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StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix
- dmschulman 8y agoStumbleUpon 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.
- marpstar 8y agoSeconded. 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.
- jclos 8y agoI 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.
- tacostakohashi 8y agoUrgh, 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.
- jclos 8y agoTo 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.
- tacostakohashi 8y agoOh, 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.
- eli 8y agoThat's half of what makes the Metafilter discussions so good (the other half is aggressive behind-the-scenes moderation)
- brownbat 8y agoThere used to be a mashup of random YouTube comments on one side, and random metafilter comments on the other testing, really validating, this theory. The difference was pretty stark. I could only find breadcrumbs: https://metatalk.metafilter.com/16003/Metafilter-comments-vs-Youtube-comments https://metatalk.metafilter.com/16003/Metafilter-comments-vs... An example might be archived somewhere...
- 8y ago
- gitgud 8y agoBut StumbleUpon did have a comments section right? Could have sworn there was some kind of voting system, which allowed reviews...
- qop 8y agoWhat makes you want to avoid your filter bubble? 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. Anyways, do you have any idea? I'm just curious
- antisocial 8y agoYes, it was my first tool of discovery too..
- mergejoin 8y agoAgreed, it was a great service.
- fuball63 8y agoI will still sometimes use it to break out of the humdrum of reddit/twitter/facebook. The app had some UX issues, and some of the content could have used better curation, but overall I think the core idea is still relevant.
- kilroy123 8y agoSame here. I used it as recently as a month ago.
- egfx 8y agoYep. 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.
- devnonymous 8y agoYep, 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.
- philipkglass 8y agoStumbleUpon 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.
- dom96 8y agoSame. 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?
- Jonhoo 8y agoI wrote a tool that lets you do it here: https://github.com/jonhoo/su-extract https://github.com/jonhoo/su-extract :)
- gusanmaz 8y agoYou could also check a tool I wrote that extracts page likes data as JSON file on https://github.com/gusanmaz/StumbleUponRescuer https://github.com/gusanmaz/StumbleUponRescuer
- danieljohnson 8y agoAmen. You speak for me too.
- aldoushuxley001 8y agoYou had the opportunity to say you "stumbled upon" StumbleUpon!
- kregasaurusrex 8y agoIt 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.
- majos 8y agoI 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.
- sizzzzlerz 8y agoA 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.
- josefresco 8y agoStumbleUpon 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.
- geerlingguy 8y agoDitto; 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.
- SirRhosis 8y agoIIRC, 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.
- josefresco 8y agoThe "social" part was that the inventory of links/websites was provided, and voted upon by users.
- jcousins 8y agoI 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.
- dswalter 8y agoThere 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.
- darkerside 8y agoThat'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.
- pedalpete 8y agoI 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.
- majani 8y agoI'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?
- whack 8y ago"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.
- reaperducer 8y ago>"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.
- majani 8y agoProfit 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
- excitom 8y agoExample: The zombie-esque http://www.excite.com/ http://www.excite.com/
- desireco42 8y agoI 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.
- tortasaur 8y agoI 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.
- vxNsr 8y agoBy 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.
- kstrauser 8y agoI'm simultaneously sad, and eager to hear Maciej's reaction.
- simonbarker87 8y agoSo 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. Anyway, thanks Stumble Upon!
- overkalix 8y agoThis is the most embarrassing moment of your life? You amateur.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- openfuture 8y agoYou 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.
- simonbarker87 8y agoNo 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.
- RpFLCL 8y agoI 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.
- gitgud 8y agoI felt the same, it lost its charm. It seemed like there were many paid articles coming up and I didn't feel the categories worked all that well. Ultimately it seems reddit did a better job at categorising links for peoples interests with a transparent voting system...
- NicoJuicy 8y agoLol, I used it this week after 5 years. Articles were pretty old and outdated, but the UI hasn't lost its touch, just no real/meaningful community
- heywire 8y agoI'm sad that I had forgotten about StumbleUpon, and now it will be gone. I found so many small interesting sites that way.
- dang 8y agoUrl changed from https://www.neowin.net/news/stumbleupon-closing-after-16-years-accounts-can-be-migrated-to-mix https://www.neowin.net/news/stumbleupon-closing-after-16-yea..., which points to this.
- wkirby 8y agoStumbleUpon 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.
- alexfringes 8y agoIf 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?)
- sdsdsdsdsdsds 8y agoComman crawl may be good place to start
- dandare 8y agoStumbleUpon was first, why Reddit won? Can you tell me examples of what good decisions Reddit founders made?
- ttul 8y agoReddit 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.
- bluntfang 8y agoDopamine manipulation via comment karma.
- jedberg 8y agoI think it had to do with curation. With SU, it was totally random, but with reddit, you got a list of stuff other people liked. And in fact, the SU functionality is part of reddit: http://reddit.com/random http://reddit.com/random
- bhouston 8y agoStumble 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.
- SirRhosis 8y ago2000 seems so long ago, but then I realize I was a "mere" 23 y/o at that time. Now that makes me feel old.
- mandliya 8y agoComputer 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.
- murph-almighty 8y agoHonest question to commenters here, since this seems to be a common trend: Why did you stop using StumbleUpon?
- c12 8y agoBut stumble upon's logo is so much better than mix's...
- duncancarroll 8y agoI 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.
- whoaminow 8y agoShame, have fond memories of finding cool random things in the early days on StumbleUpon. Later on it felt like an adfeed but still, good stuff.
- upbeatlinux 8y agoStumbleUpon 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.
- SirRhosis 8y agoStumbleUpon : launched 2001, November. Hot or Not : launched 2000, October. edit: Reddit: 2005 (I joined in early 2006 or so) 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.
- djsumdog 8y agoI 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.
- jcoffland 8y agoI've been meaning to check out this StumbleUpon thing everyone's talking about. Guess I'm too late.
- SirRhosis 8y agoI hear ya. This sliced bread phenomenon seems amazing. I really should look into it.
- exikyut 8y agoApparently no data is being lost: > 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.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoI 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. Thanks for the great memories guys!
- gymshoes 8y agoPeople who have tried using Mix, how's your experience been so far? If you haven't added any friends, is the filter bubble prevented?
- murjinsee 8y agoI 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