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StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

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Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#31

Post by eropple »

dghughes wrote: post #27
tacostakohashi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 verific…

YouTube is as bad or worse as reddit. The more you look at one topic the more it is shown to you. You end up in a feedback loop the same thing.

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.

Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#32

Post by tacostakohashi »

subpixel wrote: post #30
tacostakohashi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 verific…

I live in a particular neighborhood in a particular large US city, and our subreddit is a really useful source of local info.

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.

Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#33

Post by devnonymous »

egfx wrote: post #22
dmschulman wrote: post #2

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 in…

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.

Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#34

Post by dom96 »

dmschulman wrote: post #2

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 in…

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?

Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#36

Post by eip »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #20
jclos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 verific…

> 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.

Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#37

Post by tacostakohashi »

jclos wrote: post #24
tacostakohashi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 verific…

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 ne…

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.

Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#38

Post by danieljohnson »

dmschulman wrote: post #2

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 in…

Amen. You speak for me too.

Re: StumbleUpon closing after 16 years, accounts can be migrated to Mix

#40

Post by jclos »

eip wrote: post #36
tacostakohashi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 verific…

> 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.
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