Well, the StumbleUpon community has read my post on how to become a top user and started discussing my tactics.
Also, I’ve been taken off the Top Stumbler
page. I haven’t received a notice but I’m inclined to believe the
events are connected. It will be interesting to see how my StumbleUpon
traffic is affected.
If it goes down or disappears so be it. A site shouldn’t be dependent
on social media anyways. My aim with the original post was to help
others drive a bit of traffic to their sites and share my insights about
social media.
I knew this was a risk before I posted, but decided to do it anyway. I
don’t see how I could have violated any rules, although I have used the
system and the nature of social media to my advantage.
It’s funny how people will punish you for pointing out how a system
works. I’m sure there are many others using the same technique, but when
I wrote about it I somehow undermined the community despite
contributing many high quality pages.
I’m confident nearly every page I submitted would have made it into
StumbleUpon sooner or later. I just found a good way to get there first.
Maybe they’re worried about people trying buy Stumbles, which is
understandable.
Gaming will always be a factor is social media. I’m no idealist. On
the web, traffic is king. StumbleUpon sells traffic by slipping ads in
with regular sites. Everyone knows about this and is fine with it. But
when someone else uses the system to their advantage it is considered
exploitation.
StumbleUpon makes a point of not disclosing many user numbers. They
actually just removed the Audience figure. This has it’s pros and cons,
but certainly leads to a lack of transparency. I’m curious to see how
this all pans out, especially with the recent buyout.
0 Comments: