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StumbleUpon Is Shutting Down After 16 Years of Service (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.

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.

34 comments

  1. Stumble by Sejus · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re:Stumble by rtb61 · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    2. Re:Stumble by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    3. Re:Stumble by rtb61 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    4. Re:Stumble by careysub · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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!

      --
      Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
    5. Re:Stumble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, it was pretty worthless so good riddance. StumbleUpon was filled with morons and assholes anyway.

    6. Re:Stumble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm pretty sure that is the enemy.

    7. Re: Stumble by mSparks43 · · Score: 1

      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.

    8. Re:Stumble by chthon · · Score: 1

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

    9. Re:Stumble by ganjadude · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
  2. What service? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sharing links?

    K bye. Forums still exist, we never needed you. And if we ever feel like we do we can just use a search engine instead.

    1. Re:What service? by Narcocide · · Score: 1

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

    2. Re:What service? by themusicgod1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
  3. Too bad, but by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Too bad, but by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Slashdot has at least 8 trackers (according to ghostery)

    2. Re:Too bad, but by waspleg · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:Too bad, but by johnsie · · Score: 1

      Ghostery is owned by an adverstising company.

    4. Re:Too bad, but by Eythian · · Score: 1

      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.)

    5. Re:Too bad, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It wasn't always like this.

    6. Re:Too bad, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I show 17 on Privacy Badger ATM when not logged in.

  4. And nothing... by geekd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And nothing of value was lost.

  5. I stopped using New Anything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I used to like New Anything. For the most part, it was nice.

    But then, over time, I noticed a change. New Anything would suddenly disappear, leaving me with strange, sometimes empty feelings. This I didn't like. I couldn't trust New Anything. It was unreliable.

    That was when I realized: I no longer loved New Anything.

  6. not really 'shutting down' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

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

  7. Why Didn't I Discover Them Sooner?! by careysub · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...

    --
    Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
  8. Just one more stumble by bug_hunter · · Score: 1

    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 turtles all the way down.
  9. The web is DEAD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There's nothing left to stumble upon.
    Search engines are a road to nowhere.

  10. gone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It was great at first, but its management turned it into a POS.

  11. I interviewed there years ago. No loss. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Everyone I talked with were know it all jerks.

  12. It's a Real Shame by JimSadler · · Score: 1

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

  13. Ads by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To what extent is this due to Google's reduction in add revenue in the recent past?

    How many more web sites will vanish due to lack of advertising revenue?

  14. It was a good idea. by jeril · · Score: 1

    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.

  15. It's just moving to mix.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Same shit, different web site.

  16. Useful sites by Only+Time+Will+Tell · · Score: 1

    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.

  17. Wow... by cshark · · Score: 1

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

    --

    This signature has Super Cow Powers