case pleadings, since (a) PACER is expensive to use, and (b) RECAP has
terrible searching. To that end, it really is the YouTube of PDFs, and I love
it for that. Of course, YouTube is ad-supported, so perhaps that'd be a better
option for Scribd, but that tends to draw ire too.

For what it's worth, you don't need to pay for a Scribd account if you
regularly upload content. I haven't uploaded anything in a few months and I
was able to download, for free, the Declaration of Independence link that the
author highlighted. Of course, you wouldn't know that unless you stared at the
little text on the bottom of the page, so that should change.

~~~
notduncansmith
Just out of curiosity, what is it about pay-walls that you hate so much?

I don't hate them (my wallet does, when the content I want is behind them of
course), but I find it to be a pretty reasonable model. Have a bite of the
content, if you enjoy it then pay for the rest. It doesn't seem crazy to me
that people should be compensated for their work, and while the "pay what you
want" model is a lovely ideal, some people are more comfortable putting a
fixed price on it.

I'm not asking to be combative, I'm genuinely curious on whether or not you
have a better solution, and I'm totally open to having my opinion of pay-walls
changed if I've overlooked some flaw in that model.

~~~
cwyers
The paradox of paywalls is that content you have to pay for is less valuable
than content you get for free. The ability to link to and from a page is a
tremendous value-add in the web; a paywall breaks the chain of links. If an
article is behind a paywall, I can read it, but I can't Tweet it to all my
followers and expect they can read it, I can't link to it from my blog and
expect all my readers to get the context... sharing is a fundamental feature
for the web and paywalls break it.

There IS a case where paywalls work and work well -- if some of the value in
the information is information asymmetry. This is why the Wall Street Journal
works better behind a paywall than the New York Times does -- the audience for
the WSJ is a bunch of people who deal in investing, where the value sometimes
isn't in merely being informed but being more informed than the others.

------
gwern
For avoiding using Scribd for public PDF hosting, I've been looking at
[http://pdf.yt/](http://pdf.yt/)

(I keep wondering when the powers that be at HN will finally remove the Scribd
autolinks on submissions, and keep being disappointed.)

~~~
hollerith
>I keep wondering when the powers that be at HN will finally remove the Scribd
autolinks

YC owns part of Scribd. (Scribd took part in YC S06.)

------
SoftwareMaven
For at least a year, links to Quora and Scribd have been considered, by me, to
be non-existent. Every experience with them in the preceding six months had
been awful, so I refuse to interact with them again (at least, until I hear
how they fixed things).

~~~
davidgerard
Quora is casual fun. Like Reddit with text. Ephemeral.

(I am told by Quora investors that they really didn't try for the inane
comparisons to Wikipedia, but that this was made up by the press; much as the
comparisons between Wikipedia and Knol were. [I am a long-time Wikipedia press
volunteer and watched that last one being made up out of nothing.])

------
dredmorbius
Agree completely and YC should disown (and stop linking) both sites.

I've found some use pulling content from Scribd using text-mode browsers, but
even that is exceedingly painful.

My policy is to ignore both sites, and I may well simply block the domains to
avoid frustrations.

------
sandstrom
I agree in the case of Scribd. Quora is not as clear-cut.

While I dislike their 'login-wall', it doesn't feel like a company focused
around short-term profits.

I think their aim is noble, only that they are struggling somewhat to find
ways to increase engagement and scope. Although subjective, I feel they are
still on the right half of a good-insidious scale (Scribd less so).

~~~
nacs
There's nothing "noble" about spamming search engines with full text results
then putting up a login-wall for the same content you arrived on the page for.

Tricking random users looking for an answer that's supposedly there into
registering so they can see the 1 answer is not increasing engagement, just
signup counts.

~~~
dror
How is it that Google doesn't penalize them for this? I thought it's
considered a big no-no to show people something different than what you show
the crawler.

~~~
dangelo
We serve the same content to Google that we serve to users. We have no
interest in deceiving them.

------
Meekro
Scribd is one of YC's flagship companies, and rightfully so I think. People
forget how painful PDF viewing used to be: the viewers were slow to load,
crashed browsers a lot, and spread viruses. I remember how some forums
considered linking to a pdf without adding something like [pdf] after it to be
a form of abuse (more technically sophisticated forums just added that on
their own).

Scribd, and things like google viewer that followed, helped get us through a
rough patch until browsers started implementing better pdf viewers on their
own.

~~~
r0muald
Ironically, I think that links to Scribd content on HN follow the same
[idiom].

