My recent rant about StumbleUpon's spammer infestation
prompted one stumbler to write to me asking
whether StumbleUpon is so naïve
that they did not foresee
how review blogs might eventually compete
with sponsored stumbling.
While it is possible
that StumbleUpon did not expect that
a non-negligible fraction of users
would use their favorites page as a journal,
I think they've made the most of this emergent situation.
The suits at StumbleUpon
are almost certainly aware of the dilemma,
and probably figure that they can
keep the paradox from causing them to vanish
in a puff of smoke
and
turn the purported threat into an advantage
by treating us to a delicate balancing act.
This essay considers the likely motivations,
strategy, and fate
of site gone bad
StumbleUpon.
Table of Contents
The Ascent of the Stumble Plantation
Fundamentally, StumbleUpon leverages people's need for meaningful social contact. Keeping an attractive public journal is for some people a lot like decorating a nest is for some birds, and StumbleUpon cleverly exploits this to avail itself of some free labor and a large captive audience for its targeted advertising scheme. At this point, the most cynical readers may note that StumbleUpon is only taking cues from the cunning innovators who have been employing inmates to build prisons; that, however, only underscores the genius of our new Internet overlords: Web 2.0 companies have introduced a significant refinement of the old prisoners-as-conscripted-labor idea by finding ways to get skilled workers to join the chain gang willingly.
How Stumblers Pen Themselves In
Stumblers declare interests, categorize links, and contribute to groups because they anticipate being rewarded (via the StumbleUpon algorithm) with increased virtual proximity to like-minded individuals; StumbleUpon then uses each member's link tags and declared interests to recommend similar links and users. So far, so good. Now, because one's reviews are available as a syndication feed, many stumblers have turned the link comment stream into a sort of web log, and some expect StumbleUpon to integrate associated technologies (comments, pingbacks, blogrolls, access control, etc.) that will enhance this (mis)feature of the service. Oops — that's not good.
Sitting on a Fence for Fun and Profit
StumbleUpon isn't likely to enhance its blog-like capabilities because full-fledged blogs are anathema to it: they compete with its sponsored-stumbling program as a content-filtering platform and, therefore, threaten a primary revenue stream. And, yet, for this very reason, StumbleUpon should probably prefer that users who wish to keep a blog mistake the comments feed for a blog hosting service rather than take their free labor elsewhere. Ditto for the substandard forums and groups, which exist primarily to prop up the illusion of community and (given that they can only be started by subscribers) to generate revenue from particularly driven members. Indeed, StumbleUpon would not dare discourage all blog-like use of its service because, as online journals and discussion groups go, StumbleUpon's are optimally deficient for its purposes: by failing to support pingbacks and comments, StumbleUpon's pseudo-blogs and -groups confine stumblers to an incestuous, underdeveloped corner of the blogosphere where viral marketing works its magic best.
When the Fine Line is not Straight and Narrow
Given the abundance of modules implementing blogging-related technologies (e.g., pingbacks, comments, fine-grained access control) and considering the impact of the missing features on members' ability to meet their own needs on- and off-site, one is tempted to conclude that StumbleUpon's social networking and journaling features are crippled by design. Indeed, StumbleUpon may seem naïve or ham-handed to critical folks, but I am sure paymaster eBay thinks it is only commendably unscrupulous in its refined exploitation of stumblers. So, I have a question for Stumble Bumble: what happens when you need to move but the purported fence you are sitting on turns out to be a very tall wall? That's right — the answer ends in “fall”. Now, cry me a river over how the king took his men and his horses down the road.