StumbleUpon Gets Sold to eBay - Initial Community Reactions Aren’t Good

The rumors have been confirmed - eBay has officially acquired StumbleUpon. This acquisition has been rumored since November and tonight StumbleUpon confirmed it on their blog:

StumbleUpon has officially joined eBay. We’re excited about this, and we hope you are too.

Looking to the future, we think that joining eBay is the right thing to do to help us to grow StumbleUpon to its full potential. We think eBay is a great fit for us because eBay and StumbleUpon share similar approaches – we’re both driven by our community of users, and we are both dedicated to connecting people.

One interesting aspect to this sale is the immediate feedback from the StumbleUpon community. The page was immediately ‘stumbled‘ and the community immediately started voicing their opinion. So far the majority of the feedback has been negative and against the deal. Here are just a few of the comments so far (many can’t be printed here):

* Yuck. There goes the neighborhood.

* SU officially auctioned off.

* Surprise, surprise. “Rumors” indeed. Holy drama, look at the negative reviews flood in. I’m relatively proud of you worthless a%&holes right now.

* NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of the great things about social media is the immediate feedback from your users. Whether good or bad, its important to know what people are thinking so that you can be better prepared to address it. The most important thing that StumbleUpon can do is prove to their users that this is the truth:

We also want you to know that not much will change around here. We’ll be running StumbleUpon separately within eBay Inc., and we’ll still be focused on developing features based on your feedback.

Early feedback indicates that people don’t think this will be the case…