The website I’d been working on had just crossed into “Usable” territory and I was anxious to find some users to put my new site through its paces.
A few problems.
- I don’t have any social media accounts, at least not any with followers.
- There’s only so many times you can text your friends and family asking them to “Check out this site I made” before you start becoming obnoxious and I’d crossed that line a while ago.
- My new site doesn’t show up on any Google searches. I’m not talking about “Doesn’t rank on the first page” — I mean doesn’t show up, period. Trust me, I clicked “Next” on the Google results page until there were no more nexts to click. My site didn’t rank at all.
No followers, no friends, no Google. Bad place for a nascent hot spot on the information superhighway to be.
Then, since I’m old, a thought struck me. I know where I can get some free traffic for my site. My old friend StumbleUpon! You remember StumbleUpon. It’s that cool site where you clicked a button and were shown a random page so you could be entertained by the cybernetic screeds of schizophrenics sharing their conspiracy theories.
StumbleUpon seemed like the perfect solution. Random internet travelers would be entertained by my site and I would get a trickle of traffic. As more people used my site, they’d leave links behind, Google would index me, more traffic would grow. Move over Mark Zuckerberg, Inter-Tubes here I come!
Only, there’s a problem. It seems StumbleUpon is no more. It’s been replaced by something called Mix, which, in its own words “Shows you content matched to your interests, recommended by friends and community experts.” and in my words “Is kind of like pintrest, I guess?”
Mix was a problem. Neither friends nor community experts would be suggesting my site to that precious, precious traffic. “Okay” I thought, “No problem, I’ll just submit my page to whatever StumbleUpon alternative exists now.”
This brings me to the main thesis of my post. As I was taught in school, “Make the main thesis of your essay appear for the first time about 7 paragraphs in, in order to maximize your audience’s attention.” I went to a bad school. Anywho, the main point — Google’s search results are kind of bad now.
Here is the first page of Google results for the search “StumbleUpon alternative”
- 5 StumbleUpon Alternative Sites That Still Work to Pass Time
- StumbleUpon Alternatives that still works in 2019
- 8 Amazing Sites Like StumbleUpon
- StumbleUpon Alternatives and Similar Software
- What are some interesting websites like StumbleUpon? — Quora
- 15 Best StumbleUpon Alternatives
- Top 7 StumbleUpon Alternatives
- 20 StumbleUpon Alternatives
- 5 Best Sites Like StumbleUpon
- 7 Best Sites like StumbleUpon
Of the top 10 results, literally all are webpages that list answers to the question I posed to Google. This would be like if I went to https://bing.com and entered a search query and bing just linked to Google’s search results. I mean, yeah, you’re kind of answering my question, but… isn’t knowing the answers to questions kind of supposed to be YOUR job?
What’s worse is that these results are all the kind of SEO bait that’s been engineered to rank highly on search engines. They aren’t quality answers. The first result lists Mix (thanks), a service that will email you interesting URLs!!!, along with a subreddit they think is interesting.
These results are all the kind of thing where somebody paid somebody 10 cents a word on Fiverr to mass produce “Top X” articles to get onto Google searches to get traffic and profit from Google ads. Dang, I just got a new idea for a website…
Searching for “StumbleUpon Clone” has mostly more of the same. The second result is this project “Sligg” which seems to be the husk of a project that may once have existed that was an open source StumbleUpon clone, although Sligg.com is dead, there’s no code in the “Open Source” repository, and there is no evidence of the project existing. That’s the second result?
Okay. Maybe no StumbleUpon clone exists. That’s possible, right? I feel if you need something, and it doesn’t exist, that’s a compelling reason to build the thing you need. After all, people liked and used StumbleUpon — right? Surely, they’d want a replacement. I cracked open my editor and threw together a simple StumbleUpon replacement. I wanted three features:
- Click a button: Get a random URL. New URL every time. Nothing corporate. No pornography.
- Submit your own stuff so you can get some traffic.
- A history section so you can find interesting sites that you previously stumbled on to.
Thus, was https://stumblingon.com born!
I decided I could find people on twitter who were reminiscing about StumbleUpon and tweet at them, to let them know I was bringing it back! When I did, I immediately ran into two other people who were tweeting about their StumbleUpon clones.
On https://stumblingon.com people have submitted multiple other StumbleUpon clones to me. What! There’s a lot of these things out there.
The main reason I’m writing this is because I’m disappointed by Google’s results. I thought they were supposed to index the web and answer my questions. Somewhere along the way they seemed to have evolved into a way to present Listicles.
Okay, not really. My MAIN reason for writing this is to to create a webpage that links to https://stumblingon.com so that Google will index it and hopefully build my search ranking. But that disappointment thing is a close second.
