Comment by dividefuel

1 year ago

I think there are many reasons why SU would fail, but the biggest to me is that so much content is that so much content is produced just for the major social media sites. SU wouldn't offer net value over just using those apps.

For example, consider what the UX on mobile would be like. A modern SU would often send you to the major social media sites since that's where the content is. But you'd either constantly encounter login walls or "download the app!" banners OR you'd have to constantly shift back and forth between apps. As a user why would I put up with that, when I could just stay in one app and see so much of the same content?

From what I learned about SU, it mainly died because at some time they got more and more spam websites, I would call this the early days of SEO spam. Users slowly vanished. SU increased the the amount of ads on the site, which led to even more users vanishing. A circle of death.

Did you use StumbleUpon? There was very little overlap, it was a completely different part of the internet; more actual "web" than "just uses the internet for transport"