[grepLeigh]

I found this years ago, during the "Stumbleupon" era of the Internet (does anyone remember this time sink?). I'm so glad it's still alive!

[el_benhameen]

I think (worry?) that stumbleupon rearranged my brain much like drugs or alcohol rearrange the brain of an addict. Once you’ve been there, you can’t go back to being able to have “just one” beer or, in my case, “just one click” on a link aggregator. I think the novelty-seeking part of my brain was always there, but SU helped pathologize it. I found some cool stuff, but I kind of wish it had never existed.

HN has a gentle enough design that I can enjoy it without it sucking me in, but I make a conscious choice to avoid Reddit, twitter, et al.

[grepLeigh]

Eh, if you hadn't found Stumbleupon then you would have experienced the same effect from one of the zillion other competitors in the attention economy.

You're right that this kind of novelty-seeking content has a profound impact on the brain. It's really interesting to see finally see longitudinal research, plus research on screens/novelty on child development (search for $thing + "psychosocial development").

One of the most encouraging thing I've taken away is that neutral pathways are still quite plastic well into adulthood.

For example, here's an experiment to try if you wake up and scroll in bed. After you do your morning routine, jot down a mood score (-1 feeling crummy, 0 meh neutral, +1 feeling good). You can do this for a week or two if you want to collect control data. Then, force yourself to get out of bed without looking at your phone (buy an alarm if you have too). You should see changes in your mood log within a week. Sleep regulates/replenishes dopamine levels, and scrolling through a dopamine wonderland first thing in the AM can result in dopamine dysregulation for the rest of the day. Try it!

[dfabulich]

It's so strange that StumbleUpon died but TikTok thrives today.

TikTok's algorithm is based entirely on when you click the Like button and when you linger on a video, exactly like StumbleUpon's algorithm. StumbleUpon even had a video product, StumbleVideo, that was basically just TikTok.

But, in 2018, when StumbleUpon shut down and sold their assets to Mix, the prevailing wisdom was that people didn't want to use StumbleUpon because they wanted to use Reddit and Facebook, to follow curated feeds of links, instead of random links that other people like.

If that wisdom were true, TikTok should have failed too, because TikTok just gives you "random stuff that similar people like," just like StumbleUpon.

I guess it just goes to show that there's no accounting for the rise and fall of social media apps/networks.

[dylan604]

TikTok was mobile device centric, and the people that glommed onto it quickest were young mobile users. StumbleUpon was just a website that the "olds" used. Maybe I'm wrong, but did SU have a mobile app? If so, they did a very bad job of getting it into the hands of those that TikTok did.

[accrual]

I loved Stumbleupon. It was a fun way to just explore the internet and truly find many gems I otherwise would have never noticed.

Pretty interesting timeline of events in their Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon

[dingnuts]

yes, I wasted hours of my life using it until one day I landed on some site called Reddit

Kagi has brought it back (kind of): https://kagi.com/smallweb has a random button (Next Post in the top left corner)

[kreddor]

You should check out Marginalia Search as well! https://marginalia-search.com/

[shikshake]

Setting it to the new tab page is a neat idea, I will follow your lead

[tomrod]

I love small web!

[echelon]

Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Everything2, del.icio.us, Digg

[natebc]

FWIW Digg is in the process of reinventing itself which ... is hopeful? We'll see!

https://reboot.digg.com/

[dcsan]

I so fondly remember StumbleUpin, but I’m trying to recall what was so amazing about it. Was it just something of a novelty at the time or the autocuration of the decentralized web would still be relevant?

it seems like a few social media sites took over from the random delight of finding someone’s little weblog or side project.

I hear they’re trying to buy it back and restart with their uber gains

[Izkata]

It wasn't completely random or completely (in the current social media sense) algorithmic: There was a settings page where you could pick among dozens of broad topics you were actually interested in and it would only give you results people categorized under it.

[rectang]

When Garfield Minus Garfield was being published regularly, I was a regular. I couldn't get enough of its dark, sardonic undermining of the comic aesthetic.

[chneu]

There's a site called cloudhiker that kinda does the same thing. The idea is the same but there was something special about early days Stumbleupon. Idk if we'll ever recapture that.

[sanderjd]

Loved stumbleupon! I think when I realized that I was no longer stumbling upon anything interesting was the leading indicator of the long downhill trend of interesting content on the web.

[avs733]

Same, and I had completely forgotten it existed. It feels even more prescient now than a decade+ ago