The end of an era...

tl;dr version: I'm getting out of the FAQ-maintaining business. Head over to www.getgluestickers.com for sticker guides if you're needing info on anything newer than what's been posted here. The forum here will remain open for anyone who wants to keep using it and the sticker reminder calendar will remain active, but there will be no future posts here on how to earn specific stickers.


The long version: How one guy wrote a FAQ and then got burned out, hard.

About a year ago I discovered GetGlue. It was a neat little check-in based social network / service that was centered around media activities instead of forcing the users to broadcast to the world where they were or trying to get them to find more and more "friends". I signed up for it because I thought it was a cool idea and because I knew I'd be able to earn some of the award stickers they made available to the users (one of the disadvantages of living in BFE is that you're never going to be able to use a service like Foursquare effectively). I jumped on the bandwagon, started earning stickers, and met some really cool people in the process. I ended up becoming one of the power users of the site, racking up sticker after sticker after sticker, and in the process I started to realize something was amiss over in GetGlue Land. People were asking me and the other power-users how to earn stickers a lot more often than one would have expected. It turned out that it was GetGlue's policy to not divulge the requirements for earning a sticker, because it takes away from the "fun" of using the site. How "driving yourself mad while checking-in to everything under the sun, trying to figure out how to get a sticker to trigger" equates to "fun" is beyond me, but that's neither here nor there. After answering a newbie's question on how to get the "Magnetic" sticker for the umpteenth time, I decided to take action. If no one over at GetGlue was going to provide a FAQ for sticker requirements then I should do it.

So I did it. I grabbed a copy of my own sticker list as well as the sticker list of a fellow power-user that I was using as a checklist, and started filling in the blanks. At the time there were under 300 stickers in total but it was still a daunting task. I tried my best to provide the proper information to go with the check-ins so other users could earn the stickers they wanted. I set up the reminder calendar, forums, a Twitter feed and I watched it grow while trying to keep up a 0-day update schedule on sticker postings.

Time passes, as it does, and over the past nine months I have become increasingly disillusioned with GetGlue. It was fun at first, playing the game-within-a-game, trying to figure out the sticker requirements, seeing who could be the first to get the sticker to pop, et cetera. I created the FAQ because I got sick of seeing people flailing around, trying unsuccessfully to get things to work. I got tired of doing GetGlue's job for them, answering question after question from the newbies that came to the power-users for help because GetGlue wouldn't give them any help. But most of all, I got tired of GetGlue in general. Sticker awarding glitches were hand-waved away with canned responses that amounted to "oh, you must not be doing it right" (no, we were following what you set forth as the rules before, your system was just broken). Their attempt to introduce QR codes as a check-in method was a major source of outrage for the community (let's just award the stickers to the privileged few that just happen to be able to get to the code, shall we? Thank goodness we broke that code quickly). Numerous UI changes were made, many of them not for the better. Moving the goalposts in regards to sticker requirements (e.g. turning Season Superfan stickers into what basically equals Full Season stickers without prior warning) has happened more and more frequently. These are just a few of the things that I've seen, and in the process the fun has been sucked out of using the site. It's not the same place it was when I discovered it. The social interaction has been replaced by a Skinner Box-like interface where we click on a button like mindless rats, hoping a reward in the form of a sticker will appear. The chatter on topics is mostly gone, replaced by hordes of users checking-in with null comments that push any social interaction out of the way so that no one sees it. Users from other countries play the "let's see how many Gurus we can amass on the cool topics" game while spamming plagiarized reviews all over the site. And let's not forget the stalker-types that get their panties in a bunch and throw a hissy fit because they can't get enough followers to maintain a Guru, so they claim everyone is out to get them and then try and stir up drama using fake accounts. Requests for stickers go un-filled and then get blamed on the post office (here's a thought - how about you actually put our names on the envelopes instead of "GetGlue Fan" or our screen name from the site?). Support gives canned answers 90% of the time, with the exception being one shining ray of helpfulness. Suggestions for improvements for the site that would actually help users go ignored. Requirements for stickers get jerked back and forth like a cow in a tornado, and if we bug the Powers That Be about them moving the goalposts or screwing up the awarding of a sticker we get told that we were doing it wrong and don't qualify for the sticker, if we even get a reply at all. A friend once told me, "When it stops being fun and starts being work, that's the time to think about getting out." I've hit that point.

So to that end, there will be no further updates to this site. It will be left up, as a reference guide to what has gone before and a memorial to the fun that I had over the last year maintaining it. I'll still be around on GetGlue, the forums here will remain open, and the calendar will continue to be updated, but the updates here on the blog will cease.

For those of you who still enjoy GetGlue, I suggest you head over to Steven's site, getgluestickers.com - I'll be hanging out over there as well as the forums here, so feel free to catch me in either place.

It's been a fun ride. Thanks for joining me on it. Happy sticker hunting.