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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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&pr...

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Another 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/). 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]

Don’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.

The 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-m...

That article is specifically about healthcare, where women are 65% of the workforce (according to the same link).

I 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.

My own observations of women around me seems to indicate as much. Many smaller purchases while I empty our accounts :)

Young women are paying dividends apparently, check out the Becky / Basic index - performance year on year is spectacular.

A rare case where r/investing and r/wallstreetbets are in alignment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/9n31xf/introduci...

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/a1jokv/beck...

Mugatu off of finance twitter calls this "white chick beta":

https://twitter.com/SuperMugatu/status/1102678639366287361

I went to Pintrest once on mobile, a long while back. It was an ungodly awful experience. Probably the worst mobile web experience i've ever had. And it kept trying to log me in, plus all kinds of loading and display problems and ads everywhere. i guess some people like that sort of thing.

Maybe 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

also follows "meme stocks"

there aren't a lot of good traders here, but its an engineering blog

> 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.

Pinterest probably has an amazing tech stack. I am surprised that it doesn't get more love around here.

Personally, I hate Pinterest with a passion, mainly because of how it pollutes image searches with useless, context-less results.

I have to do -site searches for certain types of image searches. OTOH that does fix this issue pretty easily.

Pinterest 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).

They were very early adopters of Elixir!

They do? They should actually talk about it on their tech blog (https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering). I couldn't find it other then third party post talking about them using it (https://prograils.com/posts/why-discord-pinterest-moz-bleach...).

Even their github https://github.com/pinterest, elixir isn't even in their top programming languages.

It could be the secret sauce language kind of deal. Or they've moved away from it.

It is a pleasure to see you outside of elixirforum.

Thanks! I'm glad I could get the same handle.

AFAIK, Pinterest rewrote the logic of their notification system into Elixir and also used it to rebuild their rate limiter.

This is the main piece I've seen open sourced: https://github.com/pinterest/elixir-thrift

I think there's an irritation at Pinterest clogging up search engine results, which may lead to some antipathy towards it on HN.

Ouch, 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.

Maybe. Or, Pinterest is just a narrowly scoped and realistic product while this audience is more interested in pie in the sky ideas.

Blockchain Pintrest for uploaded brains. Putting together a series A if you want in.

Is 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@Pint...

Like cabs, room rental, and online catalog shopping?

Not 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.

Pinterest has cornered the market for women who (1) are planning a wedding or (2) have a child under five in their family.

And I don't just mean brides and mothers, but everyone involved with the wedding/baby shower/birthday party planning process: bridesmaids, mothers of the bride, future mother-in-laws, aunts, grandmothers, and godmothers. And of course everyone who's paid to be involved with those events uses pinterest as well: photographers, venues, florists, event planners, designers, etc.

My gripe with pinterest (that none of my friends seem to be bothered by) is how difficult it is to source the information that's posted. Not only does it create an environment for misinformation to spread but it makes it really hard to determine whether you're purchasing from the person responsible for the beautiful photo or if you're being led to some sort of alibaba drop-shipping site.

And crafters. My wife is on there all the time for crafting ideas.

Your gripe is what kills Pinterest for me. If you want an iota of information not in the recomposssed 6 times jpg you’re SOL. It drives me nuts every time I use it.

I'm inclined to agree with you but I realize I get a lot of my tech news on Twitter too. I follow many tech and business reporters, and a lot of tech people in general, and doing a search for "pinterest" from people I follow turns up very little. Though I'm not sure if that's inherent to the network – e.g. it's not a general usecase to share pins across Twitter. Still, I see more on my Twitter timeline about Etsy when it comes to people I follow tweeting about something cool they bought or saw.

I treat Pinterest with the same established suspicion as the Ikea catalogue - a reliable signal to predict unnecessary family expanses.

Popular with dads? Really? I'd love to see some evidence. I actually though Pinterest died off because I haven't heard anything about it in a long time. There were times long ago where I'd search for some project inspiration, but Pinterest image results felt like a cancer that needed to be removed from existence.

Pinterest 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.

Huh didn't even know Pinterest is still a thing. Is it like Instagram?

Pinterest is really big in the DIY space. It's success is more easily explained hand in hand with Etsy rather than any social media.

My most frequent interaction with Pinterest is excluding it from Google Image Search results.

Every 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.

Different-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.

Pinterest is huge in the Architecture and Design community as a place to organize project inspiration and ideas.

It 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.

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