6 ms·
Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as publ
by danso 7y ago
Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, except for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotten Pinterest IPOed, and I guess that's a reflection of how much I get my tech news from HN. Pinterest seems very underdiscussed on HN [0] relative to its market cap – $17.5B vs Lyft's $15.8B and Dropbox's $7.3B. I guess that's a function of how relatively few HNers may be Pinterest users?
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pinterest&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pinterest&sort=byPopularity&pr...
- gnulinux 7y agoHuh didn't even know Pinterest is still a thing. Is it like Instagram?
- freehunter 7y agoPinterest is really big in the DIY space. It's success is more easily explained hand in hand with Etsy rather than any social media.
- iamaelephant 7y agoMy most frequent interaction with Pinterest is excluding it from Google Image Search results.
- munk-a 7y agoEvery time I've interacted with it I've found it extremely obnoxious, it is very strongly oriented to capture users within it's network and actively tries to avoid letting users do anything while logged out or to get a raw image.
- anthony_doan 7y agoDifferent-ish. There's a recommendation system that I think is pretty good and people can collect other people pictures/pins in their own collections. I don't think there is any emphasis on influencers or at least from my casual usage I don't see any. I think this is in part because people can collect other people's pins/pictures into their own collection.
- stevesearer 7y agoPinterest is huge in the Architecture and Design community as a place to organize project inspiration and ideas.
- hnick 7y agoIt is generally good for 'mood boards' and other designer type stuff where you want to collect a bunch of images to fit a theme or inspire an idea. In my experience it's been more popular with women and crafty/DIY types.
- dougmwne 7y agoOuch, HN showing off its gender bias I guess. Pinterest is also supposed to be popular with dads, so we must be showing off our age bias as well.
- losteric 7y agoMaybe. Or, Pinterest is just a narrowly scoped and realistic product while this audience is more interested in pie in the sky ideas.
- dougmwne 7y agoBlockchain Pintrest for uploaded brains. Putting together a series A if you want in.
- danso 7y agoIs Pinterest really that much different in scope, or at least less "pie in the sky", than Twitter, which regularly makes the HN front page for not just tech/design posts, but even for being down? I won't argue that Pinterest is a more "important" company than Twitter (though I'm extremely biased since I use the latter and not the former). But I'd expect to see more HN submission/discussion from its engineering blog [0], given Pinterest's success at scale. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F@Pinterest_Engineering&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F@Pint...
- pessimizer 7y agoLike cabs, room rental, and online catalog shopping?
- rossdavidh 7y agoNot this dad. My wife kept trying to get my 14-year old daughter interested, but so far she's not. I think, based on these three data points in my family, that I have pretty conclusive proof it's a not-quite-young-but-of-course-not-old-female demographic.
- 7y ago
- wallawe 7y agoMaybe it could be attributed to the fact that the majority of HN users are male while the majority of Pinterest users are female. Interesting observation
- rolltiide 7y agoalso follows "meme stocks" there aren't a lot of good traders here, but its an engineering blog
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- microtherion 7y agoAnother way in which Pinterest is an outlier in this list is that its user base skews heavily female (>80% according to one source: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/pinterest-statistics/ https://www.omnicoreagency.com/pinterest-statistics/). I wonder whether some "Moneyball Factor" could be at work, in that this led to it being underpriced for its potential. Snapchat users also skew somewhat female, but they are also quite young compared to other sites, and "youth" may lead to it being highly priced. [Being an old dude, I never use either of these]
- thrav 7y agoDon’t want to overgeneralize, but women seem to be more likely consumers (of things) & regular users of social media. [I’m sure niche exceptions abound] I don’t know if anyone has run the numbers, but I’d expect ladies to more valuable on all kinds of KPIs of a good customer. My feel is that men gravitate towards large purchases around a hobby or two (bikes, outdoors, cars, computers, video games). While women are more likely to spend in smaller amounts across a wide variety of categories. I also may just be full of shit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Shounak 7y agoThe stats do back you up on this point. Women make about 80% of purchasing decisions in the US [0]. [0] https://health.oliverwyman.com/2019/01/women-in-healthcare-make-80--of-purchasing-decisions--yet-13--of.html https://health.oliverwyman.com/2019/01/women-in-healthcare-m...
- ac29 7y agoThat article is specifically about healthcare, where women are 65% of the workforce (according to the same link).
- chocolatebunny 7y agoI think I tend to agree with you. I think a lot of stock traders are generally men, which I think explains why the IPO was undervalued compared to the other stocks.
- anthony_doan 7y ago> I guess that's a function of how relatively few HNers may be Pinterest users? I actually use Pinterest. It's just how often does the opportunity to mention Pinterest comes up? My pins are fashion (boots, athletic wares, etc..) and haircuts.
- mywittyname 7y agoPinterest probably has an amazing tech stack. I am surprised that it doesn't get more love around here.
- jfk13 7y agoPersonally, I hate Pinterest with a passion, mainly because of how it pollutes image searches with useless, context-less results.
- ghaff 7y agoI have to do -site searches for certain types of image searches. OTOH that does fix this issue pretty easily.
- nichochar 7y agoPinterest founders are business+design. Therefore the company is not engineering first, it's product and design first. This is why it's not particularly loved on HN, and this is also why the tech stack is nothing special (it's not bad, it's just not special). What is special is the unbelievable product market fit. Engaged Pinterest users 1) spend a shitton of time on the app (hours a day) and 2) interact very positively with ads (this is VERY purposeful and part of the product first company style). I think their recipe makes for a great company, but it's not the most fun for engineers to work on (those things don't always if ever correlate).
- AlchemistCamp 7y agoThey were very early adopters of Elixir!
- Apocryphon 7y agoI think there's an irritation at Pinterest clogging up search engine results, which may lead to some antipathy towards it on HN.
- avip 7y agoPinterest was only discussed on HN as a dominant search leech. Now that google finally deplatformed that viral disease, there's no reason to talk about it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]