StumbleUpon Is Shutting Down After 16 Years of Service

An anonymous reader shares a report: After launching in 2002, website discovery platform StumbleUpon is shutting down on June 30. Over its existence, the service racked up 60 billion stumbles for 40 million users, cofounder Garrett Camp wrote in a Medium post this week.

Stumble

[Sejus]

May their last stumble be a merciful stumble. I think I used it once, didnt find it very useful.

Re:

[rtb61]

You obviously completely oblivious to the use of stumbleupon, find it useful, what kind of nut are you, you were meant to find it fun. I can't understand why they aren't selling it and instead just shutting it down, seems really odd.

Re:

[whoever57]

I can't understand why they aren't selling it and instead just shutting it down, seems really odd.

Read TFA for your answer:
"Existing StumbleUpon accounts will be transitioned to Mix ahead of the June 30 deadline."

They did sell it: to eBay, then bought it back and now they are setting up a new service.

Re:Stumble

[rtb61]

PS it seems they are not really shutting down as much as product shifting to mix.com. It seems they wish to be more of a influencer for profit, than straight here's a random popular web site in one of your categories. Their home page seems to be heavily main stream media biased, horribly so. Is it in any way stumbleupon, nope, real marketing boondoggle it sucks balls.

Re:Stumble

[careysub]

According to The Verge, Mix.com is "a curation platform that incorporates your social media presence".

I'm pretty sure I want nothing to do with that!

Re:

[chthon]

"Curation", is that like, eh, making salami?

Re: Stumble

[mSparks43]

stublevideo was one of the best websites on the internet for a while.
Then it kinda stopped letting you stuble on videos, and the whole thing became rather pointless.

Re:

[ganjadude]

ive been a user since around 04 and man it is a wonderful tool when you are just killing time. SU will be very missed.

Re:

[Narcocide]

I said the same thing about Facebook, but it didn't do any good.

Re:What service?

[themusicgod1]

The service is piercing our filter bubble, and giving people a dose of 'random' in dull moments.
Being able to step outside of our comfort zone, and skip to a part of the world wide web that we did not expect to be in. It's like setting a random course, turning on the warp drive, and stopping after a random period of time - to explore new life, and new civilizations. To boldly go where some people had gone before, but which might have otherwise lived and died as a niche part of the web that only some hipsters would know about. Unlike reddit which cultivated the "best" content of the web, stumbleupon connected people to parts of the web that they wouldn't normally go, showed them things through the eyes (and reviews) of people they wouldn't normally read.

Too bad, but

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I use StumbleUpon all the time. It's a great way to pass time.

BUT!

The thing has become a true privacy nightmare lately. If you use it without Noscript or uBlock Origin, you're bonkers: for any page that has, say, 10 scripts (and 8 are trackers), the same page referenced within the StumbleUpon "window" has hundred, even thousands of extra trackers tacked on.

It's so crazy I have to pretty much disable all scripts, and yank the URL of whatever page looks of interest from within the StumbleUpon URL (thankfully easy to extract) to paste it in another tab and view it normally.

So yeah, I'll miss SU. I won't miss the sneaky privacy invasion and over-the-top monetization attempts though...

Re:

[110010001000]

Slashdot has at least 8 trackers (according to ghostery)

Re:

[johnsie]

Ghostery is owned by an adverstising company.

Re:

[Eythian]

Surprisingly, it has zero according to Privacy Badger (though I also have uBlock origin, so if it's only ad trackers, I might not be getting them anyway.)

Re:

[waspleg]

They got bought a few years ago. I forget by whom but I think it was like AOL or something insane like that and as you say it became nearly unusable after that.

It was great for channel surfing websites and easily sharing links with friends but I stopped using it within the last year or two as it became easier to simply email or txt site links with out all the bullshit.

And nothing...

[geekd]

And nothing of value was lost.

not really 'shutting down'

[Anonymous Coward]

more like 'merging' with mix.com, a different site created by the same co-founder.

techcrunch, of course and as usual, is guilty of publishing a shitty article that simply paraphrases the original post on medium and only glossed-over that very important detail at the very end.

read the original post from camp here instead:
https://medium.com/@gc/su-is-m... [medium.com]

basically, su users will still get a similar service, just at a different domain. big whooop.

Why Didn't I Discover Them Sooner?!

[careysub]

I read that StumbleUpon is shutting down! That's the first I've hear of them. Why isn't there a service to help discover useful new sites? Oh, wait...

Just one more stumble

[bug_hunter]

StumbleUpon was a golden tool for me and let me used the internet to learn random things.
Now I just get stuck on memes and Starcraft replays on YouTube.

Time to try and retrain my brain to get more value from my time.

It's a Real Shame

[Jim Sadler]

Stumble Upon has been a wonderful site. I am sad to hear it is shutting down.

It was a good idea.

[jeril]

I liked the idea. It wasn't enticing enough fro me to ask to reset my password after I forgot it. I remember it not being worth the time unless I was really bored.

Useful sites

[Only Time Will Tell]

That's too bad, I did find them of relative use in sending weekly emails of sites I'd like. They weren't always useful, and sometimes had repeats, but I found more sites I'd never known about this way. I hope an alternative comes around.

Wow...

[cshark]

Really is the end of an era. I remember Stumble well.
Though, honestly, I'm a little surprised it lasted this long.