Pinterest Is a Unicorn, It Just Doesn’t Act Like One | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest Is a Unicorn, It Just Doesn’t Act Like One

nytimes.com

141 pointsraleighm63 comments

As 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...

I 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.

I 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.

Being 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.

My girlfriend uses it to store dessert recipes and workout clothes.

I hate you need to sign-up for the site, even to just search, but recently for some reason I just bit the bullet and now I like to use it to gather game ideas assets and inspiration (d&d related).

Pinterest does have a good UX for their target users though. They are targeting people, like my wife, who use it to create a visual collection of ideas for the next remodel or the next quilt or next woodworking project. She is looking for pictures and what is currently trendy so Google Image Search alone doesn't solve her problem. She doesn't mind using her Facebook account because she will show off her completed projects there any way. I just don't think you are one of their target users.

Yep, I actively avoid pinterest because they seem to be so user hostile (at least to people who haven't signed up). I'm not going to make an account if your service teases functionality but behaves like a broken mess when I try to use it.

It very much reminds me of "Experts Exchange" back in the day, and we all know how that turned out. We just need someone to come up with the Stack Overflow of the Pinterest world.

I agree on most of this but the mob mentality bit. I’ve seen very little of that on Pinterest because people use it differently. It’s more like a lose kind of bookmarking tool than a space for socializing and the elements where people talk with each other are not very prominent in the UI.

>not because of their great business model, but the theme of the platform...

Isn’t the theme of the platform part of what goes into the business model?

Instagram is the one social network whose users actually have positive associations with its brand. That too isn’t based on the business model, but the fact that the platform fosters engagement though posting photos rather than sowing discord among your friends and family (Facebook) and stoking outrage mobs to gang up on random celebrities (Twitter).

I can't really comment on the user side of Pinterest, but on the financial side.

* It's a walled garden, closed source, forced signup, the UX is bad (dominating Google Image Search taking you to pictures you can't click), lots of dark patterns. As a result, users can't leave. This leads to more money.

* It heavily suggests signing up with Facebook or Google, who help Pinterest make a lot of money through tracking.

* It has all the features for the mob-mentality, abuse and so on (Like system, sharing, popularity based rankings). This keeps users on the site, which makes Pinterest more money.

Pinterest is just following common, tried and true strategies. Good for them.

-- end --

It doesn't look like there is a viable way to fix this.

Honestly the best solution I can think of would be to have a well-funded benevolent organization that fights for user privacy and makes products good/easy enough to be popular. Unfortunately, no such organization exists.

I hate how Pinterest results appear in Google Image Searches then tries to make me sign up/log in to see the result. Google didn't like it when Experts Exchange used to pull that kind of trick.

Is there some incantation you can type into the search box that excludes Pinterest-hosted results?

I think it's "[search term' -pinterest.com], but I'd need to double check. GIS has started to de-emphasize Pinterest hits though, but for some queries like "furniture", there's probably still tons of hits from there.

Mozilla?

...and yet, people absolutely love it. I've never seen another web service people love using so much. Like it or not, Pinterest is on to something.

People who use it love it, people who don't hate it - because it severely degrades the utility of image searching in Google, due to showing up so frequently and employing dark UI patterns. Pretty polarizing.

I absolutely love it.

I use it, and normally everything you posted above would matter for me.

But Pinterest works for what I use it for and works really well. So I don't care.

i really wanted to like pinterest :( they were doing a lot of things right, but when they started the force-signup-to-view bit i abandoned my account.

I wish there were a way to permanently exclude pinterest from google image search.

Didn't google remove them from image search results?

My 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.

They already did. You likely won't have that same issue anymore.

When 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.

Had that issue over the weekend, and it's still happening today with the same search.

What did Google change?

To make matters worse, Google Image Search removed the feature that let you follow a link directly to the image itself.

DuckDuckGo has a far superior image search just for this reason. You can actually get a link to the image from the search results. As a bonus the link is often a DuckDuckGo proxy, so you don't even need to send someone to the source site - which is usually awful.

And when they get big enough, Getty will sue them as well, since this feature was removed as a settlement of a lawsuit.

Then someone else will come along and offer exactly the same functionality...

And the thumbnails are >100DPI, for modern screens.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

that was part of a settlement from a Getty Images lawsuit

Aren't all the Getty images water marked though? WOuldn't this have driven traffic to them?

Why 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.

As someone else noted Google has disabled this behavior.

Nope, not all the ones people paid to license for just their site.

A nice workaround is to right click the expanded image in the search results and click "view image" or "copy image location"

since others have the Chrome|ium extension linked already; a Firefox extension that re-adds that functionality:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-google-i...

this extension adds that back: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

Or you just get login/signup screen. Horrible UX.

And 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.

You 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-ret...

Wow, you Pinterest employees are all over this submission.

If 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.

uBlock 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.

I 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?

Sorry 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

I'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.

I 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.

>"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.

It looks like a login wall, but there's a link that reads "continue without account" under all the login buttons.

You 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..

As 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.

Does Pinterest really have users anymore, or is it just search engine spam?

175M MAU according to https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/175-million-people-di...

This 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.

I'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.

Comscore 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/

"slow and steady wins the race"

The 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.

Pintrest'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.

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