There are probably as many reasons for Stumbling as there are Stumblers. It is at once a very personal matter and a reason for considerable debate and public verbal venom. It would seem to me that there is enough room inside something as big as the World Wide Web for all of the viewpoints, and that coexistence should be pretty easy.

I am here primarily to learn, and to occasionally be surprised and amazed by the next thing that appears on my monitor after I click on the Stumble button. That happens a lot more than I ever thought it would. The amount of content on the Web is almost indescribably large. A lot of it is interesting. And I know, as certainly as you can know anything, that I would not get to as much of it as I do without StumbleUpon.

I did not join StumbleUpon to make new friends. It is not that I am opposed to making new friends, or opposed to meeting people on line. It is just that when I started Stumbling, I did not know that making Stumble-friends was possible. I should have, of course. I have been making friends on the internet since I joined Compuserve in 1981. I just didn’t think of StumbleUpon in those terms, primarily because I can be pretty dim sometimes. But now look at all the wonderful people I have met!

There are some people that join StumbleUpon primarily to promote something. It may be sites for their customers, it may be site for themselves. I do a little of that, too. But it’s hard to think of it as spamming. I work hard at every post I write. I believe that every one of them adds value to the Web. At the very worst, they add more value than one more photoshopped LOL-cat picture.

There are some people that join because it gives them the opportunity to make nasty comments at the expense of other people. There were people like that on Compuserve in 1981, in every forum that I have joined, and in every human habitation since people came down from the trees. Folks like that are just part of the woodwork, a very small, annoying minority, easy enough to ignore. They apparently have their own problems.

I’m not keeping detailed stats on this (I have better things to do) but I would guess that for every whiner and complainer, there are a thousand cool and interesting people using StumbleUpon. They are here for fun. They are here to contribute. They are here make friends. They are here to learn. They are here to teach. The variety is as boundless as the entire human race. That’s why this place is such a gas.

More later, some time, about why people Stumble.