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.

- 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.

If they're trying to send more traffic to that site, then we're S.O.L.

OTOH, if they're just trying to increase the number of documents in scribd's repository, then a parallel submission process would be the solution.

I.e., keep HN posts pointing to the original pdf, but also auto-submit to scribe, behind the scenes in a separate thread.

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.

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.

We don't see ads because the site is run by millionaires and hardly takes any computing resources or bandwidth.

Ah, I didn't see that (I thought once it's been trans-scribd, it stays that way).

But that raises another question: if http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172432 points to the original pdf (i.e., http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.imecs.pdf) and the guy who submitted this also posted the same original pdf link, why wasn't it detected as a dupe right then?