ProBlogger enjoyed significant traffic from bookmarking site StumbleUpon, until the site declared ProBlogger unwelcome at its domain; thanks to social media, that changed fast.
One can’t blame Darren Rowse at ProBlogger for being upset. Instead of his readers being able to bookmark and vote for his pages on StumbleUpon, they received a message that their site of choice had been banned for abuse.
“I’m a little put out that as someone who has actively promoted and used their service and even encouraged my readers to advertise on them that they simply banned me,” he said upon learning of the error page people reached at StumbleUpon, which said ProBlogger had either been banned for abuse or upon request.
As we have seen many times, such events no longer live in a vacuum. Rowse’s readers contacted StumbleUpon, and the story also spread through other services like Twitter and Digg. Before long, someone at StumbleUpon had contacted Rowse about the problem.
Then the happy bit: an hour and 44 minutes after posting about ProBlogger’s ban, StumbleUpon retracted their action against the site.
StumbleUpon likely did this based upon some type of algorithmic judgment, as it’s hard to believe a person looking at ProBlogger’s content could reasonably think it abusive. Our conversations with StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp on other topics never led us to believe the company, which is part of eBay, would treat a well-regarded blogger this way.
“I’ve never seen first hand what a blog community can achieve like this so quickly,” said Rowse in wrapping up the whole kerfuffle.
