An Open Letter to StumbleUpon Regarding Usability, Negativity, and Growing Pains

Last week when I wrote, What I Learned About Communities and Social Media by Hanging Out With the Trolls, I discussed what the members of the StumbleUpon community have been complaining about. I focused on what we as users, fellow community members and marketers can do to work together to make using SU a better experience for all community members. One of the comments on that post from John Furst really made a great deal of sense, especially in the context of SU’s usability:

“Usability Rule #1: Let people type in whatever they feel like, and let the machine make sense of it.”

This week I want to talk about the things I think SU needs to do to protect their community and get beyond their growing pains. Since they have seen explosive growth over the last year or so, it’s become painfully obvious that what was built for a small community is not working for a community of 4,000,000+ members. With negativity spreading more rapidly than ever before throughout SU, it risks imploding and causing users to abandon the service out of frustration for not being heard or being harassed. Think Digg.

Quite honestly, I fully believe that the reason StumbleUpon has grown so rapidly is because they have been able to shine where Digg has failed, and have been able to capture a large percentage of a market that once belonged to Kevin Rose.

So what can StumbleUpon do better?

There needs to be more separation between Topics and Tags

First and foremost, I think SU needs to do a lot of work with Topics and Tagging. I can’t claim to know the inner workings of their system, but from a user experience, I believe that there isn’t much difference between Tags and Topics. While when you submit a story, you have to choose a category and tags are optional, once a story has been submitted, tags seem to function exactly as topics do.

Stories should be submitted to the most appropriate Topic, but I believe users should have the right to tag stories however they wish. On del.icio.us, tagging isn’t a problem - because tags are there for individual use (filing bookmarks) and for public use (in broader topics).

There needs to be a human review when Topics are changed

Honestly, I can’t understand why anyone at StumbleUpon would think that When Trolls, Flame Wars and Cyber-Rage go too Far belonged in the AIDS category. And for those of you who think it must have been inappropriately categorized when it was initially submitted, I can provide proof it wasn’t.

While changing a Topic is a needed functionality, it’s easily abused as well - by both spammers and the ‘faketivists‘, who claim they are anti-spam but really are just using the StumbleUpon community as a punching bag to vent their anger.

StumbleUpon could add more functionality to the Thumbs Down button

StumbleUpon is supposed to know that you want “No More Like This” when you thumb something down. It also supposedly slows down the traffic to that page. I’ve actually seen the exact opposite happen, when articles get a lot of thumbs down by a group of friends, SU serves that page to more people in that circle of friends.

Suggested ways to make Thumbing Down more useful:

When a user repeatedly thumbs down topics, StumbleUpon needs to be more vigilant about making sure that this user doesn’t get any content related to that topic.

There could be levels of Thumbing Down, such as “Not Interested, Annoying, Inappropriate Content or Spam”, although I hesitate to suggest it, because of the potential for abuse. The Digg Bury Brigade is quite real, and consistently buries great, legitimate stories for no good reason.

A limit to thumbs down? There is currently an invisible limit to how many times you can thumb up a particular domain - all thumbs up after you have hit your limit have no effect on traffic. If that’s the case, then there should also be an invisible limit to the number of times someone can slow the traffic with multiple thumbs down to a user/domain to prevent bullies from harming legitimate users.

Create more separation between hobby and business users

When you sign up for StumbleUpon, you can say that you are there for “Websurfing, Friends, Dating, Business, or Community.” For users that do not check the Business box, couldn’t SU serve them content that doesn’t originate from Business users? Although that might be extreme, perhaps there is a way to partially filter content submitted by business users.

Especially if a Business user submits a high percentage of their SU Favorites into business categories, it is likely that most of their Stumbles wouldn’t be of interest to people who express no interest in business categories. I think SU at this point has no shortage of content to share with their users, and could stand to be a little more picky about what it displays to groups that are clearly on opposite ends of the SU community spectrum.

Most importantly, users need more control over what they see when they hit the Stumble! button

Users select interests based on Topics, but I know for a fact that even when things are submitted to appropriate categories, the pages are shown to users who have expressed interest only in the tags that were used for the article. Users get pissed off, because they believe that someone has invaded their ‘Topic’ with a marketing message. While this does happen sometimes, the following scenarios are not accounted for:

New users who don’t understand which Topic is most appropriate

Lazy users who don’t realize that the Topic they chose affects others who subscribe to that topic

Subjective definitions of Topics (some people think that the Topic of Photos should be ONLY Photos, and not photography services)

Overlap of Topics (an article about selling pressed flower products can be appropriately submitted to Crafts, Gardening or Business)

If pages were only served through the Stumble! button based on Topics and not Tags, it would allow users to control more closely what they see using the service.

Additionally, I have seen evidence of SU delivering pages it *thinks* people would be interested in, even when all Topics and Tags have been used accurately. Specifically, a person who had expressed an interest in “Car Parts” got a page about ways to sell cars on Craigslist. He felt it was spam and that the tags were ’stuffed’ for greater exposure. In fact, the story was submitted to “Marketing”, and I could see no evidence of other tags used. I can only guess that the StumbleUpon algorithm read the keywords on the page or in the page URL and served it up to this user who expressed interest in “Car Parts” because I’m sure that these keywords or that phrase appeared on the page. The author was accused of spamming when he did nothing to cause this to happen.

Suggested ways to give users more control:

• Allow users to choose whether they want to subscribe to closely guarded Topics or loosely guarded Tags
• Allow users to define their level of adherence to Topics- from strict adherence to expressed interests or a willingness to see content that is Tagged in other categories
  
• Allow users to opt out of Topics or tags in addition to expressing interest - this should be done immediately, in my opinion.
• Allow users to block content that was liked by certain users (If SallyJane23 likes this stuff, I know I won’t)
• Allow users to have both private tags and public tags, with private tags carrying lesser weight
  

If you don’t like what you are seeing on StumbleUpon

I’d like to remind people of what is permitted on StumbleUpon if we are to stay within SU’s own Terms of Service, and are NOT considered spam, nor a reason for an account being disabled:

Stumbling, thumbing up, reviewing your own content.

Negative reviews of you. Negative reviews of your friends.

Hostile people. Unkind people. Mean people.

People who negatively review the stuff you like.

Shameless self-promoters. Shameless “other-self” promoters.

Friend Whores

People who PM you with “Thanks for viewing my page!”

Additionally, StumbleUpon actively encourages people who run websites to promote their readers’ use of SU by adding buttons, and specifically states “Add a Stumble It! button to your page and let your visitors promote your site for free on StumbleUpon.”

What would you tell to StumbleUpon if you had their ear?

My guess is that SU wants to grow, and wants to listen to their community. In fact, that’s not just a guess, I was asked by one of their community managers to submit my suggestions for improvement. I decided to make my suggestions in an open manner to gather more input and suggestions from other readers. Every time I write about something like this, readers usually add fantastically valuable input that I didn’t think of, so please, add your thoughts.

One post I want to particularly mention is Andy Beard’s 7 StumbleUpon Problems I Would Love To See Fixed, which is somewhat related to this article. Also, Shari shares some interesting perspective from the inside of StumbleUpon in The Two Faces of StumbleUpon, Part 2.

And allow me to clarify in closing that nothing in this article is referring to *real spam*. For the sake of this conversation, *real spam* is spam that the moderators at StumbleUpon deem to be spam, not just the users. All of us are on the same page in regards to ridding StumbleUpon of the real threats of multiple accounts, bots, and abuse of the system. This open letter isn’t written to address those issues.