Cloudhiker: The StumbleUpon Successor That Actually Curates

Cloudhiker is what StumbleUpon would be if someone rebuilt it in this decade and refused to let the algorithm anywhere near it. Pick a category, press the button, and you land on a website a human being personally decided was worth your time. Press it again. Keep pressing it. That is the entire product, and it is enormously more fun than it has any right to be.

What is Cloudhiker?

StumbleUpon died in 2018 and took a specific pleasure with it: clicking a button and being surprised. The web still has surprising things on it. What it stopped having was any mechanism for finding them that was not a recommendation engine optimizing for engagement, which is a polite way of saying “the same nine websites forever.”

Cloudhiker rebuilds the mechanism. It maintains a catalog of several thousand sites, sorted into around nineteen categories, and hands you one at a time. The categories are broad and slightly old-fashioned in a good way, things like art, science, music and audio, technology and internet, games, food. You choose which channels you want in the mix and the button does the rest.

The critical detail is that everything in the pool has been reviewed by a person before it goes in. This is unglamorous, slow work and it is the only reason the site is any good. There is no trending feed, no engagement score, no way for a content mill to game its way into rotation. What you get instead is the stuff the modern web is terrible at surfacing: one-person projects, obsessive single-topic archives, tools built by someone who needed them, art experiments that nobody promoted.

It also tries hard to show you the actual destination rather than a preview card. Where a site allows it, Cloudhiker loads the real page with a slim bar on top, so you are on the website, not reading a summary of the website. Small thing, big difference in feel.

There is a free tier that covers the actual stumbling, and an optional paid tier for people who want unlimited saved collections and faster review of their submissions. You do not need either to use it.

What can you do with Cloudhiker?

• Just hit the button. No account, no setup. Land somewhere, decide in four seconds whether you care, hit it again.
• Filter by category. Turn off the ones you do not want. If you only ever want art and science, you can have a machine that only produces art and science.
• Save what you find. A free account gives you collections, so the genuinely good hits do not vanish into browser history the instant you stumble again.
• Submit sites yourself. There is a bookmarklet for firing pages at Cloudhiker as you find them, and submissions go through the same review everything else does.
• Read the blog. The team writes occasional pieces about web discovery and finding things off the beaten path, which is a reasonable place to steal ideas from.
• Use it as a bookmark bar escape hatch. Pin it, and it becomes the thing you click when the usual five tabs have nothing new in them.

Tips to get the most out of it

Narrow the categories before you start. The default all-channels mix is fun for ten minutes and then starts feeling random in the bad sense. Two or three categories produces a much better hit rate.

Give each site four seconds, not four hundred milliseconds. The instinct is to bounce instantly. Half the good sites on Cloudhiker look unremarkable above the fold and turn out to be somebody’s twenty-year obsession about lighthouses.

Make an account before you find something great, not after. Every stumbling service teaches this lesson the hard way. You will find one perfect thing, close the tab, and never see it again.

Use it as a research warm-up. Stumbling in a single narrow category for ten minutes before starting work on a topic is a surprisingly good way to find sources no search engine was going to hand you.

Submit the weird sites you already know. The catalog is only as good as what people put into it. If you have a favorite obscure archive, feeding it back in costs you thirty seconds.

Do not treat it as an infinite feed. It is a discovery tool, not a scroll. Ten stumbles with attention beats a hundred on autopilot.

If you like Cloudhiker, also try…

• The Useless Web: the same button, but pointed exclusively at nonsense.
• Wiby: a search engine that only indexes small, old-fashioned, handmade pages.
• Kagi Small Web: a firehose of recent posts from independent personal blogs.
• Should See This: another curated one-click route to somewhere you did not expect.

More rabbit holes in Weird & Wonderful, and the practical end of the web lives in Tools & Utilities.