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A year or so ago, I was totally focused on becoming Top Stumbler. I was in the third position, behind two veteran stumblers, Wiggy (who has since left StumbleUpon) and Starspirit (who has been one of the very top stumblers as long as I have been on SU).

Thanks to a friend who noticed I was getting too caught up in being at the top of the list, and called me on it, I seriously cut back on my Stumbling activity for a while, and when I came back to StumbleUpon, I noticed I was having fun with it again, instead of stressing about always finding good articles to post.

So, here are my top 5 reasons you might not want to push to be Top Stumbler:

It doesn’t really bring you that much more real StumbleUpon traffic. It might bring visitors from outside SU, but it doesn’t bring loads of new SU visitors. In fact, many times I’ve written to friends to congratulate them on being a top stumbler and they hadn’t even realized it.

If your goal is visitors, your time would be better spent in more community involvement on SU instead of striving for Top Stumbler.

It does increase the amount of spam that you get though. Thankfully with the way SU works that’s still not a lot, but I did get requests to thumb up pages (which were usually ignored or thumbed down, depending on how I was asked and what the page was) and the occasional job offer.

If you hope to do more than appear at the bottom of the list occasionally, you need to be consistently thumbing up new and interesting discoveries. This can become as much work as a regular job if you’re not careful. There were many days when I’d thumb up more than 100 pages a day (sometimes more than double that) and times I’d post 40 - 50 reviews in a day.

You need to focus on finding undiscovered material. Each time that you give a thumb up to a page that someone else has already discovered you’re hurting your chance to become a top stumbler. I can’t say for sure, but from my own experience and reviewing the Top Stumblers on the list now, you probably want at least 50% or better of the total pages that you liked to be pages you discovered.

It discourages mutual sharing of web pages among friends. When your friends send you pages, they are usually hoping you’ll add a thumbs up and maybe a comment, not just read and forget about them. Since these pages are almost always already thumbed, giving them a thumb up hurts your percentages. Unfortunately, it can be a source of lost friendships.

This one is a small one, but probably drove me up the wall more than any other. Not thumbing up already discovered pages means you can only thumb up the pages of brand new stumblers, and not stumblers who’ve been around a while. I knocked myself off the Top Stumbler list one time because I finally got so frustrated with this and gave a thumb up to all the stumblers whose pages I liked. Eventually, for my own happiness I decided that I’d thumb up stumblers I like regardless of whether it affected my being on the list.

So there you have it, my top 5 reasons to think seriously before you try to get on the Top Stumblers list. Now I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you think being on the list is worth it? Why or why not? (LOL that sounds like a high school essay question. )

This morning, there was a notification in my inbox that I had received 4 comments on this blog last night. Unfortunately, I could tell, even from the few words that the notification included, that the comments were spam that my filter hadn’t caught.

I have to admit, since e-mail is the first thing I check right after I wake up, my mouse actually slid up towards the spam button on my e-mail before I realized what I was doing, and came to the website to label them as spam instead.

I had been thinking about writing an article on using the thumbs down button a couple days ago, but wasn’t sure what to use for an example. (Be glad the spam came along, my other idea was to use a civil liberties post I put on SU the other day, and since civil liberties is one of my soapbox issues, this post probably would have gotten a bit sidetracked).

But back to the spam. When I use the spam button on my e-mail, I’m telling the e-mail program not to let any more e-mail in from that specific source. But, if it’s not the source that’s the problem, like this morning, then I’ll be blocking an address that does send helpful e-mails, even though these weren’t especially helpful (okay, that’s not quite the truth either…they did help me know to go delete the spam from my blog).

Using the thumbs down is like hitting the spam button. If the page I’m on is spam, then I’ll thumb it down because I definitely don’t want to get any more pages like that. On the other hand, if it’s an article that I disagree with, but part of a topic that I’m interested in or a blog that I like, I don’t want to tell SU not to send me anything more from there. So in this case, it’s best to either not thumb the page at all, or thumb it up, but write a review stating my opinion of the article.