Webupon

I’ve been a StumbleUpon user for quite a while now. It’s a powerful online social network and if you have good standing with it’s members, a great tool for getting content out. But despite its near holy status with users, It has a few drawbacks we could all learn from.

Thieves

Anytime an article or image has a remote chance of becoming popular on the Internet, people love to rip the content in it’s entirety and paste it to their own website. The result is then submitted to various social media or networking sites like StumbleUpon or Digg. Results become skewed, the original poster could be discredited and ultimately it’s the stumblers who have to deal with viewing the same content twenty times. I’ve took note of a few times that I’ve stumbled the same exact content twice or 3 times in a row.

Posers

For those who don’t like to completely steal someones content, there is always the route of riding on another persons success. I’m talking about people who get quick spurts of traffic by creating and posting a pseudo Xkcd (or other well known) comic strips to their site and submitting it to Stumble. Often times these poorly conceived ripoffs damage the reputation of the original artist.

Using search engines to submit search results
No one wants to stumble a hundred variations of a phone book website search engine stating, “We could not locate a soul in Dick Chaney”. Whether you’re playing the system to increase your stumble counts or just want to follow a meme (or Internet fad), stop it. You’re effectively killing the fun and you’re not using stumble for what it was originally meant for; to discover original websites or content.

Begging for stumbles

I can understand people who submit their own works the stumble. I do it myself. I’m not going to lie, I’ve submitted this article myself. However, If you are going to do that, don’t identify StumbleUpon users and start begging for thumbs up. The user will decide whether or not to bother thumbing an article. Begging usually results in an automatic thumbs down.

Resizing the browser

Unnecessarily resizing your users browser will leave some very sore users. It’s pretty much the equivalent of telling a user how they can or can not use their browser. Furthermore, anyone who needs to resize someones browser doesn’t know a thing about effective web design. Often times, the action of resizing someones browser is enough to earn an automatic thumbs down.

Addicting

This problem is exclusively StumbleUpons fault. It’s addicting! I’d sit for hours on end just checking out new websites and passing saving or damning judgment with the thumbs button. You might be wondering, “Well what’s wrong with that”? Aside from the power kick? You tell me what’s wrong with that when you’ve got a work project due that you’ve put off for a week, it’s one in the morning and you’ve got a choice between doing your work or stumbling more sites.

Now don’t get me wrong, this list does not sway my love for StumbleUpon. This is just a list of things that we can try to keep in mind or avoid all together the next time we submit. Despite these issues I will continue using StumbleUpon (probably due to issue number six). Let’s all just make sure to do our part to make Stumble a fun and enjoyable experience.