Just like with youtube, its the copyrighted stuff that is brining in the traffic. People just want to get their Harry Potter and DAVinci code etc for free. All the other documents are crap that no-one cares about.

Not sure what the previous reviewers are ranting about. Scribd is just a good place to find ebook / pdf report type documents, and like any other social sharing site, it is of course packed with crap. But it self organizes nicely and it's going to continue to grow as a nice vertical search and from the publisher side a good way to get content out there for free.

Though I had not intended to write a response to the exhortation presented in the message above, I found a good reason a few links down as I was searching the word "Scribd". This is a webpage entitled: "Top 100 Tools: Scribd." The address of this page is: http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Top100Tools/scribd.html The reasoning is that Scribd is used by many individuals who have found some sense of worth in the English language, if only an economical one, and have therefore written their exercises in English and uploaded them into Scribd in order to access them a few minutes later in their computer-generated English-accented voice. In short, Scribd may be subconsciously launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing against foreign learners. Or, maybe--just maybe--they may have decided to be more competitive in the domestic American market by attracting more Americans by making it smell as it were like burgers, beer and phallic All-American bratwursts rather than garlic-like Italians, or hookah Arabs and Turks, or kidney-pie Brits.

Since today and without any advance warning they have started to destroy thousands and thousands of documents they deem are an infringement to the copyrights. The only problem is that 90% of all documents like in any other sharing environment is copyrighted stuff somewhere and so they are shooting themselves in the foot. Not only is their searchengine (that is the reason it was down the last days - hypocrites) now polluted with thousands of bad links - as are the searchengines and thousands of blogs - but I don't think the power users that they have punished - and sometimes were responsable for some valuable feedback will probably just leave the site for the Titanic it has become. Working intensively on and with scribd the last 6 months i have come to the following conclusions First there aren't that many documents that are being uploaded in english every day (take browse - most recent and english and you will see a few a day - for a worldwide internetservice) Secondly the service is being overtaken by spammers (using the services in commentspam with an iframe), stupid docs about the most stupid subjects, sex and pics without end. In the beginning it used to be a document service that wanted to become the babel of the internet. Thirdly they still don't have the infrastructure needed to host such a service because their statistics (gimmicks in jave etc) aren't active again and those were a strain on the service. They also have more frequently hic up pages coming up. Fourth their search engine for related documents is just a big joke. Fifth the team suck even if they are millionaires now these guys don't understand that you make traffic by a few people uploading masses of stuff that other people want to see and let known around them. maybe they really want to be a pornservice anyway