Welcome fellow Stumblers. I’m sure most of you are well aware of this latest sensation to sweep the web. What started out as an ill conceived viral marketing campaign, by the web design firm uP’n’@tom, has quickly morphed into an all out spam attack on the StumbleUpon Community.
The problem with uP’n’@tom’s stumble cards is that they lack creativity and are extremely easy to duplicate. Spammers have quickly made their own stumble cards to drive traffic to their sites serving advertising. This is degrading the user experience of StumbleUpon. Another problem is that ad-driven blogs, like Cult Press, are jumping on board and posting collections of stumble cards to drive stumble traffic to their blog posts that are loaded with ads.
The biggest problem fueling the stumble card pandemic is the collection of stumblers who thumb up the cards. If the majority of StumbleUpon users, who dislike the cards, can get the word out that these cards are nothing more than spam, then maybe fewer and fewer people will thumb them up. Over time these spammers will see less and less traffic coming to their stumble card pages and it will not be worth their time to create new ones. As long as people keep thumbing up the cards, the more of them we will see on StumbleUpon.
So my question to the StumbleUpon community is this: what do you think the SU community should do to address this problem?