The New StumbleUpon
Rated • 40 reviews • stumbleupon • stumbleupon.com
A very subjective update for the bewildered and
those who are still resisting "coming over"
I have completed the laborious task of adding RSS feeds for all my subscriptions, so I can manage things from Google Reader instead.
I just can't work with the subscription and "direct share" lists offered in V4 whereas in G Reader I can organise subscribers into groups and labels that work for me.
For those who don't know, you don't have a friends list in V4; you don't have friends, apart from "friends who are not subscriptions", who are listed under your subscriptions.
Confused?
Get used to it!
What I, and I presume most people, really need instead of what we've been given is a listing of people I both subscribe to and share pages with -- the bulk of our friends under the old system and the people we really want to keep up with.
There is no such list now.
You have to either type their name in, search through pages of subscriptions presented in no particular order, or perform a search.
Alternatively, you can scroll through a dropdown list alongside messages in your inbox -- but that, too, is a masterlist of all your subscriptions, so it can be unwieldy.
The whole thing is unwieldy, to say the least.
I also dislike the way stumblers are increasingly rewarded for thumbing -- presuming that when they thumb up a site they go to the front of the queue on people's subscription lists.
The flip side of that is that those who are less active, or maybe away cos they're in trouble, just disappear off the radar and we forget them.
How "social" is that? How human?
A few other things . . .
1) We have a workable tag search feature (aka tag cloud) now, but only tks to Foresthippy and for those using Firefox and Greasemonkey.
I strongly believe SU should be fixing this problem -- we can't and shouldn't have to always be relying on add-ons for a basic search features and access to our own favourite sites.
Gallingly, the company claims -- see here -- to have "implemented the idea" of a tag cloud, but has not done so and has not responded to questions about this piece of misinformation.
2) I am staying in V4 only because I do not want to risk further conflicts with formatting between V3 and V4.
As it is, I have hundreds of posts that no longer look right just because SU has chosen to no longer recognise simple HTML coding.
I don't know whether they will ever be fixed because I am not prepared to change every post, and SU has not agreed to resolve the problem even though it affects a lot of very active members.
3) I go back to V3 for specific reasons:
To check for new friend requests, since the V4 friending system is totally unworkable, and also to get a better idea of who has been visiting my pages -- because in V4 visitors have to cycle through 100 places before they show up on your network again.
This makes a network seem more sluggish than it is and gives no indication as to who is visiting most frequently.
4) And I intend to tick the "accept shares" box on all people I am subscribed to from now on, on visiting them.
On the flip side, I will not tick the box for people I haven't subscribed to.
What this means:
If we're subscribed to each other and you tick that box too, we will become Mutual Subscribers Who Can Direct Share, to use the company's parlance.
A cumbersome and ludicrous term, for sure, but it means we will then see each other's activity (albeit mostly only thumb-ups under the "Discover" tab) and be able to make contact via the toolbar.
None of this is great IMO, but we can only work with what we've got.
