Blocking Pinterest may reduce your data usage | Hacker News Reader

Blocking Pinterest may reduce your data usage

ruky.me

157 pointsrukshn148 comments

Other than the tired old "Pinterest bad" which is obvious to everyone, this post is pretty confusing. The author can surely let us know how they're using Pinterest? Because if you just do some search on Google Images, then however many results you load and however many of those results are from Pinterest, you're not gonna connect to Pinterest at all, as all images are proxied through gstatic.com. You have to actually visit a Pinterest property to make a connection. (Edit: or some other site that pulls in Pinterest resources. If that site has caused you to unwittingly download 1.2GB of data in 17 connections from Pinterest, you should also complain about that site, and that complaint would likely be more interesting.)

I just tried visiting some pages on Pinterest (from Google Images results for "cat pinterest", "dog pinterest", etc.). I scrolled all the way down until I'm not allowed to scroll anymore (until I create an account?). Each time it's around 7MB data transferred. Assuming one connection per visit, that's still nowhere near 1GB in 17 connections.

So, maybe you have a Pinterest app installed that's doing stuff in the background? Or maybe you visit Pinterest signed in and can scroll indefinitely, loading thousands upon thousands of images? Or maybe you're infested by some malware that's secretly connecting to Pinterest for god knows what reason?

In any case, I don't think you're gonna lose data to Pinterest if you're only seeing some Pinterest results on Google properties.

Hi op here, not a regular Pinterest user, I may land on their website when I’m looking for an image on Pinterest.

I’m not an avid daily Pinterest user, neither I have Pinterest on my mobile phone

This is sent to me by my ISP, I know it does not make sense and I don’t understand it either, what I know is that something is wrong somewhere

If you’re curious enough, please follow up with this after installing some bandwidth-tracking tools on your home network. It would also benefit you in future as you’d know immediately when something is eating up data.

>Bought a zoom package and data add-on today because I need zoom to work

So the ISP does have cheaper bandwidth available, but only if you pay them more. This is _exactly_ why we need Net Neutrality - instead of having to figure out whether we should block Pinterest.

I found that data plans that Sri Lanka Telecom offers here[0] with the "zoom package" that he was referring to here[1]. The "zoom package" that he mentioned doesn't seem to be any faster, it just adds additional data to the cap for Microsoft Teams/Zoom/Skype/etc. Their standard plans have also separate data caps for regular and off peak hours. Remember how cell phone plans used to be metered by the minute for talk and you had a different allocation for nights and weekends. Now even cheap prepaid plans in the US offer unlimited talk. When Sri Lankan infrastructure improves and their economy grows plans like this will be a thing of the past.

[0] https://slt.lk/en/broadband/packages

[1] https://slt.lk/en/broadband/data-addons/meet

It may be cheaper because Zoom subsidizes the cost in which case net neutrality would increase the cost to the end user.

Maybe in the short term. In the long term, not having net neutrality here reduces competition by giving Zoom an additional artificial advantage over its less entrenched competition.

Net Neutrality is good for society however that wasn't the argument of the person I replied to. I'm merely pointing out that lower telecom prices isn't a consequence of net neutrality.

Ultimately it is as competition leads to lower prices.

> The ISP was kind enough to reach out to me and I received an email detailing the data use of my internet connection.

Is it just me, or does this level of data collection seem pretty concerning for an ISP? I'm aware that there are legal requirements for this type of data collection for law enforcement use, but sharing it with customers seems strange.

Besides that, these groupings seem strange. Why are applications/services, application and encryption protocols mixed here? With that level of granularity, "Pinterest" might easily be misclassified traffic of any other service sharing Pinterest's CDN.

> Is it just me, or does this level of data collection seem pretty concerning for an ISP? I'm aware that there are legal requirements for this type of data collection for law enforcement use, but sharing it with customers seems strange.

ISP's have been been doing this for eons, not just for law enforcement, but for marketing as well.

To be honest, I think it's refreshing that they are willing to share the data they have about the customer with the customer. I think if more providers did that it would be eye opening to end users what's going on behind the scenes.

Top answer is.... Corruption

Reading this made me realized how cheap Internal data is in Viet Nam.

- 4G: 2GB per day for less than 4 USD each month (89k VND/month) - Home Fiber optics network with guaranteed 35Mbps/35Mbps: unlimited for less than 10 USD each month (220k VND/month).

> Reading this made me realized how cheap Internal data is in Viet Nam.

same here in Chennai, India. I'm currently paying 15USD including tax for a 200MBPS connection with 3.3TB FUP. I have never reached my FUP limit. provider is ACT fibernet and they are good in the business.

Wow. That’s a fast connection (Also are you sure it’s a 200MBPS and not 200Mbps?). Something like that would cost around 100USD and only available for businesses.

I am sure it is Mbps not MBPS. Same here with Jio Fiber [1]. Get 100 Mbps with 400GB data per month at at 699₹ (approx 10$) per month.

[1]: https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans

I love how we let ISPs get away with advertising speeds to consumers in bits per second when all data, like file size, is displayed to those consumers in bytes. Everyone basically thinks their speed is 8x faster than it is.

I am still regularly fooled by it.

Network interface speeds are usually specified in Mbits, so it's not just the ISPs.

Worth noting that's because their smallest operation can be a bit, whereas when it comes to storage that doesn't really make as much sense.

