StumbleUpon was one of the first web services I came across that actually provided a new and exciting way to traverse the internet. I'll never forget the sense of discovery and wonder and amusement it provided, my only other sources for cool and interesting content were things my friends would share with me or sites I would find via an article/web page.
StumbleUpon took me out of my "filter bubble" if you will and introduced me to corners of the web I would have possibly never discovered on my own. It will be missed.
Seconded. Many hours in college that I should've spent studying were spent "stumbling". Digg came along, and later Reddit and HN and I spent a lot less time using StumbleUpon, but it was AWESOME for its time.
I was considering dropping Reddit and going back to StumbleUpon, because I realised that it is very hard to use reddit without making it another filter bubble, which defeats the purpose of information discovery. Plus, the fact that SU doesn't have a toxic comment section makes it better imho. I am sad that it is gone.
Urgh, Reddit is indeed an addictive, toxic timesink of a filter bubble. It reminds me of Slashdot, but on a much larger scale.
I have been reflecting on ways to fix it lately. I was imagining something like reddit, but...
1) not completely anonymous / pseudonymous. Maybe a profile photo with you holding a sign with your username for verification (like certain subreddits do), first name, and SMS / phone number verification or something. That's all - not strong firstname / lastname identity like facebook, but also no throwaway accounts.
2) allow people to have a different alias for different subreddits, in a way that they stay separate and can't be easily linked. maybe that means one verification photo per subreddit, and all you really share across subreddits is your username / password. the thing of people looking through post history across different, unrelated subreddits and beating them up in response to their latest post is pretty toxic, and goes against real life where people tend to have a different persona in different contexts.
Hate to be that guy, but while people being somewhat shittier anonymously is a real thing, there are whole cadres of incredibly horrible people that will post horrible stuff under their real names and be proud of it. Losing anonymity means losing protections for actually vulnerable people. The shittiest people are often the ones with the most secure positions in society.
I think our online personas are just a reflection of our culture. Our culture sucks, so our online personas suck.
> Losing anonymity means losing protections for actually vulnerable people. The shittiest people are often the ones with the most secure positions in society.
Case in point - Google forcibly merging Google+ comments into Youtube comments.
It didn't end trolling or harassment on the platform at all... people were are are perfectly willing to be vile under their real names, but it did expose a lot of people's personal information and real names to that cesspool against their will.
Also, Usenet. A lot of people posted with headers including their real name or an email containing their real name, yet it wasn't exactly a bastion of civility because of it.
must be liberating how easy it is to be racist/troll etc under your real name in Youtube, because everybody else is doing it. Real name, fake name, pseudonymous or completely anonymous, it seems it doesn't matter - herd behaviour washes away everything.
The way I see it, the web being primarily text based makes empathy difficult, which makes irate and rude behavior easier. It's easy to forget that there are real people on the other side of these text boxes.
Not just text, but temporal and geographic distance as well. There's plenty of Youtube reaction videos going back and forth of people just bashing each other, like any other flame war.
Also, let's not discount the effect an audience has. I would hazard that most negative public comments are actually crafted more for the benefit the author gets from the public reading it than the purported target. What's a little hurt feelings of one or a few when you get that buzz of doing something that shocks or amuses 20,000 people?
I hate to be that guy, but each subreddit is different. This is arguably the main selling point of reddit vs other link aggregators like facebook. Grouping all into the same toxic culture is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unless a subreddit is heavily moderated, I've yet to see one that's gained popularity outside of its core users that didn't turn into a meme/clickbait/karma-motivated cesspool.
> Unless a subreddit is heavily moderated, I've yet to see one that's gained popularity outside of its core users that didn't turn into a meme/clickbait/karma-motivated cesspool.
Well that's a weird condition given that all the good subreddits I know owe this entirely to moderators. Why are you looking for lightly moderated content?
I'm very much in favor of heavy moderation. However, I realize that it's a difficult task when moderators aren't paid and users are joining exponentially.
Yea, the reddit I visit is wonderful. Full of helpful, technical people.
I guess because I have zero interest in politics or anything even slightly political - I can't even describe what left wing vs right wing actually means, or which I am (I must be one, I suppose)
I post/hangout in all technical forums (pfsense/proxmox/vim/android) and pretty much without exception people are lovely. Android gets a bit catty because people are very aligned to their favourite thing (Samsung etc) but I'd never call it a vile place.
> I have zero interest in politics or anything even slightly political - I can't even describe what left wing vs right wing actually means
Political apathy is toxic. You don't have to be obsessed with politics but it's everyone's civic duty to understand the basic principles and players of our political system. Low voter turnout and low-information voters were major factors in Trump's win. You may think you don't care about politics but it's practically guaranteed you are or will be affected in some way (probably negative) as a result of his election - even if you don't live in the US.