------
hk__2
There’s a trick to view everything on Quora without signin up: add ?share=1 at
the end of the URL. It doesn’t remove the loginwall forever, but it’s handy.

~~~
mofle
There's a Chrome extension [0] and userscript [1] that removes the login wall
and nagging.

[0]: [https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-
unblocker](https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker)

[1]: [https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker-
userscript](https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker-userscript)

------
Theodores
Scribd has not been going anywhere in recent years. I remember five years ago
when their product was slightly innovative in that you could embed a PDF in
your web page and, at the time, that was useful for me as I had some content
that was PDF only and I did not want to recreate it. However, they soon added
adverts and spoilt that mild utility that their service had.

I personally tend to avoid PDF files or, if a HTML version is available, I
will go to that. I just don't like the format and avoid it. Sure my browser
renders it fine but I avoid.

Similarly, with Scribd, I avoid. Others do to, and, in time, people will learn
not to bother with Scribd. They will avoid it from both ends - uploading
content and viewing content.

I believe you can just upload a PDF to a GDrive share and set it to be world
viewable. Or you can restrict it. It all ties in to one's Google account, so
why would you want to go to Scribd for that? Imaginably people will come to
that conclusion and, before too long, Scribd will become even more irrelevant
than they are now.

~~~
notduncansmith
Google Drive, AFAIK, doesn't allow you to monetize/paywall your content, which
appears to be the draw of using Scribd - not as a superior hosting/viewing
platform, but as a distribution platform.

------
spindritf
What is a good alternative to Scribd? One that allows viewers to download the
source file without too much hassle and displays the text properly? Google
Drive?

~~~
LordIllidan
PDF hosted anywhere? Dropbox for instance, or github.

~~~
gwern
Dropbox doesn't expose your PDFs to search engines, so it doesn't work as a
public reference dump. (Github does, I think, but it's not so easy to use -
can you imagine ordinary people trying to use git to expose documents to the
world?)

~~~
LordIllidan
Aye, if I wanted to publish my pdfs, Dropbox would be a bad choice.

Sharing to a select group of people (e.g. a link in a mailing list, or on a
small online community - it's perfectly valid in my opinion.

------
ecesena
My opinion on Quora is totally different (note, I have no interest, nor I
think my point of view is right or wrong, simply different).

I don't 100% support the idea of putting a barrier before content, but I
understand their need to grow in terms of registered users (i.e. users for
whom they have email or social account). It's a mere strategy for fast
growing, a sort of compromise that they chose to do. I don't see this
particularly different from the _initial_ Reddit's strategy of fake posts to
grow the community (from an ethical point of view, is hiding content so
different than creating fake one?). My hope is that this will be just the
_initial_ strategy for acquiring users.

~~~
overgard
Kind of a dumb strategy in my opinion. A lot of times I'll see a post on quora
I want to share on facebook or whatever, but I don't because I know I'll just
be irritating my friends when they see a "Signup to read this article" page.

~~~
ecesena
I agree, it seems to conflict with sharing.

However, for 1 person like you that thinks about not sharing, I'm sure there
are many that will share without thinking. Moreover -on this point I'm totally
sure- if you force users to signup vs you leave the option, no matter how good
is your landing page, you will have more signups with the first option.

The point would be to understand how many share they lose vs how many signup
they still get, but I guess the math is on their side (note: I'm assuming the
most important metric here is number of signups, which is totally an
assumption).

------
throwaway5752
It works better when Dijkstra says it.

As far as pricing, isn't that what the uploader of the document sets, not
scribd? And yes, quora is unfriendly to use IMO, but do you really feel like
they'll make it through the next industry shakeout?

------
tambourmajor
It would actually be great to have something like a web services donation flat
rate. Basically something like [http://flattr.com](http://flattr.com) but but
also for web services and apps, not only for creators and artists. A place
where you can spend some money on the places you enjoy online without having
to think too hard about it. For example, I would happily pay maybe $10 a month
for reddit, Less Wrong and HN, just to cover independence, moderation, server
costs and to prevent them from being forced to come up with annoying business
models (like those on Quora and Scribd).

~~~
shurcooL
What if I told you that already exists, and you can be giving $10 a month or
whatever to many websites or individuals right now?

Most people who say "wouldn't it be great" like above end up changing their
minds about donating after they find out it's actually possible.

Anyway, if you're still interested, feel free to reply here and I'll forward
you to what I'm referring to.

FWIW, I do think it would be great and I'm already giving money to people
whose work I think is great and I want to support.

~~~
tambourmajor
It would be great if it all was bundled in a single place and not many
separate services I need to keep track of.

