Stumbleupon Hate Reviews Demystified

November 20th, 2007 | 18 comments

If you’ve been marketing online for more than a day you know what Stumbleupon is. If you don’t know then you need to catch up on times The fact is, if you publish good content, SU can easily drive thousands of visitors to your site/blog. It’s sent over 6,000 uniques my way in just the past 30 days.

Stumbleupon reviews

The Stumbleupon Problem

It’s a great source of traffic, but in some cases it’s a great source of childish, immature, and downright nasty reviews! These “hate” reviews normally come from “non-marketers” when a post is submitted to a non-marketing category. The category I see it most in is the “stumbleUpon” category (topic).

In some cases I honestly don’t blame them. These are people who are using a social network to find fun, cool and interesting sites. They aren’t looking for pages on how to get traffic from Stumbleupon etc. They don’t know what marketing is all about so they just assume that all marketers are spammers.

BUT, there are some idiots out there who are out of line in a big way! One of my more recent posts titled “How to be a Power Stumbler on Stumbleupon” received over 40 thumbs up, but it also received 9 thumbs down. Here is one of the 9 negative “reviews:”

More Stambler crap; as the reviews indicate, this kind of junk is getting tiresome. Even better, this clown hides his negative reviews. Jackassery to the Nth degree.

What’s a stambler? Is “jackassery” a word? So I’m a “stambler” a “clown” and I’m guessing since I take part in “jackassery” I’m also a “jackass.” I also hide my negative reviews. I’m not sure where he got that one, or any of the other garbage he typed, but I don’t think it’s even possible to hide negative reviews. If it were, I’d do it though, hell yeah. Why let garbage like this see light? btw, if you know how to hide negative reviews, like this clown is accusing me of doing, I’d love for you to tell me!

Caroline had a great post degraded as well and it was very well intended, as mine was. It’s titled “Do you Thank your Stumblers” and she wrote about the negativity here.

What we can do as Marketers

Although there are some idiots out there who are trying to spam Stumbleupon and everywhere else they can, I think the majority of us aren’t spammers. This is why we need to look out for one another.

1. When you stumble a good post that is marketing related submit to an appropriate category (TOPIC) and stay away from the “stumbleupon” category all together. If you’re not the one to discover the post, insert marketing related tags. Doing this would reduce the amount of hate reviews by 90% I almost guarantee.

2. If you see a bunch of non-marketers attacking a legitimate page, add a positive review to offset that misguided soul who felt it necessary to degrade something they know nothing about.

3. Report abusive “stumblers” through Stumbleupon’s contact form by selecting “complaint” in the drop-down subject menu.

Now, if this post gets stumbled, I’m curious as to whether or not it’s submitted under “stumbleupon”

Related Posts

18 comments

The certain Way
20th November, 2007 at 11:17 am

I think one needs to be careful wiht what one submits to stumbleuppon. I found a lot of high class sites via them and really believe this should be kept this way.
On the other hand, I also promote some of my articles via the system. It gets me at least 500 page views. Therefore I only take those pages that I would normally give a thumbs up myself.
I must confess that I never look at the reviws, maybe I better shold
Josh Spaulding
20th November, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Hi The,

You’re right, the category is the most important part. Marketing related posts can be seen as spam if submitted to non-marketing categories. If they’re submitted to the marketing category then they’re in place.
Maurice (TheCaymanHost)
20th November, 2007 at 8:40 pm

Nice post Josh and some very good advice. I was horrified by some of the language and vitriol directed at Caroline after her post – disgraceful people behaving disgracefully. I have to admit to reporting several of the worst offenders on that occasion.

It has certainly made me mindful of just what and where I Stumble marketing related information. I hope this post gets widely read and that people will take it on board.

