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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

> It would be such a relief if they went under, I am so tired of pinterest thumbnails

That's unlikely to happen as Pinterest is currently booming. Their global usage is growing fast for an already large social network. They have $1.7 billion in cash, with little to worry about financially for the next five plus years. Pinterest is likely to get a lot larger yet given their growth rate, they're up to 416 million monthly actives with zero serious threats in terms of competition. Facebook's attempt at building a competitor failed nearly immediately. As with LinkedIn, they occupy a niche in social media that they entirely own.

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Who's the target user of Pinterest? My only interaction with them are their low quality image search results, I've never met anyone who used it.

I would add to this - teachers and education in general have a specific use for Pinterest. My spouse, and all of the teachers in the k-12 system we are associated with use it for classroom ideas ranging from basic bulletin board decorating to science experiments and literature lessons.

> Who's the target user of Pinterest?

Overwhelmingly their target base is women. If you look at their newer markets around the world, uptake is always dominated by that demographic. Pinterest doesn't release very detailed information on their user demograhpics, however I'd be surprised if it's not 2/3 women or greater.

I entirely agree with the annoyance of the Pinterest image mess in Google image search results, which has been going on for many years now. However there is a legitimate place for Pinterest in terms of what it does. The parent should primarily be annoyed with Google (which is intentionally - they're fully aware of what's going on - filling their image results with Pinterest images), not Pinterest.

You almost certainly have unless you don't interact with women ever.

I can't use it because of it's closed nature, but it has a very good set of image cataloging and sharing features. Add in the valuable network effects and I see why people use it for idea sharing/collaboration.

Purely anecdotal, but pinterest is the only social media network that my mother has ever signed up for. She and her friends use it for recipes and animal photos. I reckon the platform has managed to capture those for whom Facebook is too much of an information barrage, and Instagram is too youth-oriented or "me"-centric. From what I've seen, it's like a more innocuous Tumblr, without all the drama.

I'm a male and occasional user of Pinterest. I used it with my wife to collect and exchange images and ideas about interior design. I have a couple of male friends who have used it in a similar way. It's very good in suggesting visually related images. It is not an image search engine like Google, but rather a tool to organise and share collections of visual references. It seems to work great in areas where Google or DDG image search fail, because it relies on users organizing images, and seems to have a similarity graph for images. There are kinds of images you can easier find on Pinterest than on Google: haircut and fashion ideas, interior and architecture design, gardening and landscaping, some diy items, etc. When you have an idea how something looks, but don't know google keywords to find it.

I understand frustration of Google image search users. But pins in google search results are Google's problem. I switched to DDG myself, and find it more straightforward for keyword based image search.

My wife uses it for everything. From recipes, over things she might want to buy, to stuff she finds interesting.

I made an account on a lark and it's actually nice.

Their image related grouping works way better for the things I'm interested in (art/illustrations) than other sites.

Women.

And that niche is being a parasite on Google Image Search while offering crap results?

> And that niche is being a parasite on Google Image Search while offering crap results?

I believe your anger is misplaced, and directed at the wrong target as well. It's Google Images offering the crap results, and I think you already know that. Reddit is also loaded with plenty of low quality content, as is Imgur, as is Facebook, as is Twitter; all large social networks are flooded with epic piles of garbage; Google's search results are clearly the problem re Pinterest images showing up in Google image search.

To answer your 'question,' the 416 million monthly active users very obviously aren't staying with Pinterest just because Google Images has a lot of Pinterest image results.

I don't like TikTok, it doesn't appeal to me. The very short video clips mostly annoy me. I still fully understand why so many people use it. Google indexes their video content - I wouldn't blame TikTok if Google's video search turns to crap over time due to that, I'd blame Google.

OTOH the same logic would be to blame google when sites are using blackhat SEO. AFAIK pinterest does do greyhat (at best seo): they scrape images, feed them to google image search to get the best tags, and add then to the post.

You're saying that asking Google which terms best describe the pic, and writing that down next to the pic, is unethical SEO? At most it's some kind of theoretical IP infringement on Google's image recog algorithm.

I'm not talking about content quality!

When I find an image on Google search and I want to go to the source site, I want to see that exact image there.

Not scummy paywalled "I show Google something else than you" images.

Plus it's pretty obvious that in many cases they scraped the original, which then they outrank in SEO.

Google controls the Google preview, not Pinterest.

Pinterest is serving different content to the Google crawler than to Google search users.

The more likely avenue for relief is for much of it to be de-indexed as it is showing crawlers something different from a regular browser.

Is it still considered a social network let alone social media? I was under the impression it was more like a shop-by-image these days—I.e. most interactions are with products, not people.

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