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Comment by moccachino | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of walled gardens. There is probably no service in this world that I hate more, as a non-user, than Pinterest.

Pinterest manages to do something horribly stupid and kind of abusive that I usually associates with adult sites ads: show you a preview of something that gets your interest, if you click to get access to it put you through a maze of forms and links all promising the result you asked for at the end, and then when you get to it they don't deliver and instead show other stuff you might like but really you don't because you did all that for this specific thing.

I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...

I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.

They have actually had one positive influence on my life. After having dealt with exactly what you described a few times, I learned that I don't need anything that's on Pinterest. If a search results returns a pinterest link, I ignore it. If I can't find it anywhere except that link, it's as good as a dead link so I move on. This can be extended to much of the internet. So much peace now.

I’m the exact same. Over time I’ve been trained to ignore every link from google search results that points to Pinterest.

Why not use an addon? My addon removes all search results for facebook, pinterest

Sounds like my experience too. Any link on pinterest image, ie from google search is met with login/register form. Well pardon my english but screw that approach, pinterest doesn't exist for me.

It is one of my main uses of Pi-Hole: “never, ever let anything from that domain into my network ever again.” If I accidentally click a link, it doesn’t go anywhere. I use it for quite a few domains that show up in a lot of places, but have proven to be an annoyance. I’m believe Pinterest was one of the first to be added for that reason.

The ad blocking Pi-Hole provides is a nice bonus, too.

It would be cool if this could be extended to automatically clearing those junk sites off Google's results, maybe by querying for a few extra pages, deleting the garbage, and then re-assembling them into fewer pages. Google spam filters would be great, I could also put in a rule to eliminate any page title that starts with a number ("Ten great ways to...").

Google used to have a way to block sites from search results. Do they still have that option?

They did offer the Personal Blocklist extension[1] for Chrome, long ago. But it's been sunsetted, there are some alternatives.

1: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...

I wrote a userscript to do this if you're interested:

https://code.byuu.org/google

It blocks search and image results by pattern, and also removes the URL tracker wrapping wherever possible.

Same here, I have their domains blocked in my hosts so if I accidentally click I don't see anything.

I constantly tack "-pinterest" on to the end of Google searches...

I've added Pinterest to my reverse image search extension [1] to avoid having to sign up when there is no alternative source for the image. It returns Pinterest search results [2], and you can access the image directly from the image icon.

I plan to release the image extraction module in a separate extension, so you can just click on the page area with the image, and it opens the image in a new tab. This way you will not need to do a reverse image search to get to the image, or manually look for it in the page source.

[1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image

[2] https://i.imgur.com/L2wv2Wk.png

Brilliant, I didn’t know extensions like this existed.

Thank you for creating this, it's an excellent extension!

Thanks! Make sure to explore the extension's options, it can be configured to fit most use cases.

What about Twitter?

I just created an account with an email but after few minutes of clicking around it locked me out. I can only use it again if I give them my phone number, too -.-

As if this wasn't enough of their invasive procedures my profile officially says "Account is blocked because of suspicious behavior".

This is some advanced trickery to fool users into giving them more data than they intended to do when creating a profile and it sucks.

There are more examples: Have you tried browsing Facebook or Xing as a user? It's all a really crappy experience.

I think Twitter does that for some email services, definitely saw that behaviour with ProtonMail and Tutanota, Gmail was safe to use then (a couple of years ago, when I wanted to create a secondary account).

Ok as my domain is newly registered that could be a valid reason probably.

It's a TLD and no service like ProtonMail. Gmail would be the next party I don't want to share information with - I know those are complicated preferences from a "normal" point of view but I don't like to spread my data too much.

fwiw, this has happened to me a few times with fresh twitter accounts. In my experience, if you care enough and have the time, you will probably be able to get support to unblock your account without handing over your phone number.

I'm not saying this to defend twitter, this is definitely some aggressive, disingenuous behavior.

I just wrote a message to support and I will keep you posted about any updates.

Just to be sure I also ordered a free SIM card so I have a spam phone for these kinds of services.

Thank you for the advice.

As expected they did not give me the answer I was asking for:

"If you need to reset your Twitter password, please request a new one here: https://twitter.com/account/begin_password_reset.

If your Twitter account is suspended or locked and you are unable to access it, please log in to your account and use the following form to get in touch with us: https://support.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended...

Because my account is "temporarily restricted" neither of the cases matches so I think this is their kind way telling me to f-ck off or give them what they want. I don't like these kind of games and I'm thinking about not using their service after all.

Don't worry it sucks as a user as well. Curiosity pushed me to use Google SSO to circumvent their crap one time, and they allowed themselves to subsequently spam my inbox with a flurry of emails. I proceeded to click the "unsubscribe" link in one of them, but to my surprise the spam kept coming. Turns out they have more than a dozen mailing settings and you have to painfully disable each one of them individually. Of course the simpler option is to mark all emails from pinterest.com as spam in the email client.

Especially as a site that specializes in hosting nearly exclusively non-original content, it's so ethically wrong for them to use such tactics.

Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, I never understood why people keep using these clearly unethical websites. Stop using them and other better alternatives will pop out, it's not like you depend on them like you depend on grocery shops or clothing stores. Voting with your attention is easy and cheap.

> I proceeded to click the "unsubscribe" link in one of them, but to my surprise the spam kept coming.

I despise it when this happens. The only solution is to create a gmail filter to catch the entire domain and archive it or mark it as spam. It's surprising how many companies willfully ignore the unsubscribe option.

I ignore any search result that point to Pinterest as, apparently, other commenters do. It looks like Instagram is now going to get ignored as well.

I have a browser extension which automatically removes any results from Pinterest in searches.

LinkedIn is comparably aggravating if you aren't a club member.

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