Internet-ing Better: Stumble to Mix
I love the internet. I spent most of my adult career working at StumbleUpon. Not many people could say they’ve kicked off client meetings stumbling through videos of hamsters eating mini-burritos to how sperm whales sleep. I remember most of my favorite stumbles.
Stumbling the internet was magic.
The internet is and was a big place, 1.9B websites and counting. During its peak years, StumbleUpon made 500M content recommendations a month. So much information at the touch of our fingertips. So many new things to learn and discover. StumbleUpon was so good at that. Why is that? People added their favorite pages, articles, and videos into Stumble for others to find — about 1.8M new pages were added by the community a month (1,800,000). This social part was hidden, not on purpose, it just was. There wasn’t much noise, just you and your next discovery. You could click a little orange button and be taken some place new, a place you didn’t even know you were looking for. It was brilliant.
What happened?
People got “busy” and moved on to new social networks like Facebook. (Fun fact: We had the thumb up button on Stumble first!) Websites started to change making it harder for Stumble to pull in content through the iframe that powered the platform. The tech pre-dated Facebook. Can you remember the internet without Facebook and Twitter? (B-A-N-A-N-A-S) As time went on the way we served content (via an iframe) became more and more difficult as website security became more and more important. Websites would frame break which means you would just see an error or “link not found” message. A lot of links also stopped working for a number of reasons like browser updates, security reasons, super intrusive website ads, flash, and more. It was built for desktop, while most people were moving to smart phones and just moving off of StumbleUpon in general.
Why didn’t it evolve? For non-engineers like me, the best explanation I would get is “the code is like a heap of messy spaghetti”. Years on years on years of code built on code, learnings, data, content repositories. One small update or change would bring the whole site down for a few hours. Our StumbleUpon team had physical servers in the desert, they set on fire once. Seriously. It was built for a different time.
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Shutting down StumbleUpon was super sad, but super exciting at the same time. We have a second chance to make the internet better (again).
What’s next?
I hear “bring StumbleUpon back” almost everyday, a few times a day. I hear you. I want that too, but I want a better StumbleUpon. One where people get credit for their discoveries. One that doesn’t break. A platform that can iterate based on feedback from the community. A place with better tools to share and discover. An internet that makes me less mad. One that’s not littered with trolls.
It’s going to take some time. We’ve added a new extension that lets you surf the web with the click of a button and we’ve launched a mobile app. Adding requested features and a platform better than Stumble is in the works and we’re getting there every single day.
One of my resolutions this year is to make better use of the time I spend online. And this will be one of the hardest tasks ahead for Mix as we grow. Changing the way people spend their time online.
Personally, I’m going to spend less time mindlessly scrolling through a feed of baby pics, people trying to sell themselves or meal kits, or reading through threads of HS friends fighting about vaccines. Woof. I’m going to make a conscious effort to divert my attention from negative comment rabbit holes (why are the so addicting!!?), less time on people spreading/reading fake news and less energy being consumed with getting the most “hearts”, “likes”, and “views” if I do decide to share something.
I’m going to spend more time doing things on the internet that make me feel smarter, teach me something new, or make me laugh. I’m also going to start the year off eating better, basic, I know. (Here’s the start of my Whole30 collection) Planning more stateside travel to some of the national parks, I’ve only been to two (Stateside Travel collection). Some of many things I want to focus on in this brand new, beautiful year.
I’ll be sharing all my favorite discoveries here, on Mix, obviously. And will keep trying to document our teams journey into making the internet better.
