9 ms·
Pinterest Is a Unicorn, It Just Doesn’t Act Like One
- wlesieutre 8y agoMy only interaction with Pinterest is that it dominates Google Image Search results, and then when you click on the result the image is nowhere to be found. Wish Google would do something about that.
- zackargyle 8y agoThey already did. You likely won't have that same issue anymore.
- cpach 8y agoWhat did Google change?
- dawnerd 8y agoWhen did that happen? Just did a search and amazingly didn't find a single pinterest image when the last time I ran the same query it was nothing but. Huge improvement.
- djrogers 8y agoHad that issue over the weekend, and it's still happening today with the same search.
- overcast 8y agoOr you just get login/signup screen. Horrible UX.
- naravara 8y agoAnd if you’re on mobile, they take up like 40% of your screen to insist you use the app. Websites and web based services trying to force me to download an app, which is basically just a container for displaying the same web content, are honestly in the top five worst things about the modern web. And it’s competition involves Nazis invading social networks, erosion of privacy, etc.
- huehehue 8y agoIf you're lucky, you can get around that by requesting the desktop site. Would love an add-on/extension for mobile browsers that stops sites from injecting links to the app store.
- majewsky 8y agouBlock Origin for Firefox Mobile might be doing that. I cannot recall seeing any of these in recent times, but I'm not sure if that's just because the websites I visit don't have any.
- zackargyle 8y agoYou probably haven't used the app in the last 6 months. The mobile website was completely redone and doesn't force you to use the app anymore. See: https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/a-one-year-pwa-retrospective-f4a2f4129e05 https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/a-one-year-pwa-ret...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoWow, you Pinterest employees are all over this submission.
- lemoncucumber 8y agoTo make matters worse, Google Image Search removed the feature that let you follow a link directly to the image itself.
- eli 8y agothat was part of a settlement from a Getty Images lawsuit
- bogomipz 8y agoAren't all the Getty images water marked though? WOuldn't this have driven traffic to them?
- OtterCoder 8y agoWhy would it? Thumbnail watermarks are usually too small to see, and when you click to the image to go to Pinterest, all you'd see is the 'signup now' modal, with another group of thumbnails greyed out peeking around the edges.
- bogomipz 8y agoAs someone else noted Google has disabled this behavior.
- eli 8y agoNope, not all the ones people paid to license for just their site.
- faitswulff 8y agoA nice workaround is to right click the expanded image in the search results and click "view image" or "copy image location"
- pathartl 8y agohttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhcelnjdmblfmjabdeclccemkghjk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI keep seeing this complaint but I've never come across it. I honestly can't remember ever being sent to Pinterest from GIS. Perhaps I'm searching for the wrong things?
- egypturnash 8y ago"slow and steady wins the race"
- blackbrokkoli 8y agoAs others mention here, I would say we shouldn't overdo the praise. I can't really comment on the financial/entrepeneur side of Pinterest, but on the user side: * It's a walled garden, closed source, force signup, the UX is bad even if aren't a user (dominating Google Image Search taking you too pictures you can't click), it has lot's of dark patterns * It heavily suggests signing up with Facebook or Google, making all the critic on privacy of those platforms also theirs * It has all the features for the mob-mentality, abuse and so on (Like system, sharing, popularity based rankings) There aren't as many of these problems visible because of the content(no sensitive fotos, banking information or much politics) but that's not because of their great buiseness model but the theme of the platform...
- swalling 8y agoI think one point you're missing is that the vast majority of people use Pinterest for reasons that are different than a social network. Even if it may have some of the same surface-level mechanisms (like a personalized feed or share buttons), it is very much _not_ used as a tool to broadcast personal updates, read news, or cultivate relationships among people. The average user treats it much more like a visual search engine with a bookmarking system built into it than a social network. Also, this is a minor quibble, but Pinterest does not have a Like system any longer. I know because I worked on deprecating it.
- mc32 8y agoI tend to agree with your take. When I did use it, I used it as a visual clipboard. A shoebox of diffetent ideas. But I stopped using it because i could not do a search without signing in, which felt like an undue nag.
- dfsegoat 8y agoBeing totally ignorant of the site myself, the use case you mentioned was roughly how I had it described to me by my wife and her friends a few years ago: They use it as a 'scrapbook' for fashion/craft etc. ideas. -- not necessarily even sharing them.
- smt88 8y agoDoes Pinterest really have users anymore, or is it just search engine spam?
- joshenders 8y ago175M MAU according to https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/175-million-people-discovering-new-possibilities-on-pinterest https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/175-million-people-di...
- smt88 8y agoI've seen lots of highly active accounts posting hundreds of images. That's the spam I was referring to. Pinterest seems uninterested in policing/removing them, which makes sense because they draw traffic. I suspect those are counted as MAUs (and I can't see any reason Pinterest wouldn't count them, even though a human can tell they're just bot accounts). Unless Pinterest has written transparently about their massive bot problem, I'm reluctant to believe any self-serving metric they publish.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoComscore reports ~111 million monthly uniques for US only, so 175 million MAU seems plausible, though I'm sure you are right that it includes a few million bots. https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/ https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/
- overcast 8y agoThis may be addressed(corporate firewall blocking me) but how much is that driven by Google Image Spam though? I honestly can't think of the last time someone has even mentioned Pinterest to me, and most of my friends are female.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bogomipz 8y ago>"Pinterest, by Mr. Silbermann’s design, is the opposite: the web’s last bastion of quaint innocence." A lot of people would argue that aggregating other people's content and sticking it behind a login wall is neither quaint or innocent.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoYou get a login wall if you go to their homepage, but the other multiple billion pages don't require login. Any pin, board, user page, search result, etc..
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- joegahona 8y agoIt looks like a login wall, but there's a link that reads "continue without account" under all the login buttons.
- hexo 8y agoSorry to say, i've found pinterest to be the most annoying "nothing" of the web. It never served anything i wanted to do on the web, it just interfered with my image search all the time in a horrible way. In the last days it only shows content in the search engine for me and when i follow the image i get blank page that wants me to log into my google account - and you can imagine me doing that, really... so, what unicorn again? I've never found myself being thankful to its existence, and it leaves me wondering for whom that service really is and why
- neuralRiot 8y agoI solved the login annoyance with a greasemonkey script but it's still useles because every time i find an interesting image is either what you said or the image links to another "pinboard" or whatever is called then another and another and the image is always the same but surrounded by weirder unrelated stuff. My wife loves it though.
- onion2k 8y agoI've never found myself being thankful to its existence, and it leaves me wondering for whom that service really is and why There are plenty of valuable businesses that don't count me as a customer, but I can still see why they're worth a lot of money. Sometimes it's not about you.
- aszantu 8y agoAs a google user, I see pinterest as cancer, its results shouldn't appear when I have to login because I want to see a pic that showed up in the search results. I find it complicated to use if I ever log into it.
- sleepychu 8y agoPintrest's algorithm is trying desperately to tempt me back (I used it briefly to look for some UI examples). Last week it sent me... what I can only describe as a bunch of racist mexican jokes. If anyone from pintrest is here and wants to see the email, let me know and I'll dig it out.
- Skrillex 8y agoThe dark patterns on that site are piled pretty high, but that is not my issue with it. My issue with Pinterest is that it has taken the Google image search results by storm, and often does not actually lead me to the source of the image. The effect that it has on Google image search is like if Wikipedia made you sign up to use it but then did not actually have anything in the article.