Why Scribd is falling into the Abyss

Half of the uploaded documents to Scribd are there only to serve one
purpose - downloading documents. This presents a real problem for hte
quality of documents on their platform... as time goes by, the amount of
noise (random, useless documents) increases compared to the amount of
signal (useful documents).

This document is itself an example of that, being filled with AI generated

text from this point on....

It includes comments from AI and a few random words from Apple, but also
contains a lot of unrelated noise. I'm not sure how this non-profit platform
can be expected to deal with such errors. This shows how far behind some
companies are on the technology front.

Sharing

As part of the design, Scribd claims that the document storage is encrypted
and the content protected by default. In most cases this does happen - but
that does not apply to public domains.

I searched for htmltfiles.org to see if this is the case... and found it on

Scribd. I wasn't able to see what is was on htmltfiles.org (some of the
documents were hidden in HTML tags on the pages), but my guess is that
it's a monkey surfing on a banana - which is still far from copying a piece of
history...

Privacy and ethics

This lack of data ownership and transparency may negatively affect ethical
discussions. It is unacceptable that we upload a piece of history in its
entirety, knowing that it is going to be scanned and shared with everyone
around the globe, possibly forever. It's not even a free web app. We have
to pay in order to access it. While we read a report by a company, they are
sharing more information about us... and for all those who can't read, or
can't read or don't even know how to read, maybe they don't care.

Apple is aware of this problem and is trying to make up for it with some
financial incentives to users who share their documents - like this
chumbawumba dancing monkey...

Another possible problem is ethical. Most documents uploaded on Scribd

have an attribution to the original content owner. Even the documents that
have no attribution are mostly filled with irrelevant noise - which can be
easily found by search engines. The lack of transparency is another issue -
because we may be sharing a document with some monkey or some other
non-human who shares his opinions with us in the form of rubbish, or when
we comment, we may be unintentionally offering some extra value,
unintentionally creating more noise. While it might not be possible to
prevent copying of documents containing information about us, it is
certainly not possible to protect that information.