Most online discussion sites (reddit and HN, for example) focus overwhelmingly on US politics. This is significantly less relevant for the billion-odd people who use the English language internet but do not live in the USA.
He didn't say anything about US politics - he specifically said anything 'slightly political'. Trump is an example of what happens when a critical mass of people adopt that attitude, and it could just as well happen in any other country under the right circumstances (and indeed has many times in the past).
Yeah because the Tea Party didn't exist under Pres. Obama. The Birth Certificate truthers exist, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Anti-Bush, and the No Blood For Oil crowds have existed forever across the spectrum. The only thing that's happened is that the internet has made everyone willing to turn everything into politics louder, less willing to listen, and easier to find an echo chamber. People talk about politics because it's the only thing that's literally relevant to everyone.
I focus on being a good person (as best as I can) and I care about being happy. Worrying about what a bunch of quarreling children are doing, with very limited scope to impact or change any of it, is detrimental to being happy.
I am under no illusion that the changes driven by Government affect me, in many ways.
There's a decent chance ol' trumpy might let off a bomb, ruining hundreds of thousands of lives. Maybe, if it hits New Zealand, that of mine and my children too.
But I still chose not to care/worry about it. I focus on enjoying the time I have with my family, trying to teach them to be happy. If they find an interest on politics makes them happy and excited, that's great! I'll encourage that 100%.
But I don't care.
That's a convenient attitude to have until you don't have the privilege of being so carefree about the potential consequences. That's exactly how Trump got elected - people who were politically apathetic or ill-informed took the bait of a loud 'charismatic' celeb with a message that was perfectly tailored to appeal to those who couldn't be bothered to learn the basic facts.
I totally agree. But where do I draw the line. How heavily invested do I have to get into politics to get over this line you're alluding to, but haven't defined.
What about global warming? Space junk? Plant and Animal species becoming extinct etc. I expect you'll say those all tie back to politics and yes, they do to a degree. But having a strong political opinion doesn't suddenly change the world.
We have limited time on this earth, I chose to invest my time into local things I can have some influence over.
I agree I am extremely lucky to be in a privileged position to take this stance.
1. One should participate in representational political processes as a matter of self-interest and civic obligation, even if it's just the absolute bare minimum of voting
2. Pursuant to that obligation, one should take the time to develop at least a basic understanding of the differences between the major political factions so that one's vote is not a completely random choice. Every adult should be able to write 2 gradeschool-level paragraphs comparing and contrasting the general principles and policies thereof.
3. Even if one does neither of the above, one should recognize that normalizing and rationalizing political non-participation is damaging to society if it influences others to do the same, and should thus be avoided.
That's a bad way to put things. You can disagree with the outcome of the 2016 election, but it was a _feature_ not a _bug_ of the system the US has in place. The voters who got their way are equal in their right to their preference as you are to yours.
The feature/bug metaphor fails to take into account tradeoffs. Every political system has pros and cons, and which one you choose to describe the system reveals your politics.
For instance: the voters are not equal in their right to preference. Delegates are equal in their right to preference. This means the person with the popular vote lost. So, do you value the republican vote or the democratic vote (government, not party)? There’s no objectively better option; it’s a pick-your-poison type deal.
Sure, and I'm equally in my right to encourage people to take action to effect a different outcome. And, independent of the outcome, I feel quite comfortable in asserting the universal truth that people have a moral obligation to be involved in political processes that are tangibly in their direct self-interest and society's interest to participate in.
To me it's the random jumping from site to site via browser extension that really made SU worth it. I can discover stuff through reddit, but the presence of a comment section kind of ruins it since I am not disciplined enough to ignore it.
As to fixing reddit, I agree with your changes, but you'd run into the same issue all candidates for remplacement ran into: reddit delivers value through the network effect. You need users to get value. You need value to get users. Basically unless you can kickstart the replacement with a shitton of existing data, or unless reddit fucks up as much as digg did before, it's hard to compete.
Oh, right, another radical thought of mine - something that users would pay for. Even if it were just $1/month, one account per credit card only, it would serve as another little barrier to all the right people, and prevent throwaways and constant account deletion.
Obviously for a commercial, advertiser-funded operation, it is all about more and more users and traffic and the quality of the content isn't a priority, but this eventually destroys everything. I'm imagining something much smaller, but potentially higher quality and self-sustaining. I guess I'm pretty much describing The Well, but hopefully cheaper and with more users, but not free and as many users as possible.
