Harder to find interesting and unique content using StumbleUpon

After surfing the Internet the last two years for articles that I think you might enjoy, it is harder to find interesting and unique content.

I find as I am surfing a high number of duplication, errors of all types (misconfiguration software, factually wrong statements, and scrapings of other websites). It is interesting what StumbleUpon suggests for me. I have more than 30 categories of content, but the more that I use it, the worse it seems to get. Has anyone noticed this? That SU really reaches to find interesting things to share?

What I have noticed is that SU tries to suggest pages based on most recent stumbles by other users. Many times those suggestions are the same pages that other stumblers stumble. So for instance I might look at 50 pages per day and out of those 4 are duplications of what other users have found. It doesn’t do a good job of filtering pages you have already seen.

This isn’t meant as an attack/rant against StumbleUpon. I have found some great content with it. It just seems that there is quite a bit of noise on this service, and very little signal. When I first started it, I found all kinds of great content. Now however, the great content is harder to find. I have started to suggest pages that I thought were good for others to find, but have less than 10 that I’ve suggested.

Some stumblers find some great content. I have met some interesting people from it as well. What would be a killer application is to have SU also integrate with Gmail or other email services. So that when you stumbled something you could automatically notify a select group of friends. Even better would be integration with Shareaholic. A Shareaholic and StumbleUpon combination would be amazing. It could be double filtered against your interests, and that would make a very intelligent AI to select things for you.

I will stick with SU until I find a better way to find new and interesting content. I am open for suggestions.