In it there is this advice to become a Power Stumbler:
I wrote this post because today I became a newly minted Top Stumbler. If you go to the Top Stumbler's Page (as of 4/17/07) you'll see my ugly mug, probably on the bottom half of the page (username: pickthebrain). All I did to get there is submit newly popular stories from Digg and Reddit as well every great post I find during casual feed reading. The StumbleUpon toolbar makes this incredibly easy.
To drive traffic, I also Stumble many of my own posts. Without fail, StumbleUpon sends at least a few hundred visitors over the course of the day. My friends with blogs have reported similar results.
Most people view social media as a form of entertainment and not much more. But if you're already using it, why not expend a bit more effort and use it to drive traffic to your website?
Now that you know how it's done, get out there and take away my competitive advantage!
Now I suppose it's inevitable, given SU's growing popularity, that there will be ever-increasing numbers of people trying to "game" the system, but I'm worried that this trend is deeply antithetical to the SU concept.
Can or should something be done to alter the way SU functions so as to hinder this type of usage, or can we just trust that "uninteresting" stumbles will sink to the bottom given time?
I was thinking: if someone created a script that automatically passed (thumbed) new newsfeed items of a site (e.g. digg), and nothing else, wouldn't that user effectively 'be' digg in the SU system? I mean this in the following functional sense: If you like digg, you add digg as a friend, your stumble skew somewhat towards digg stories.
The ability for users to create such pseudo-users, given any domain with an RSS feed, would be relatively straightforward to automate. Given this ability, SU functionality would be extended such as to make it a full 'indeterministic news aggregator'.
9: A quite compelling random thought. I think that's very much against the current TOS, which forbids "[using] the StumbleUpon Toolbar and Website in an automated manner." Still, it would revolutionize SU if done the feature was added.
sparkster
lerryn