Mashable announces some unpleasant news. Unethical and unscrupulous website owners can pay to have their sites bookmarked on the popular StumbleUpon service. The controversial “service” behind this has already been paying Diggers to unnaturally promote links at Digg. Digg is already gamed from the inside, and it’s audience seems to be made up mostly of puerile adolescents, so I never cared much about it. But it would be very sad if you had to start wondering whether an article or site was stumbled because the user was paid. I have the feeling that it wouldn’t be too hard to spot these StumbleUpon users and ban their IP addresses: their stumble lists would be full of crap, and their profile information would be minimal. They would never join any StumbleUpon communities. There would be no avatar.
I hope StumbleUpon plans to fight this. There’s nothing wrong with doing it, legally, but because StumbleUpon is only worth the value of its links to its users, it would be in StumbleUpon’s best interest (that being the best interests of its users) to fight any attempts to game their system with cash.
If you want to get increased stumbles, here’s the right way to do it: Please Stumble this Post! Click the “Bookmark or Email this Post” link below. Stumblers need to know about this! Thank you!
Technorati Tags: stumbleupon, paid to stumble, blog spam, comment spam
9 Comments
Terrible! Everyone knows free stumbles are much better than paid stumbles, surely.
What with this new idea of paid-for comment leaving as well, it’s hard to know what’s genuine anymore
@SEO Ranter: I couldn’t agree more.
@Chris: It is harder, but still possible to tell the fakes apart from genuine comments, and then delete them accordingly. I have the feeling that paid comments won’t contribute anything of value to the discussion. As I mentioned in my post, I bet the paid stumblers will all have similar characteristics when you view their StumbleUpon profiles. Time will tell if I am correct or not.
I’m fed up with the way sites are abused by spammers. Not just comment spam and getting linked to through Technorati, Diggs and StumbleUpon. Have you looked at MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and such? You get endless people who want to be earmarked as your friend. They want other sites to link to them. It’s spoiled the whole purpose of MyBlogLog. It should just be MySplogLog now. What especially ticks me off are the ones who say what a great blog I have, how much they enjoyed reading it, etc. Yet I can see they never even bothered to click into my blog and read one word of it. Are they that obsessed/ desperate? If so, why the frick would I ever want to read or link to their trash pit of a site?
I came to your site to read an article you wrote about not using Adsense. I can’t find it though. It’s not linked on the site that quotes you
Laura, that article isn’t linked to from the site, it’s on the site! The link in your comment goes to a guest post I wrote on homebizblogger.
Paid stumbles are awful. I wonder if they will do something about it. You would think it would be easier to find - just look for a sub section of users who all have stumbled the same pages at the same time…. and only those pages…
Thanks for the heads up. I had no idea.
What will they think of next? First paid commenting and now paid stumblers. - Ashley
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