Once upon a time, before my time, text files were the most interesting thing on the internet. You could learn how to program computers, blow things up, pick up girls, obtain free phone calls, survive nuclear war, pirate TV signals, perform witchcraft and conquer Zork in one short evening without leaving your bedroom. You could still do this if you weren’t spending so much time on YouTube.

Scribd hopes to be the YouTube for text files, only the text files are now tricked-out with embeddable Flash players and convertable to every format around including MP3 with a British accent. They’re accompanied by statistics showing views, votes, referrers and locations of readers. Their uploaders get extensive profile pages. If more interesting people would upload more of them, this site could get unusually entertaining.

The Techcrunch commenters hate it, so it must be good. Start uploading those old Phracks.

UPDATE: Jason Scott, proprietor of Textfiles.com, offers his take on Scribd: “A gigantic, farting zeppelin of web 2.0 lazily rising into the sky to grab a little piece of the money sun before exploding in flames. Will they make it to the safety of the moon before they’re caught out for facilitating book piracy as a business model?”