~~~
shurcooL
I had Gittip in mind, and it is a single place.

~~~
3rd3
That appears to be directed at individuals too, or am I missing something?

------
sferoze
Quora is an extremely useful service. Whenever I am learning about a topic and
want to clarify something, I post the question to Quora. And it is amazing how
fast I get a response.

Once I was wondering how the dragon capsule got into orbit with the ISS.
Robert Frost and another person spent a lot of time with me in the comments
until I finally understood.

I've asked many other questions about where to find certain resources, how to
accomplish certain task, etc. and the answers have generally been quite
useful!

The great thing about Quora is the site has an active community who spend time
on the site. Also you will find experts in certain fields who are willing to
spend time answering questions and clearing up misconceptions.

It is an extremely useful and valuable site for me, I really appreciate the
Quora community and the help I get from users who answer my questions.

I use Stack Overflow mainly for programming questions instead of Quora.
Stackoverflow is amazing.

I have noticed the Stack Exchange network with so many different topics. I
think I will start asking questions in the Stack Exchange network as well in
addition to Quora and see how they both compare.

------
rrggrr
Numerous Scribd uploads, which we needed for our business, were fine one day
and irretrievable the next. The response from tech support was to re-upload
the content, which wasn't possible. Haven't left, yet, because I'm not sure
where else to go to host thousands of documents quickly.

~~~
notduncansmith
What exactly is your use-case? Are you trying to host paywalled documents, or
just host the docs for internal use?

------
mercer
I don't like Quora, and yet I find myself on Quore surprisingly often because
a lot of the questions and answers highlighted in the emails that I still get
in my inbox are so interesting.

Does anyone know of a less unpleasant site with Quora-like content?

~~~
bambax
Okay, but if you didn't get those emails, would you ask those questions?

I end up at Stack Overflow after seeking answers to questions I'm actually
asking.

Quora is just entertainment, and a very evil version of it.

It's funny (in a sad way) that YC which wants to "kill Hollywood", presumably
because of DRM and such, would end up backing up properties like Scribd and
Quora.

~~~
mercer
Hmm, that's an interesting comment. In the 'grand scheme' of things I suppose
Quora is mostly useless, and for the past week's I've been paying more
attention to my information consumption. That said, I have found some very
valuable stuff on Quora.

One example was the link to the summary of Irvine's book on stoicism:
[https://booknotes.quora.com/Notes-on-A-Guide-to-the-Good-
Lif...](https://booknotes.quora.com/Notes-on-A-Guide-to-the-Good-Life-by-
Irvine?share=1)

It prompted me to read the actual book.

I've also found a lot of the 'wisdom to younger self' type Q&A's to be very
valuable, to the point where I store offline versions in my information
thingamajig (DevonThink).

------
anoncow
scribd sells access to content that users post. It is like youtube selling
access to user videos, keeping all the money and telling publishers - " here,
you can watch a couple of videos for free"

------
notduncansmith
If anyone wants to read the Declaration of Independence as linked in the
article (or any Sribd document blurred in a similar fashion), here's a
bookmarklet that will remove the blur and promo boxes:
[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f9a222112070b2313b27](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f9a222112070b2313b27)

It's funny, I actually used a similar trick (text-shadow + transparent font)
for an optometrist's website a long time ago. It was just a neat visual effect
though, no DRM garbage.

------
yuhong
I wonder if sama has seen this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4503910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4503910)

------
herokusaki
As a technical fix to the Scribd copy-paste problem you could implement a user
script to perform frequency analysis on the text of the document and to
correct the text as it is being loaded substituting the DRM font for a regular
one. (You can't easily perform the substitution at copy time with JavaScript
and put the modified text into the clipboard.)

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capedape
I've followed and contributed to some questions on Quora that have I've gained
useful life and business knowledge from. Saying that, I like to add random
bits to Evernote and it drives me nuts you can't copy ANY text from Quora's
IOS apps, not even a sentence. That kind of scarcity mentality bugs me enough
that I no longer use it.

~~~
dangelo
The copy/paste issue on iOS is a bug, and should be fixed within the next
week. Sorry about that. We want people to copy and share content out of Quora
far and wide, which is why our terms of service gives people an unusual amount
of legal permission to copy and reuse content. See:
[http://www.quora.com/about/tos](http://www.quora.com/about/tos)

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userbinator
There are a ton of Chinese document-sharing sites similar to Scribd, and they
use all the same horrible DRM-ish tricks (some even split the text between
Flash and HTML) to make it difficult to save the content. I was briefly
involved in a project to reconstruct a PDF from the contents on one of these
sites, and the end result did work pretty well.

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krisgenre
Querying my full name brings up my Quora profile as the top result on Google,
even over my G+ and Facebook profile. No idea how it happened.

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r0muald
I just want to point out that Academia.edu is not much different from the two
examples brought by the OP

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awkwit
Hate scribd. Love Quora. Conflicted.

