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Comment by dusted | Hacker News Reader

This is the most I've ever gotten out of pinterest, other than this, it's just the "wrong site that google turns up, that I can't use because it wants me to create an account just to watch the image I searched for"

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Can we not do the thing where we pick an organization from an article and then bring up the most generic complaint you can about it in a way that is entirely irrelevant to the post? We get it, you don't like Pinterest showing up in search results, nobody does. But this has absolutely nothing to do with the article other than it being pattern matching on the word "Pinterest", which is about the least informative comment you can make aside from outright trolling or spam. There are threads that come up from time to time where such comments would be appropriate, if not particularly substantive.

HN has always been very predictive.

Praise Microsoft for turning the corner, Dislike Google for ads and snooping, Praise Apple for privacy, Dislike Zoom for privacy, Dislike Pinterest for middlewaring Google Image, and so on.

I'm not even complaining about Hacker News being predictive, we all know that likes to have certain conversations and there is no stopping that. My only request is that this doesn't happen in every single thread regardless of whether it is relevant or not. (To be clear, I am "guilty" of the former myself; there are a handful of topics that I have a particular opinion about and I don't hesitate to share them even if I have mentioned them many times before. I just try to not bring them up in places where they clearly have no connection to what's being talked about.)

Friendly amendment: *predictable

So if Monsanto/Bayer had a post about their bio informatics stack, you'd expect nobody to complain about the company and its business practices?

Sometimes the negative impact of a company is just more interesting to people than what the article brings to the table.

I wouldn't expect it, because I have been here long enough to know that that is just not going to happen, but I would very much like it to be so, yes. Rehashing the same topic whenever you see something tangentially related is just a lazy karma grab, not an attempt at creating interesting, insightful conversation.

Look, I get it, sometimes you want to rant about a company that you think is doing something you don't like: my point is that we have specific threads for them where such a comment could at least be on-topic. When you come to an article that about Pinterest doing some git thing to make their builds faster and your comment is "they're ruining my search!" you're commenting at the level of someone who hasn't read the blog post.

The point is it’s not directly relevant to the article, and on top of that GP’s particular complaint was especially generic. In this case Pinterests negative impact is not that interesting and it’s constantly discussed too.

It’s not surprising when certain firms evoke a strong personal feeling, but it’d be terribly exhausting if every article about, say, React, attracted the annotation that Facebook is the Philip Morris of media. The subsequent discussion then tends toward the divisive and derisive rather than the illuminating and informative. Hard to tell anyone they should suppress what they feel, but overall I’d tip the balance towards “fewer like this please.”

I think it's valuable to keep saying it because otherwise we start thinking it's okay to fetishise a company's products just because they're technologically interesting. If a company made them on the back of incredibly shady and unethical dealings, they shouldn't be getting free advertising here.

Who here is fetishizing products because they learned something from the engineering blog? This is not happening.

Sorry no. If an article is paywalled, on Pinterest, or similar, then please let's discuss the source instead, even if it ruins the discussion, so people learn not to post such links.

Paywall complaints are explicitly off-topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989. I am not a moderator, but I think I've made it clear that I personally consider comments like the one I responded to be as well.

FWIW, in the all years I have been on this site, I have seen this happen regularly and I have yet to see any reduction in such links or these kinds of discussions. Seeing as you've been here longer, I'd be curious to hear about why you might feel differently.

We heard your complaint but you are being acting entitled now. People are free to register, free to comment, if you don't like it, downvote it. It is the top comment, that means it is being upvoted. get over it.

I tend to downvote very rarely and only for clear violations for the rules, not for comments I don't like. Telling the author why you didn't like something they did often gets them to change or explain their behavior. Just because something is upvoted doesn't mean it is something that should be on Hacker News.

I just don’t mind repeating myself whether it changes anything or not I guess. Simply because discussing paywalled links or Pinterest linked is invariably more interesting than whatever is found (or not found) when following those links.

TFA isn't paywalled, or on Pinterest, or similar.

I guess you're right. I've not noticed this being a topic before, and I should have spent more words telling that the article in question is actually quite interesting, it definitely made me consider our own Jenkins setup.

Thanks :) I don't want to make it seem like I'm after you in particular, it's just that you were the top comment in this thread and it's that time of night when I should logged off and gone to bed is long past, so my patience for this was just a little thinner than it usually is. It's just that enough people have done this that I figured I might as well steal the second-to-top comment spot with this in the hopes that they might see it and not do it anymore.

I am not sure why google does not penalize this behavior in their search ranking.

The most frequent search keyword that I use is "-pinterest"

Yes, there seems to be no way to make it clear to Google that we want to never see certain websites in our search results. Yet, Google claims they need our information to "improve our experience".

If Google wants my information to improve my experience, I'd love to be able to vote search results up or down. Or entire sites, like pinterest and content farms.

Wasn't that a thing? I remember a +1 button somewhere on Google Search

Edit: I misremembered, it was a social network thing from Google+ https://www.techspot.com/news/43064-google-adds-1-button-to-...

There was a thing called SearchWiki where you could adjust your own results. It didn't last long.

-pintrest should be a search extension.

For what it's worth, DDG image results doesn't get spammed by Pinterest. While my browsing is a drop in the ocean compared to Googles market share, using a Google competitor is as clear a signal as one can send that you're unhappy with the Google service.

That's my experience too. Imagine how many views they have lost over the years, just because they require a login.

And shame on you, Google, for playing along and indexing their shit, when it's not visible when I click through.

This fact has forced people to write browser extensions to filter Pinterest out.

I opt for the "teach non-tech people how to dork" route instead: https://soatok.blog/2020/07/21/dorking-your-way-to-search-re...

This is one situation where a duckduckgo search is objectively of a better signal/noise ratio.

Yeah i always believed it was some kind of lone evil ai that lives through search results.

The worse experience is when you have found a dead link that contains useful information that exists only as Pinterest snapshot while doing a web search...

Y'know, I actually made a Pinterest account once because of one particular picture I really wanted. Guess what, even with an account you can't have it. Oh well, guess I'll just let it go.

They also created/maintain the kotlin linter, "ktlint".

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