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Comment by rhn_mk1 | Hacker News Reader

I doubt StumbleUpon would be able to take off in the same form today - it installed a browser toolbar, collected a profile of your interests, and collected your up/downvotes to fed them all to an opaque algorithm that took you to the next random page. Who knows where that data went.

Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to stumbleupon today?

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Firefox’s Pocket recommendations took a good approach. The browser downloads a big daily file with “potential recommendations”, then filters it at the client side.

The big downside was that, because it was turned on by default, a whole bunch of people who didn’t actually want it had it foisted upon them, so it got a very bad reputation right out the gate. Right algorithm, bad execution.

I actually really like Pocket's recommendations, but yeah, the way it's all forced on you it's basically an ad. That's pretty much why I feel like I have to boycott it despite liking the product. It's such a Mozilla move to take something nice and turn it bad for no good reason.

At inception it was just a website that redirected you. There are variations of this created all the time but centered around essays and journalism. It would be trivial to create what is basically a glorified copy of SU, but no one cares enough to do it. Or more accurately, they already exist and we collectively don't care enough to notice.

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