🔥 The Internet Changes, But the Spark Doesn’t : Tribute to websites no longer relevent
🌵 StumbleUpon, Arizona, and the Era When the Internet Still Felt Like Play
There was a time — before algorithms, before "content strategy," before every app tried to psychoanalyze us — when the internet felt like a desert highway at sunset. Wide open. A little wild. Full of surprises. In fact, many people referred to the internet as the Wild Wild West — and out here in Arizona, that felt like home.
And in that era, I'll say it plainly: I was building something in Arizona before anyone had a name for what we were doing.
We didn't have ring lights or brand deals or "engagement pods." We had curiosity, caffeine, and a blue button called StumbleUpon.
✨ When Clicking Felt Like Discovery
StumbleUpon wasn't a feed. It wasn't a scroll. It was a portal. You clicked, and the universe handed you something unexpected:
- A Norwegian fjord glowing like a dream
- A poem that hit you right in the chest
- A website so weird you wondered if you'd hallucinated it
- A flash game that stole three hours of your life and you didn't even mind
It was the internet's version of wandering into a thrift store and finding something incredible on the bottom shelf. You didn't "curate content." You stumbled into wonder.
🌐 The Platforms We Rode Like Wild Mustangs
If you were online in those days, you remember the whole ecosystem:
- Digg — before it dug its own grave
- StumbleUpon — the king of serendipity
- Squidoo — where we all had a "lens"
- Bubblews — where we tried to make a nickel
- Blip.fm — where you were the DJ of your own tiny universe
- Twitter — when it was fast, funny, and felt like a secret club
- Facebook — which I joined reluctantly because it moved like molasses
On Blip.fm I followed a Jason Croch and a handful of others who introduced us to music we never would have found on our own. One was Psychedelic Ghost — a name that tells you everything you need to know. Even Dave, who was working long hours and could only dip in occasionally, loved the concept. You didn't search for music. Music found you, through someone else's good taste.
On Twitter, I found my way into the top 10% — not by gaming anything, but by actually being curious about people who weren't in my lane. I followed Calvin Lee of Mayhem Studios because his graphic art stopped me cold. He turned out to be a Forbes-recognized social media influencer who built his following the old-fashioned way: by being genuinely helpful to everyone he met. That was the culture then. You followed people who made you smarter or showed you something beautiful. Not people who were just like you in business. For instance I also followed MC Hammer who interacted with people and Aging Backwards — because in my philosophy, who doesn't want to age backwards?
Then my dad got sick in California. I was gone for three weeks. When I came back, the momentum was simply gone. I reached out to Calvin — who by then was being named a Forbes Top 50 national influencer — and asked what had happened to my numbers.
And that was the honest truth. Nobody knew. The algorithm was a black box even to the people winning at it. Three weeks off Twitter and you were simply erased — no grace period, no explanation. The internet had moved on. That's the part nobody tells you about those early platforms: they were generous when you showed up, and ruthless when you didn't.
🌵 What StumbleUpon Actually Taught Me
StumbleUpon taught me something I didn't fully understand until years later: creativity thrives on surprise. You don't grow by scrolling the same predictable feed. You grow by stumbling — literally — into something new.
That's what those platforms gave us. Not followers. Not metrics. Expansion.
🔥 From StumbleUpon to What Comes Next
Maybe StumbleUpon is gone. Maybe Blip.fm and Squidoo and Bubblews are relics. Maybe the early Twitter that felt like a conversation has mutated into something unrecognizable.
Some of us outlasted the platforms we wrote for. eHow — which tried to be something nobody had a name for yet, a hybrid of social and writing before either word meant what it means now — is technically still standing, a ghost of what it was. They let the contributor network go in 2014, but they paid us fairly on the way out. That counts for something. And honestly? We had fun. We made friends. Some of those friendships are still going. Susan, who has contributesd and helped rebuild it, came out of that era. The platform died. The people didn't.
But here's what's interesting: my son Joel is building a tool right now — a purpose-built AI blogging platform called blogdr.ai — designed to eliminate the gap between the story in your head and the published post on the page. And the whole philosophy behind it is the same thing StumbleUpon understood instinctively: get out of the way of the creative person. Stop adding friction. Let the idea through.
The internet has changed completely. The spark that made those early platforms worth loving hasn't changed at all. And out here in the desert, we're still chasing it — just with better tools.
— Darla 🌵
More from the desert desk:
⚡ How to Electrify Your Writing
🤖 Writing With AI Tools: Cozy Creativity
🌵 Hard-Earned Lessons From the Desert
☕ If this brought back some memories — or introduced you to an era you missed — a coffee keeps the desert dispatches coming.
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