Like it or not, receiving that kind of abuse has to be upsetting for anyone, regardless of what has been submitted. I often stumble at random, just to see what gets thrown up (marketing does get boring at times) and sure, I’ve seen lots of garbage as well as some cool stuff, but just because something doesn’t appeal to me doesn’t make me feel the need to spit hatred and poison at the author or Stumbler.
Josh Spaulding
20th November, 2007 at 8:43 pm

Thanks Mo, a good portion of this post states the obvious, but I felt it was something that needed a little exposure. Hopefully alot of stumblers on the marketing side give it a read.
Napafcu (1 comments.)
21st November, 2007 at 10:32 am

Thank you for great hints! Especially hint 2. about non marketers sounds to be very useful for me.
Carpentry Jobs (2 comments.)
21st November, 2007 at 9:11 pm

I heard Google bans certain adsense publishers for inflating impressions with SU. If that is true, then I think it is better not to go for SU
Josh Spaulding
21st November, 2007 at 9:20 pm

Hi Carpentry,

That’s an odd name your parents gave you. Here’s something for you to look at

I’m not sure who said that, but I can’t see it as being true. We can’t inflate our own traffic without others stumbling our posts, so it’s out of our control.
Ad Tracker (1 comments.)
24th November, 2007 at 2:20 am

Interesting. This is obviously a growing problem. I just wrote a similar article about a different incident.

You can find it by clicking my name.

Didn’t want to violate the comment policy
caile
26th November, 2007 at 11:40 pm

I do NOT believe in personal attacks or abusive stumblers, even against SU exploiters. There is no cause for using vitriol and nastiness, period. If someone doesn’t like a site, they can thumb it down and move along, or they can even give it a negative review — as long as the review is directed at the ARTICLE/PAGE and not toward the stumbler or the author of the page. Additionally, negative reviews can be well-thought-out and well-written and do not have to contain profanity and curse words, nor do they have to be nasty. They can be simply people’s matter-of-fact opinions (although I am prone to being less tactful at some times than others).

To be honest, I’m very tired of marketers that have seemed to have exploded onto SU in huge quantities just in the past 8 or so months.

I am tired of people who don’t even subscribe to my pages constantly asking me to “review” and “thumb up” their websites because I happen to have a large fan base. I flag these people as “spam” and don’t even bother to visit, because it’s rude.

I joined SU for fun, like the overwhelming majority of stumblers there. The wave of marketing-oriented stumblers is ruining the landscape. If we could keep all the marketers “confined” to a certain section (like a smoking section in a building), then those that WANT to stumble these sites/pages/people can GO there and visit, not have all the SEO crap foisted on them when we’re at SU to enjoy ourselves.

And to be honest, we don’t really give a hoot if your site makes money. We’re on SU for ourselves and don’t care for marketers flooding the place and mis-labeling their blogs to inflate “traffic numbers” and we’re forced to wade through more and more pages of this “how to manipulate SU for your personal gain and screw the rest of the 3 million people there who might not appreciate it” type stuff.

Yes this is rather strongly written (I’m exercising restraint actually because I have gotten to the point I’m nearly ready to leave SU because it’s not “fun” anymore, it’s all about business and marketing — and I have a marketing DEGREE!). But the fact is, MOST of us (and especially the old-timers) do NOT like this influx on how to use SU for your personal gain. It’s supposed to be a collaborative effort to share with other stumblers content we’re personally interested in. And frankly, all these “how to make money off your blog” blogs are NOT interesting to those of us who simply want to read some news or photoblog or find humor or whatever we’re there for.

As an aside, it is possible to hide negative reviews: Just go to your “reviews” page and find any negs and on the right side it says “hide review? yes/no” and you click yes. However, if you DO choose to hide the review, it also means you can no longer see the person if they visit your page’s network rotation, nor will they be able to contact you (you are essentially putting them on ignore). So hiding reviews should be done with caution.

As I keep saying in my posts about these marketing blogs that are yammering about how to do this and that on SU, I do not intend my commentary to be directed at any one person or site, but at the overall practice. There is no subtlety and there is only going to be the eventual alienation of the true stumblers, so that although at first you will get a lot of “curious” traffic, I suspect that before long, the only real traffic these blogs will get is from other marketers looking for the same content and have the same goals with using SU, as the “regular” stumblers will have basically gotten too annoyed to bother.

These are simply my opinions. I will state for the record that since I am good friends with a LARGE number of the more long-time stumblers, these opinions are quite widely held, and I think they should be allowed to be heard. Thanks.

Sincerely,
caile~
Josh Spaulding
26th November, 2007 at 11:48 pm

Hi Caile,

Thanks for the very in-depth comment.

I fully agree with you!!

My whole point is that we need to be submitting stories to an appropriate category, which would be marketing.

On the other hand, if someone stumbles one of my pages and places it in an inappropriate category, does that make me a spammer? Hell no!!!

