I’m quite sure everyone using StumbleUpon has noticed this and feels the same but it really annoys me how you get tons and tons of stumbles about SU in general. I don’t think anyone who uses SU needs a basic introduction. I can’t figure out any good reason for people to keep thumbing up those pages. Which reminds me of a few things about StumbleUpon that I think are not that great.

The whole concept of thumbing sites up or down is a bit confusing affair: often I want to see more pages that I disagree with (I like to amuse myself with that kind of material). So, do I thumb the page up and look like a creationist-racist-whatever to other people, or do I thumb it down and get less unintentionally hilarious pages? They should have two ratings for pages based on if you agree with the page and if you took time to read the page (because, like, this may shock you but SU is mainly for wasting your time).

One thing I think would be nice is that you could explicitly tell SU to send you pages with the specified tags. And, even more valuable would be if you could tell it to never send you any pages with some tag. I’m subscribed to something that sends me tons of SEO tips (i.e. search engine optimizing, the art of creating pages that get a lot of visits thanks to dubious means of getting the page first on Google results instead of because the page kicks ass) that I don’t necessarily agree with nor want to see more of them. However, it is hard to stop receiving those pages and still get the other pages in the category. It would be very convenient to have a filter that filtered out pages with a suitable tag. Maybe the filter should work a bit like how you search the Web, i.e. you would have a search box on the SU toolbar and you would type in a query, and each click on the “Stumble!” button would give the next search result.

Which brings to my last complaint: more tags, please. Even automated tagging would help a lot. After all, in the above case, pages about SEO would be easy to spot because they tend to contain the said term a lot. Or, the term tower defense. God, I hate all those TD games. Also, if you are just submitting a new web proxy site, please die. Those can’t be that profitable.