Was a lot of it classic word of mouth, email, etc.?
I imagine something like that, but I’m wondering as I feel like there may be some useful pieces of knowledge that may be worth recalling as people gradually start to move back out of the more centralized sites/services.
Mix is barely a shadow of StumbleUpon… The closest StumbleUpon “clone” I have found so far is cloudhiker.net. There are a few others that attempt the same thing but aren’t quite there yet. I also used StumbleUpon daily since inception until it was shut down. I really miss it.