Do you remember… StumbleUpon?

Before feeds decided what you saw, there was a button. You installed the StumbleUpon toolbar, ticked a few interests, and pressed Stumble! Up came a website you’d never have found yourself: a page of optical illusions, a strange little game, a blog about a single type of biscuit.

Didn’t like it? Press Stumble! again. Liked it? Thumbs up, and StumbleUpon learned a bit more about you. Two hours later you’d be somewhere wonderful and have no idea how you got there.

It started in Calgary in November 2001, and for a while it was one of the biggest ways people found anything new. eBay bought it in 2007, and its founders later bought it back. In June 2018 it closed for good and pointed its users to a new service called Mix.

The web still has those odd little corners. There are just far fewer buttons that throw you into them at random. (Which is, if you hadn’t noticed, what our Surprise Me button is for.)