Just unsubscribe all subreddits, and only opt-in to interesting, niche communities. My feed got 10000x less toxic after I unsubbed from /r/politics, /r/news, and the like
It's worse than that (and, I think, mendaciously so). YouTube tries to steer you towards the highest-viewed, most popular stuff on whatever very narrow vertical you're in...or a vertical that their algorithms have decided is nearby. Which is why you see people--mostly kids--going from videos about video games to videos about how the feminisms are taking away our video games to the feminisms are destroying Western society to straight-up white-supremacist agitprop.
Reddit is by no means clean; they just don't care about, as opposed to actively facilitate, this stuff. But you're right in that there are deep problems on YouTube, too.
Hmm, maybe it's bad in different ways for different viewers.
For me, it seems so ruthlessly risk averse that if I watch one video, it fills my queue with every single thing that person ever made, to the detriment of other interests.
Does YouTube assume all humanity is completely obsessive, based on some subset of frequent users who probably behave that way?
Youtube's suggestion system filters you towards the most extremist videos. It's a big problem and one that they don't seem interested at all in solving.
> I have been reflecting on ways to fix it lately.
Don't worry. They are pulling a Stumbleupon/Digg right now. Taking something that isn't broken and trying to fix it. The redesign is corporate suicide.
This is actually great. The only way a potentially viable alternative will succeed is if there is a mass migration from the main site, so I welcome their corporate suicide.
ugggh no way jose. no "real names" - "real people"- "let me shit all over you with my ego"-maniacs. rather keep reddit where even the trolls are anonymous
how about a way to randomly visit Reddit/r/all links with the press of a button without having to deal with registration/participation/comments. or make comments optional. Similar to Stumbleupon iframe bar. Similar to Diggbar: http://blogoscoped.com/files/digg-bar-large.png
Yes! The subreddit for my large city is also pretty useful, by-and-large. It's things like that which are good about reddit, but could perhaps be improved upon - subreddits for cities, personalfinance, legaladvice, realestate, immigration - these serious topics could be even better by getting rid of the riff-raff.
Sorry, not trying to be funny here, I want to understand why there are some people who seem passionate about consuming their Internet methodically and sort of like egalitarian, and other people are just content to delve deeper into their own idiosyncratic impulses. I kind of think of like polarization in consumption habits as like recursion, almost. Ya know, because like it seems like people who make that connection that they like to consume content they already agree with and they can consume from some source to get that stimulus, that they end up recycling those behaviors into all the different media they consume until some point where they reach like an island in what content they engage with.
Same. It's a real shame they are shutting it down. To be fair, I haven't used it in a long time.
I'm now wondering how do I rescue my data from StumbleUpon, I don't see any way to download it. I looked through the settings and my profile page. I even tried this new mix.com website and it didn't transfer any of my data from StumbleUpon. Anyone know whether I can export my data somehow?
Yep. Stumble Upon was great for that. Using it was like pressing buttons on a slot machine. I think Stumble Upon lost it's way soon after they dropped the Firefox toolbar in favor of the integrated iFrame. Only Yahoo! when it first came out, made me feel the way SU did.
Yep, this ! I stopped using StumbleUpon right after they decided to ditch the toolbar. The whole use case for StumbleUpon was to not visit a specific site but rather discover new ones. I used to absolutely love reading comments about the suggested pages as much as I liked the suggestions themselves. I also liked the tagging and searching through tags ..it was a bookmarking, social, reviewing, recommendation toolbar ...and then they went ahead and killed it trying to replicate arsebook or whatever.
StumbleUpon had a Firefox extension up until the last, but the original toolbar was a victim of Firefox's removal of XUL/XPCOM extensions in newer versions. Firefox has made a lot of improvements lately but I still miss the broader, more powerful variety of extensions that Firefox used to support.
It was really great for finding new things, both in and outside your interests range! I'd tried it again once or twice in the past few years, and was annoyed at how often and how noticeable the 'sponsored stumbles' became. Felt more like watching a series of hyper-curated ads instead of a natural discovery engine.
So SU tangentially provided me with the singularly most embarrassing moment of my life about 9 years ago.
So we are showing our office to a design company a few buildings over and just chatting about the business and the stuff we make (we were all starting out and in our early 20s), there were lots of prototype bits around and adhesives and stuff, basically the office had a slight chemical smell to it.
One of the guys from the design agency says “That smell, reminds me of inaudible half mumble, in my spare time I like to surf”. My dumb dumb brain decides he means he likes to surf the web and so I reply with “oh, you should check out Stumble Upon, it’s a pretty cool service for finding new stuff on the web”.
