Reality Crowd

*****Update - See below for an update to this story*****

If you have recently been using the website recommendation site StumbleUpon (like we have), you might have recently stumbled across something like this:

Depending on your point of view, stumblecards are either the latest, greatest craze sweeping the internet or yet another marketing scheme ruining the social media landscape. But what exactly are stumblecards? Lets start from the beginning. The internet recommendation site Stumbleupon.com uses a tool bar that integrates with your browser. There are 3 main buttons on the toolbar, Stumble!, Thumbs Up, and Thumbs Down. Hitting the Stumble! button takes you to a random website that other users who like similar things to you have recommended (by hitting the thumbs up button). The more thumbs up votes a site gets, the more Stumbleupon users it is shown to. Stumbleupon is a great way to discover new articles and websites that you might normally have missed and has gained a huge following. The latest (and most contentious) thing to hit the Stumbleupon network are stumbecards. Rarely has any topic (other than Spam) elicited such a huge response…both positive and negative.

The positive reaction to Stumblecards is baffling at best. They are not actually cards in any meaningful way, just images placed on an image of a card. They appeal to the collector in us (the text above them even asks us to ‘collect them all!’) yet there is no real way to “collect” them. You can thumb them up, which will add them to your Stumbleupon list of ‘liked’ sites, but that seems a rather poor substitute for actual collection. They don’t contain any useful information, nor are they funny. They also don’t take any skill to ‘collect’… you can run across them while hitting the stumble button looking at random websites, but if you actually want to find them you can just search for “stumblecards” in the stumbleupon search engine. There is also no ‘official’ list of cards to collect and anyone can make them. So in other words you have a collectible card game where:

There are no actual cards
There is no discernible game or strategy
There is no fundamental difference between ‘collecting’ the cards and not
There is no use for the cards once you find them
There is no way to know if you ‘have them all’

So in other words we have a ‘game’ that is not a game at all. The interesting part is that for some reason it seems to bypass people’s usual mental filters against promoting stuff like this. Something about them makes people who are otherwise pretty discerning about what they give the mythical ‘thumbs up’ to ignore their inner voice and gleefully promote stumblecards to the masses. While the stumblecard backlash seems to be in full force on StumbleUpon, the phenomenon has yet to show signs of slowing. This raises interesting questions for social media in general. We like to think that social media sites are a way to sort the good sites from the sea of mediocrity that is the internet. But if it is so easy to short circuit our filters for ‘quality’ with a simple psychological trick, how can we trust the wisdom of crowds to filter the internet for us? And this is just the beginning… as marketers infiltrate social networks they bring with them all their psychological tricks. Are we ready for it, or will social media websites become just another marketing channel?

So what do you think? Do stumblecards have any redeeming quality? Are they the ruin of Stumbleupon or just an annoyance? Is there hope for humanity? Let us know in the comments!

****Update - 2/19/08****
Adam Atom, the creator of stumblecards, stopped by this post to give us some information. Apparently there is an official list of stumblecards available. You can find that list at http://www.upnatom.org/ the official site of stumblecards. In addition, Adam did an interview with E3internet where he describes the point of stumblecards. It makes for an interesting read as it turns out Adam is not a marketer at all, he was merely trying to create an interesting new game. From the article:

People seem to be attributing this meme to SEOs or online marketers but from my own investigations, you come from an artistic or web design background. In fact your website doesn’t offer any marketing services at all. Do you find it strange that the first StumbleUpon viral came from a non-marketer?

I don’t think it’s strange at all. I’m a web designer so it’s important that I have at least a basic understanding of viral marketing. However, my intentions were always coming from a desire to inspire, entertain and engage Stumblers in the hope they might participate. I don’t have anything to sell or advertise, only the idea itself.

A couple of interesting points of note from this new information. The official list is interesting in that it doesn’t actually contain some of the cards that most of us think about when we think of stumblecards (the Joker card being a prime example). In fact, most of the postings out there on the internet talking about stumblecards use cards that are not ‘official’ as an example of what they are.

Adam’s interview does shed some light on the origin of the phenomenon as well as the original intent of the game. Adam places the blame on marketers and copycats for a lot of the negative reaction the stumblecards have been getting. However, it seems the goal of the game and the way that StumbleUpon works are almost inherently at odds. The game seems to be about searching out the cards, almost like a treasure hunt. StumbleUpon is designed to serve you random webpages that match your interests. If I was looking for something very specific (such as a specific page) I would never really use StumbleUpon to find it, I would use something like Google. It would seem that the random delivery of StumbleUpon and the specific nature of a stumblecard are somewhat at odds. If I am actually looking for stumblecards I would look some other way, and if I am just using stumbleupon to find useful websites then stumblecards are just an annoyance. This combined with the quick appropriation of the phenomenon by marketers would seem to be at the heart of the stumblecard backlash.

Thanks to Adam for stopping by and adding to the conversation.

*****Update 2*****

Adam has now updated the official site to clear up some confusion about stumblecards