Stumbleupon users - are you seeing the same as me?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been a user of StumbleUpon for a long time. Just recently, I’ve been noticing that a significantly increased proportion of my stumbles have taken me to sites that are defunct - i.e. domain holding pages, ‘domain for sale’ or ‘account suspended’.

Anyone else seeing this?

Is it just a symptom of the economic climate (i.e. abandoned sites that have expired), or are these sites that only ever existed briefly for the purpose of SEO or something like that? (and maybe StumbleUpon was part of the plan).

2

If you PM me some specific examples I may have some answers.

3

I’ve not noticed that, but I have noticed an increase in “You cannot dislike this page” results. I used to really love it, but it seems that there are fewer users, so the stumbles kind of suck most of the time now, and/or are ancient (in web years, not astronomical years).

4

I have noticed a rise in loops - where you end up going to the same 4 or 5 pages repeatedly. It seems that I have to go somewhere else for about half an hour or so [shorpy is a favorite] to get unstuck.

5

I think that just means you’ve exhausted the list of candidate stumbles in your categories.

6

Will do - thank you.

7

I think those are caused by some sort of redirect - the Stumble takes you to a page that instantly whisks you off to the actual content somewhere else - at a different URL to the one in StumbleUpon’s DB (there are both good and evil reasons why webmasters might set up their sites in this way)

8

I tend to leave it on all, I probably have selected 30 or 40 sub categories, but I am stumbling for the hell of it and don’t feel like restricting it. Though I do wish there was a way to eliminate all vegan, low fat, gluten free cooking blogs…

9

I stopped using SU a long time ago in part because I was getting a lot of pages that triggered virus/malware warnings. This didn’t necessarily mean they were trying to communicate malware, but it was annoying enough that it took away some of the fun of stumbling.

A much more significant reason I stopped using it, though, was because so much of the content on the internet is becoming bland and predictable. It was impossible to customize the settings enough to avoid the mediocre. I discovered more interesting ways to waste time.

10

I have found the same things as many of you. Loops, pages that are defunct, and pages that won’t open. It also seems I’m getting more pages that have nothing to do with the topic I’m stumbling. For example, I was looking at genealogy pages when a page about cars came up. Then it went right back to genealogy.

I used to love the site, but lately it’s not worth it.

11

I seem to remember they had a pulldown category for wrong topic - now it is not for me, spam, duplicate content and block. Maybe I’ll wander over to their homesite and see if they have a complaint/suggestion contact.

12

I use the toolbar - this has an option ‘report this stumble as’ with options such as ‘broken or 404’, ‘unsafe’, ‘not about [category]’ etc. No idea how effective reporting it actually is.

13

I used to “Report this page as not in English” all the time and it forced you to choose which language it was. It was highly inconvenient. It’s changed now, I think, so at least there is an “I don’t know” option.

14

yes, this

15

I found that, whatever my interests were, I ended up on countless “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About…” type pages.

16

I think that’s just because a lot of blogs have adopted that style - instead of writing their own, interesting content, they just reblog someone else’s, breaking it into multiple pieces that force you to reload the page (and the ads) multiple times.