Everyone looks at me like I’m a total idiot but I just carried on as normal because my brain is still thinking: surfing the web and not the much more obvious surfing with wet suits that smell like our office does. I’m guessing the bit I didn’t hear was the word wetsuits.
Anyway, as soon as we show them out it dawns on me what a socially awkward penguin I just managed to be, I still die a little inside every time I remember the bemused look on his face after my comment. Funnily enough we never did do any work with those guys.
You should drop what you are doing and go find a way to embarrass yourself properly. I mean no offense but it's just so sad that you've managed to avoid embarrassment to this extent when there is so much to learn from it.
No offence taken, I'll take mine over some of the other stories out there. I've got plenty of time to drum something else up, I'll try not to specifically plan anything though.
My most embarrassing moment included myself, an extreme amount of alcohol, and me running backwards up a one way street with my pants down resulting in me mooning a cop driving up the street toward me.... so yea like others said, you gotta get out more.
I've been mulling a form of charity where instead of closing down a once famous website, you give it to some talented developers in a poorer country to maintain it remotely. There are good developers in third world countries who get paid a pittance for basically busy work. They would certainly appreciate the challenge and money around a service like StumbleUpon. What do you think of this idea and is there anyone doing something like this?
I was once involved with a somewhat popular social network that was closing down, and some people in the user community would say this.
It's not really practical, as there are lots of operating costs for hardware, bandwidth, looking after the domain names, DNS, security issues, DOS attacks, dealing with subpoenas from law enforcement, DMCA takedown notices, getting rid of illegal material, the list goes on.
This work is difficult to do well, it's not the kind of thing that "developers in third world countries who get paid a pittance for basically busy work" can actually do successfully. The good developers in those sorts of countries are not doing busy work, they're starting their own social networks or migrating or doing the other things that good developers do.
Isn't the largest cost of most online business the staff? This cost would reduce 10x if given to third world devs and surely that will put most of these flailing websites in the black
"Once famous" websites are rarely ever thrown away completely. They are often scrapped for parts, and any nugget of value that still remains, is sold to the highest bidder. This is often incompatible with letting the service continue running as usual.
For example, the article mentions that the StumbleUpon cofounder is currently working on Mix, and all StumbleUpon accounts will be migrated over to Mix. Most likely, they want to harvest whatever is remaining of StumbleUpon's userbase/reputation, to help grow Mix instead. This will be much harder to do, if StumbleUpon continues operating and slowly degrading.
>"Once famous" websites are rarely ever thrown away completely. They are often scrapped for parts, and any nugget of value that still remains, is sold to the highest bidder.
Even sites that are completely healthy and thriving sometimes disappear just because someone drives a dumptruck full of cash into the lobby.
I once turned down a spammer who wanted to buy one of my site's e-mail lists (very targeted, high-value). When I turned him down, he approached my partners and tried to buy the whole site. He told them he was going to shut the site down and just use the e-mail list.
Profit is not usually the motive in a fire sale. The motive is to salvage something small from a bad situation. Doing good is a competitive proposition if you look at it that way
It's a great idea, but probably not practical. Turning over ssh keys, data, and legal ownership would be labor intensive and probably expose the current owners to risk.
I think it's a fantastic idea, I'm not aware of any trusts/charities like it but I'm sure there's many older techies and rich .com entrepreneurs who'd be willing to donate something small.
I started using StumbleUpon in high school, maybe around 2007. Until then my internet activity was pretty limited to Wikipedia and (oddly enough) Slate. StumbleUpon cracked that open -- the number of cool, strange websites I'd never have otherwise found was astonishing, like what I imagine the prototypical country bumpkin feels when they step off the bus in the big city.
Of course, I haven't used it in at least 5 years, so this news isn't so surprising. But it was a cool thing for a while.
I loved stumble upon until the pages I was shown veered from my interests and began to feel like either spam or obvious paid content. It was annoying and the issue that eventually pushed me off after 3-4 years of use.
I'm a bit sad to see this news. Maybe my view became jaded, but with this timing I have to wonder if it's related to GDPR. A profile of your interests and favorite sites is the kind of information a company like CA would have been interested in buying.
There is no mention of this in the document, but the timing suggests there may be a GPDR-related factor. It's hard to get consent from users that haven't touched the service for years.
That's an interesting point. I wonder if at some point in the future we'll start getting historical exemptions, similar to those for real world properties with historical value.
It might even free up faster innovation in technical law, since new laws could be as onerous (or not) as lawmakers wish.
I agree and think it is clever marketing. They may not have permission to email their users promoting their new service, but telling your users that "your data is being moved" is a requirement isn't it? Now that in theory it is in the hands of a new service.