The problem lies in the stumblers perception that anything that lands in “their” category that is marketing related is spam.

They obviously don’t understand how SU works.

Do I look at SU as a means of marketing? Yes. That’s because there are many Stumblers who ARE interested in reading my musings!

It all comes down to the category in which the person stumbling places any particular page.

I did notice the “hide review” link finally and I’ve hidden a couple children who felt it appropriate to call me a spamming idiot for running a marketing related blog.
caile
27th November, 2007 at 12:50 am

Thanks for your allowing me to post my comment. I wish to add something I neglected to add in my earlier comment (that I sent to you on SU):

While I personally don’t care for blogs that tell people how to use SU to effectively market their own non-SU sites, at least if a blog is going to do that, I’m glad to see a blog that instructs these people how to do it *ethically* as you stated in your post, as well as hopefully to employ some manners and common sense in the process.

Anything you can tell these marketers that will help them to better understand how to use the system (such as properly labeling their reviews, etc.) without angering the masses at SU is a GOOD thing.

So I am not against your blog or your niche at SU at all. I’m against the *abusers* of SU, and I don’t believe either you or your blog belong in that category. Unfortunately, there are far fewer “ethical” marketers on SU than the sleazy ones. Let’s hope your advice can help change some of that.

Anyway, I just wanted to make myself clear regarding this particular site and your site on SU. Thanks.

Cheers,
caile~
Mani Karthik
27th November, 2007 at 2:00 am

Josh, I agree completely.

I recently wrote an article on how to be a top stumbler in less than a week. And it got many thumbs ups but one of the top stumblers turned back to it. And tagged it as spam and focussed on numbers article.

While she was a “looking for fun” stumbler, it was clear that she didnt know anything about marketing.

Well I was not ready to let go and I literally “taught” her what we SEO guys were doing and how we respect the system.

We finally agreed upon certain things and she actually did a thumbs up. Phew!
Mani Karthik
27th November, 2007 at 2:04 am

Well I have to admit that there are a few things that we marketers should keep in mind while using SU cos there are genuine quality users out there who are not money minded and just want to use SU as a means of well..lets say fun tool. Dunno if thats the appropriate word.

So I think we shouldnt annoy them, so that they dont mis understand our efforts as spam , but take it in the right sense.

It’s about striking a balance somewhere in between. May be we are too much focussed on numbers rather than the quality sometimes. Rohit BHargava would be interested to read this.
Michelle W (1 comments.)
17th May, 2008 at 4:05 pm

I feel I was wrongly accused of being a spammer on Stumbleupon. I never bookmarked any of my own marketing sites there. I did bookmark some other people’s marketing sites though. Isn’t that my choice, as long as I selected the appropriate tags? Anyway, I’ve been told that my account is “Under Review” and I cannot log in until they take that off. I have a feeling that this won’t be remedied either.
Josh Spaulding
17th May, 2008 at 4:37 pm

@ Michelle – Sorry to hear that. This is the whole problem with SU. It’s full of people who think all marketers are spammers, even when they are using the system correctly.

I hope you get your account back!
Michelle Adams
19th August, 2008 at 12:12 am

Hi Josh, gee whizz, I have never gone to SU before until today, I am getting into the whole squidoo and digg thing and thought I’d better start looking at SU, Facebook etc. I must say I’m scared off from SU and I haven’t done anything with it yet! I clicked on your SU icon for your article on SU bad comments etc…when I got there I only read a few of the comments below and there was idiot after idiot! Yuck!
I know you’ve mentioned about catergories etc to work with SU the best way possible, but out of all the community sites on offer what would your top three be? I love Digg and Squidoo so far as they have already got me within the first three pages of Google on hot keywords and I only put up a few things a couple of days ago! So does SU fall into your top three for generating traffic?
Josh Spaulding
19th August, 2008 at 12:51 pm

@ Michelle – Some nice people there aren’t there? lol

The top 3 would depend on you. THere are social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Spinn etc. and there are social networks like Facebook, MySpace etc.

They’re all good to be involved in. My suggestion is to join all you can find and at least start establishing your profile. You don’t have to actively participate in all of them right away, but you can at least establish a presence in each for later.
Michelle Adams
20th August, 2008 at 11:49 am

Great advice, thanks Josh.