

Scribd Goes Straight, Bans Porn - raghus
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/17/scribd-goes-straight-bans-porn/

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prakash
Interestingly, I am revisiting Tim Brady's interview from Founders at work.
Tim talks about the early days of Yahoo's traffic and says _"The sex category
was probably 25% of web traffic, just like the VHS industry when it first got
going, and the Internet was no different in that respect"_.

A year and half or so after launch, Yahoo pulled out all their porn links, in
that sense Scribd seems to be doing the same thing.

Porn seems to provide the impetus for early traffic, and, once you get a bit
of legs under your business, move away from it seems to be the strategy.

~~~
jsrn
_and, once you get a bit of legs under your business, move away from it seems
to be the strategy._

And as soon as someone buys your startup, the porn comes back (see nsfw reddit
and Condé Nast)

~~~
unalone
That was a more personal initiative, though. As in, a user created the reddit
again after people were allowed to make their own.

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prakash
Maybe Scribd is going to be acquired and porn is a big red flag for most
companies that want to buy them.

Can someone refresh my memory, when did reddit remove their NSFW page --
before or after the CondeNest acqusition?

~~~
philh
I think it was shortly after, but it's since been reinstated. They said at the
time that they removed it because it wasn't being used as they wanted. People
just submitted porn, rather than normal content that happened to be NSFW.
(Looking at the page now, that still seems to be the case.)

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wumi
"Should we expect Scribd’s traffic to take a nosedive? Unlikely. Porn may have
helped Scribd gain momentum in its infancy, but the site has long since proven
its use as a blogging tool and a document repository. If anything, it’s
surprising that it took Scribd this long to make the switch."

so will Justin.tv ban illegal broadcasts as well?

seems the somewhat successful strategy for building content on these community
apps is allowing either illegal or unscrupulous behavior to build traffic, and
then nix it when you're big enough to survive on your own.

Is this the strategy PG recommends, or the YC founders just think of it on
their own?

~~~
andreyf
_seems the somewhat successful strategy for building content on these
community apps is allowing either illegal or unscrupulous behavior to build
traffic, and then nix it when you're big enough to survive on your own_

It worked for YouTube, didn't it?

 _Is this the strategy PG recommends, or the YC founders just think of it on
their own?_

I think it's a bit too obvious to say that anyone "thought of it".

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demallien
Heh. And this happens just one day after PG releases an essay about
disconnecting distractions. Coincidence? I think not, my friends!

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goodkarma
This was the right decision for Scribd. Most of the "adult" content on Scribd
was spammy crap anyway, feeble attempts at trying to get people to sign up to
Adult Friend Finder or whatever.

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menloparkbum
Is porn a huge problem for scribd? I've never really looked at scribd before,
so I just went to check out the Adult section. I'm seeing a lot of PDFs
written in Cyrillic, "Soft Drink Awareness - How Coke and Pepsi are HELPFUL"
and then further down "PUMPING women - are you running out of gas?." I'm not
seeing a lot of porn here. However the stuff that is here seems pretty weird
and hopeless. Scribd should have no problems removing it.

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LPTS
Good for them.

Porn sucks. Porn is to sex as chocolate life savers are to an artisanal
chocolate cake.

~~~
mlinsey
Yeah, good point. Scribd should ditch the porn and introduce new features to
provide their users actual _sex_ , now that would be a killer app!

~~~
Prrometheus
That would be bigger than Google.