I used to have a setup where StumbleUpon was permanently on my TV set, and the Stumble button itself I had hooked up to my remote control, so I could stumble my way through things on the couch. It was infinitely better than TV itself.
I agree with other commenters how it expanded their online world, and I'm saddened that there is no real alternative to this now, especially in the land of insular internet bubbles we live in today.
StumbleUpon was "unique" in the aughties sense of the word. Before Reddit and Digg made things Hot or Not this was the place to go for interesting content. It wasn't loud or or overly verbose; it sent you to great sites before SEO and paid media killed content.
Maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic on the implementation as well as the time. IDK.
I hope Garret, Ali and the team at Mix do great things.
I personally miss What's Better (two random photos and you click in which one is better, like a Seal vs a Bird, or AIDS vs Jazz Music, or Europe vs Ben Folds Five).
It didn't last long and it was written entirely in Python .. had some scaling issues too.
Digg : 2004, not that much before reddit. Stumbleupon and hotornot.com both predate these by a lot. There was also Myspace before Digg, and Tribes before that.
Stumble upon was one of my first contracting jobs. In second year university back in 1999/2000 (more than 16 years ago?) I had a little freelance project for them to write an Amazon like recommender system. Super small project money wise and I just ended up delivering a math paper like result. I suspect they never used it and instead just contracted with someone else.
StumbleUpon was a game changer, and a big gateway into discovering truly weird and wonderful things about the internet. I used to bind the Firefox plugin to middle mouse click, so I could keep browsing with a hotkey.
Haven't used it in years, but still sad to see it go.
By far the most important service of my younger years that influenced me and attracted me to CS. Without it I never would’ve discovered all the cool tools that eventually convinced me to try building my own.
StumbleUpon was a key driver in traffic to some of my early blog posts. They didn't stay long (compared to search referrals) however the exposure was great.
Ditto; I remember a few years ago seeing a few massive traffic spikes (larger than Slashdot in its heyday) to some posts, and the traffic from SU was a lot more sticky than from other tech sites.
IIRC, there was no "social" part of the media. It was just random links to other sites. Most of which also had zero social media factor. SU was just curiosity.
I was working on Website Randomizer at the time when everyone told me it is already done and pointed to StumbleUpon. I abandoned project, which I am a little bit sorry about, but I always liked StumbleUpon and it was great way to discover new things.
If one wanted to build a barebones SU replacement, what would be a good approach to get an index of random pages these days? (Or is there an underreported replacement out there somewhere?)
I remember using StumbleUpon in my teens, and one site in particular sticks out to me. It was a full-page Flash point-and-click game where you directed a few children across a few different landscapes (IIRC at least a desert and jungle).
It stuck out to me because it was an example of someone making something to be enjoyed, in a time where I had assumed people needed money as a motivator for entertainment to be created.
I have many fond memories of Stumbling back in the day, made some genuine connections with a few Stumblers, more so than I ever did with Friendster etc.
The only other social media service that resulted in similar genuine connections with other like-minded folks was MySpace music. I've not found that x-factor - serendipity, I suppose, with a platform since.
Computer science blog gems I found using stumbleupon were priceless when I was in college. I would spend google portion of night stumbling good blogs of computer science and DIY projects. I could never find them through google because I didn’t know what to look for.
I fondly remember this platform from my college days. At the time I had a girlfriend who was kind of a missmatch for my interests. She was much more focused on athletic pursuits than exploring new types of technology. That all changed when I showed her the StumbleUpon toolbar and site. After a few clicks she realized that it was a lot of fun exploring the Internet randomly.
A valuable and worthwhile tool in its day. I was a fan from almost its beginning, using it for some years but, gradually, I stopped entirely. I haven't even thought about for a decade now. Still a pleasant memory however of something so simple but very useful.
> With a few clicks you can register and import your SU favorites, interests and tags — creating Mix Collections that are easily shared with friends. If you have any questions, email support@mix.com for help.
I can only view like 4 lists of 13 articles each right now. The website directs you to download an app, which seems to be nothing more than a shortcut to a webpage. When i open the app, there is a banner at the bottom that says, "Get it on Google play".
All in all, Mix seems to be a work in process to me, and not a smooth landing off Stumble
Reddit started out with a nerdy community that bootstrapped excellent content. They added features slowly, focusing on quality and the moderation system. The idea of sub-Reddits allowed groups to form, each with its own “rules” to ensure the site remained useful to everyone as it grew.
StumbleUpon took me out of my "filter bubble" if you will and introduced me to corners of the web I would have possibly never discovered on my own. It will be missed.