Monday 5 January 2015

Stumbleupon and a Wasteful Internet



While attempting to browse Stumbleupon last night, I found it frustrating how completely inept it was at delivering meaningful content. And that's when it hit me that I should probably check how badly this problem was. So I decided to analyze my home page and see how much of what it recommended was worthless. Below is an annotated screenshot.
As you can see, there's a lot of garbage. Most annoyingly, lists. Internet lists are a horrible thing for a multitude of reasons, most of all that they're basically sensory popcorn. Their entire purpose is to give you a trivia-like knowledge of things that seem immediately interesting; upon closer inspection most of them are pointless or boring, though.

I really wish there was a way to filter for lists, so perhaps I'll make a userscript for doing so. Lists are really a huge waste of space, and in general just make the internet a worse place. Maybe it's about time one of us did something to eradicate them.