The Scribd file was degraded in quality to absolute illegibility, I had to grab the original link out of the URL just so I could read it.
Opt-out? It's annoying. They should just stop doing it for everyone perhaps, or just use it as a backup in case the site is knocked off line by the influx of social news traffic.
They do check. The sequence of events here seems to be:
- Person submits PDF article.
- HN rewrites article to scribd link.
- People complain about scribd link.
- Admin manually corrects link to point directly to PDF.
- A month later, another person submits same PDF article.
- HN rewrites article to scribd link, but because the original article was manually corrected, the scribd link doesn't match the original article, so it doesn't register as a dupe.
To be fair, the purpose of HN is to serve YC -- that's why we don't see ads on the site. People have suggested not scribd-ing everything before; I can only assume that the reason this has not yet happened is because the feedback we are providing is more valuable to YC than a few upset readers.
And this may well be the case: When most people have problems accessing a web page one way, they won't tell you directly; instead, they'll try to find another way to access it or give up. By providing only one way to read PDFs on a discussion board, you get access to this otherwise invisible negative feedback.
Yes, but not every idea turns out to be a good one.
Based on the unanimous jeers every time a PDF submission gets autoconverted, scribd appears not to be one of the good ones. Maybe it's time to try something else.
But wouldn't either the original pdf link or the resulting scribd link show up as a duplicate in HN's dupe checker, since both were in the submitted list at one time or another?
Look at the link in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172432 ... It's been changed from the scribd link to the original pdf file. I'm guessing they only check for dupes against a list of the current article links, and that they don't maintain a separate list of submitted links (which, except for cases like this one, would be the same list).
