There are two terrible web properties out there that everyone hates, Scribd and Quora. Please don’t use them. Instead of Scribd just host a PDF anywhere, or upload text to pastebin or make a nice blog on WordPress or Medium or something. And instead of Quora use Ask MetaFilter or StackExchange.

Scribd’s business model is to host documents in formats that are unusable. For instance, here’s a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Or rather, the free preview; you have to download it to read the rest and a one-day guest pass costs $9. Here’s a copy of Elliot Rodger’s insane manifesto. It starts “This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be.” Only I had to retype that phrase; if I copy-and-paste I get “]fjs js tfh stgry gl fgw J, Hccjgt Tgmahr, eknh tg dh” because Scribd uses some stupid DRM font. Easy enough for a pirate to reverse engineer but impossible for normal use. They also broke “Find”; there’s some Javascript thing overriding the browser that doesn’t seem to work.

Quora’s business model is to trick people into sharing information for free, then put it behind a login. It’s like Experts Exchange 2.0! For instance, on Quora you can read Who owns the copyright on content contributed to Quora? Only you can’t just read the text. Depending on your history with the site and the way you got there you may see a giant popup demanding you log in obscuring the page, or the first answer clear and then the rest blurred, or if you're lucky just the page. It appears nondeterministic.

Both businesses are deliberately trying to lock up text content to make it harder to access, to force users to pay or share advertising data or some such bullshit. The part that kills me is some engineer actually wrote code to deliberately break document sharing on the web. It’s terrible.