Hacker News Reader

Comment by pksebben | Hacker News Reader

Stumbleupon! What a gleaming ray of sunshine in the vast landscape of the web!

I agree with you that it couldn't survive today, but I often wonder why. If I had access to stumbleupon as it was, I would absolutely be using it - but when I try to think about how to reimplement it there are a couple sticking points that I don't have any solutions to:

  - Engagement: SU lived and died on it's users, a paragon of the crowdsourced model.  For it to work you'd have to have it pull enough interesting people from the mire to function

  - Gaming the system:  One of the things that made SU great was that there wasn't so much goddamn SEO out there.  If you 'stumbled' on a thing, it was because it was interesting, engaging, funny, or otherwise *actually valuable*.  These days, I can't imagine a successful platform *not* getting beleaguered by the SEO vultures.

View on HN

Or Stumbleupon clone's aren't popular because there really just isnt a lot of demand for them. Stumbleupon clones already exist. People generally prefer social media and in this case I'd say Reddit more specifically.

Here is one I found with a 5 second search: https://cloudhiker.net/

It works great. It's fun. Hopefully people will enjoy it. But I dont think we need to make excuses for why its not more popular.

That looks great. Is there a list of these types of sites?

An aggregator aggregator? Then you run into issues of "what constitutes an aggregator site" coupled with "... that deserves being on the list".

I agreed that I thought SU wouldn't work in today's internet, and I clicked on the cloudhiker link thinking I'd be met with SEO trash, but I ended up on this post: https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier

Which was a great post and now I understand more than I did about how air filters work...more complicated than I'd thought.

Maybe I should give cloudhiker a try.

I read the page because you linked it, as an aside " (Yeah, power usage goes down when you add the extra carbon filter to the IKEA purifier. I’ve confirmed this myself with a power meter. Physics is weird.)"

when you block a vacuum cleaner the motor spins faster and uses less electricity, it just sounds like it's "working harder" but if there's less stuff (air) there to create friction then it's working less hard. So the heavier filter material using less electricity makes sense, especially when you take into account the lower "CADR" - wtf-ever that is.

Furthermore , all of my "DIY" air filters do a remarkable job, and they move very little air compared to the fans they're duct taped to, but they still turn black if i don't clean them every month or two.

I swear that IKEA filter writeup was on HN once upon a time. That or someone else's thorough analysis of the exact same appliance!

Yes it was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31812259

Looks great, makes a really great statement on its front page and then offers their extension for your browser... the link goes straight to the Chrome store, no other browser gets the extension support it seems

One issue is a lot more sites today have headers that block displaying the site in a frame. This prevents sites like StumbleUpon from displaying their UI at the same time as the content; the only way around it that I’m aware of is a browser extension.

How is that related to other browsers not getting an extension?

Because it’s more work to maintain an extension for N browsers than to maintain a single website. So developers tend to just pick the one they care about.

And unfortunately in doing so, which is where my point really was, continue the Chromification of the internet... this seems to be counter to the theme of what they set out to do

Having to use an extension would make me suspicious... I'd rather just open indexed sites in new tabs.

cloudhiker just took me to a delightful site. Fun rewarding experience, will prob never use it again.

Hmm, my first cloudhiker link gives me a:

Five Tips to Make Meditation Easy and Enjoyable - Video Five questions that beginning meditators…

Not exactly what I was hoping for.

2 and a half years ago CloudHiker was a much more direct spiritual successor to StumbleUpon, and it was called Stumbled.cc

It worked better, didn't require an extension like CH and then at some point they changed and all the content on the site went downhill. As others in the thread have mentioned, it was starting to become SEO'd.

I didn't mean to do this, but a smarter person than I once said if you want the answer to a question on the internet you ought to post the wrong answer, and I feel like I inadvertently did this.

In my hubris I assumed there wasn't anything comparable that was live, but this is pretty awesome. Glad to have egg on my face here.

In regards to "Gaming the system," I do not think popularity begets SEO spam. SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search so that you get ad revenue from visits. If you have genuinely valuable content and get popular from Stumbleupon that doesn't create an incentive to implement SEO spam. Ads maybe - but not publishing garbage to rank high on google search because you already solved the discoverability problem.

It's not the successful website that turns to seo spam, it's seo spammers that spam the StumbleUpon api with bots "liking" their spam.

> SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search

The same SEO mindset/paradigm is used to make sure someone's spam surfaces on any variety of platforms, not just Google Search. We can argue about the specific semantics of "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) not being the right word to use for gaming TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat algorithms. Perhaps a different word is needed.

But the above poster's sentiment is not flawed, even if you think it's overreaching within a specific meaning of "SEO".

This site has seemingly solved both of those problems. So isn't HN the modern StumbleUpon, albeit with more focus on technical topics?

SU was always one of the many aggregators in the addth.is toolbar, alongside places like Reddit. They do both serve the same function of making the Internet more discoverable - noting that early Reddit didn't have comments.

> I can't imagine a successful platform not getting beleaguered by the SEO

May I suggest inclusion of the following snippet in the <head> section of every page on such a site:

   <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

That single line would be enough to make any site very UNappealing to SEOs

I think there are many reasons why SU would fail, but the biggest to me is that so much content is that so much content is produced just for the major social media sites. SU wouldn't offer net value over just using those apps.

For example, consider what the UX on mobile would be like. A modern SU would often send you to the major social media sites since that's where the content is. But you'd either constantly encounter login walls or "download the app!" banners OR you'd have to constantly shift back and forth between apps. As a user why would I put up with that, when I could just stay in one app and see so much of the same content?

Did you use StumbleUpon? There was very little overlap, it was a completely different part of the internet; more actual "web" than "just uses the internet for transport"

From what I learned about SU, it mainly died because at some time they got more and more spam websites, I would call this the early days of SEO spam. Users slowly vanished. SU increased the the amount of ads on the site, which led to even more users vanishing. A circle of death.

I miss Stumbleupon and discoverability. I despise the me-shaped bubble that I'm forced to occupy on the current, broken internet.

I think the SEO problem would be harder. Even though there's definitely a network effect, a few dedicated users can curate a thousand interesting web sites, and that's probably enough to draw in anyone moderately interested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com