likes abandoned places, art and artists, books, buildings (preferably old or vernacular), Europe, Greece, history, Italy, Palestine, pirates

My Other Sites: Subscriptions:
Search

The New StumbleUpon

 
http://www.stumbleupon.com/help/The_New_StumbleUpon_User_Profile/

An opinionated summary for those who are still lost and bewildered

(non-stumblers will want to skip)

With the changes made final in December, the concept of friends was replaced with “mutual subscribers” and “direct shares” — creating a more distant, anonymous relationship between stumblers; one which focuses on what we do rather than who we are.

The visual editor was removed and 22 colour backgrounds reduced to 7 for the sake of a “consistent” look across the network and to discourage use of SU to create personal scrapbooks.
The wish for this uniformity is reiterated in official notes accompanying the New SU but has been grasped only slowly by stumblers (including me) who wailed for months about the loss of personal choice and individuality.

What’s New, alerting stumblers to the latest reviews by their friends, was replaced with a “Recent activity” page alerting them to what those friends have thumbed up, as against what they’ve posted in their own words.

~ ~ ~

The mantra from management was that the new SU was “simpler, searchable and more social”.

It IS simpler if the intended action is for stumblers to primarily click buttons, thumb up sites and dash off the odd brief review (with no fancy formatting), perhaps a la Twitter.

It IS more searchable — this is the one gain, and I like the options when I search on a keyword to do so within my own favourites, from among the pages of my friends or from the whole database.


Media_httpatomicpoetf_rupiy


But more social?
This has been the big problem.
It can’t be called more social if the focus is on website discovery and rating rather than writing or presenting something personal.

The problem for both SU and we stumblers is that so many of us were more interested in what our friends had to say about a site than in the site itself.
That interest in what I had to say or you had to say is what made it social; most of us would not have spent the time and energy that we did if it was primarily, or only, to be guided to good websites.

I certainly checked out sites my friends recommended or sent me, but I was just as likely to be interested in them and their lives, and they in me.
It’s only human.

Merely thumbing sites does not make relationships.
I could look at your site, go through your discoveries, tags and subject matter and read your reviews if you have written any, but unless there’s something of “you” on the page I am unlikely to even want to send you a greeting.

That, in my opinion, is why so many of us have decamped to Tumblr, where we can “be ourselves”, present whatever we like without the pressure to review websites, and also free ourselves from the policing, censorship and copyright issues that have grown as SU morphed from community to corporation.

Now, with an unofficial add-on visual editor no longer working, I may never post on SU again but to be honest I’ve moved on. SU is for sharing pages and quick messages, looking up bookmarked websites and copying a bit of code (eg with Photoblog It, which thankfully hasn’t been removed), while Tumblr actually feels friendlier and puts the focus on people.

0 comments

Leave a comment...