I read this post with interest: Is Scribd a Porn Document Network? and of course did some reading in between the lines. Scribd is a document upload site - kind of sort of like Google Docs, you can upload a variety of documents, both text and image based, and they’ll be accessible to other people on the site and through embedded links - and they won’t lose their formatting, which is awesome. The site also has a social networking aspect to it, with profiles and the ability to add friends, leave comments, and form groups.
Naturally, the most popular group on the site, with some 24,000 members, is the adult group. And the most popular search strings for the site are all adult in nature - the top one is “how to eat pussy,” which if you really wanted to be a touch mean, you might say, “ha! it’s a new media site, and all the tech dorks are researching something they hope to do some day!” You might say that if you were mean.
Of course after reading the article, I had to go have a look. I signed up and uploaded two documents: the postcard (with sexy photo) for my upcoming art show, Modified Eros, and the word doc press release for the same (and there will be a real post regarding that). You can have a look at my profile and both of the things I uploaded (guess which one has gotten more views so far? yeah, you don’t need to guess) on the site. There’s no login required to browse docs, even the adult stuff. When you upload stuff -which you can also do without a login(!)- you have the option to mark your content as adult (there is text saying they welcome adult stuff, but want it tagged). Anyone can comment on uploaded content, you don’t need to sign up to do that.
The last commenter on the Center Networks post about Scribd and porn, Anand, says:
Isn’t this the problem with any of the web 2.0 User Generated Content websites. Youtube has a good number of p0rn videos too, which are flagged and removed. So is it with Flickr.
However, Scribd being a text based website, I do agree that it might list high on search engines. And porn is one of the top search terms on the search engines as well, and when those users visit scribd through related listings, the porn related searches increase too.
Bottomline is that it is more of a web 2.0 problem than Scribd’s.
Ok, so people search for porn. Especially on a site where they don’t have to register, they upload it, look for it, and comment on it. And porn drives a lot of traffic to a site, whether that is happening organically through the users of the site or the site’s developers are responsible for it in a maybe less than white hat way. Is this the downfall of the internet? Is explicit content the marker of a site that is going downhill? That attitude really pisses me off, though I also understand the “but the children! the children!” thing.
On the other hand, I find myself rolling my eyes at some of the crappy content and community that rises up around adult stuff. Behold, the most recent four comments on the afore alluded to doc (Guide to Oral Sex: How to Eat Pussy):
Le sigh. This is what I’m getting all up in arms and defensive about? I guess that’s the thing about free speech, right?
12:56 pm
It’s strange. I’ve been through much of the Scribd Adult content and I have to say most of it’s crap from a get me hot and bothered point of view, but in my other life, workin gas a computer historian, the stuff they’ve saved from some of the old BBS’s is incredible because almost all of that material is gone in it’s original form.
The two things I really like about Scribd are the ease of uploading docs and the fact that it’s pretty much infinite document storage for free. The search leaves something to be desired, but that’s always a problem.
And I actually read both your documents, though I have to admit I want to the postcard first.
Chris