It also makes sense since it's the same as frequency, and historically with baud rates in the 10s and 100s it makes sense to not divide it by 8.

I'm pretty sure you can't transmit a single bit over any commercially available internet access technology that is metered by data.

It's really just convention.

They're not "getting away" with anything. Your network is a serial stream. The bitrate is what matters. At the dawn of IP, machines with 5,6,7,8,9,16, and 18 bit "bytes" were commonplace. Bitrate is the only common way to measure data rates among dissimilar architectures.

This doesn't describe reality now (and hasn't for a while), all the reasons that are left are deceptive ones.

Arguable counterpoint: HDMI/DP in HDR mode, with typically 10 or 12 bit per channel. I think DP still crams it into bytes, but last I checked, HDMI doesn't do anything like that. They tend to just send the raw binary image content.

We were speaking about the speeds on internet connections and their hypothetical need to be stated in bits. No good argument for that exists today. You've provided an architectural detail for something most people won't know about and broadly doesn't matter when speaking of the internet besides.

I get your point because I also often have to just pause and realize the difference every once and a while, but I also don't think it's all that deceptive. Who among regular people are really fooled by the difference? If you are none the wiser about MB why would you be fooled by ratings listed in Mb? I would think most people's cognizance about that extends no further than, e.g., 100Mb is less than 200Mb and that is less than 300Mb and I want the highest number I can get.

I guess what I am saying is that all things are really relative and humans operate on generalizations, e.g., in this case assumptions that a higher number is better just like a higher number of apples is better than less apples.

It's usually the technical obsessive types, most prevalent in the modern era that are obsessive and work themselves into a frenzy about things that are both inconsequential and also only really matter in the bubble they have constructed around themselves. "We must save the poor innocent people from the evil deceptions of MB vs Mb!" decries the obsessive modern … while the regular person just shrugs and says "I don't care, I'm buying the biggest number I can for the credits I have. I don't understand any of this anyways. I just want my drug of empty stimuli as fast as possible. I have Disney content to watch."

> Who among regular people are really fooled by the difference?

Just about everyone I've ever happened to talk about it with. Regular people don't know the difference.

One of the most classic complaints in 10+ years of having roommates is how our download speed never matches the one on the tin. And most of the time it's at least kinda close, but the person complaining doesn't realize they're off by 8x and will always feel extremely ripped off.

The responses to my comment are sadly predictable. We have a hard time admitting when computing is failing and deceiving people just because us power-users can navigate the confusion.

I think the opposite assertion of your post is the more realistic one. The only people who want to see the unit of "megabits" are the niche nerds, not my roommate trying to decide which ISP package is going to be good enough for him by estimating how long it would take him to download a 1gb movie. He thinks a 1 megabit connection is going to take 15-20min.

Yes sorry it's 200 Mega Bits per second.

edit: the pricing page of ACT for reference - https://www.actcorp.in/broadband/chennai/broadband-plans

Amazing. I'm in a part of the UK using copper laid in the 1950s, my maximum speed with VDSL is about 30mbit. Upload struggles to beat 5mbit. For that I pay £30/month.

4G is a little better, I recently got a contract for £37/month and can get 35/10mbit down/up.

Incredible to think that I pay quadruple what you do for an inferior service.

It's happened in a number of places. Anywhere that never really invested in copper, or had crappy colonial copper left over, just skipped the whole xDSL era entirely and went mad for 4G, Fibre, or both.

These guys are roughly paying 1000 INR for average salaries (of the tech folk... others are much worse) of around 60,000 INR per month. Is it around the same ratio for you in terms of earnings versus cost for the connection? Otherwise it is misleading to convert everything to USD since earning average capacity is widely different from the West to other places.

Its not misleading. Its actually quite costly there.

Actually that's fair, in terms of parity dollars mine is really much cheaper, I'd imagine.

Still, it confuses me in terms of absolute cost. Does this just mean I'm a profitable customer for my ISP? Or that they're less efficient? Or is it just a symptom of the higher wages of the ISPs' employees?

What's FUP? 'Full Usage Plan?'

I've never heard that acronym before.

Fair usage policy

Yes fair usage policy

I think it is a term used in India. Basically you might have an "unlimited" data plan but after you cross the threshold your data rate gets slowed down. Most US Mobile carriers work this way.

Enna thala Airtel ah? Nanum dha. Tirupur la.

ha ha illaba ACT from Chennai.

oho. Sounds a bit odd that both Airtel and ACT have decided to cap 3.3 TB as FUP limit

it's the jio effect. they are offering 3.3 FUP with free subscription to all online services.

It's similar in India. In Mumbai, I have a fiber-to-home 150 Mbps up/down connection. I pay the equivalent of $9 per month. FUP is 3.3 TB per month.

For mobile data, I have a plan that gives 2 GB per day for the cost of <$3 per month.

Same in Romania:

1Gbps is 10$ per month. 2.45$ per month gets you 50GB mobile data (100mbps download/10 Upload). 5G is capped at 80GB though

(I wrote all that correctly)

Here in Fiji, I can get 100GB/month of 4G (LTE) mobile data for USD$8.

Which provider are you using? I use mobifone and constantly have to buy data packages for 10K as 1.5GB only lasts me ~0.7 days. 2GB/day would be the sweetspot.

I'm using Vinaphone. But I know some of my friends who are using Mobifone get special deals that is about the same price as my plan. Feel free to contact me via my email in bio if you need more information.

Yeah, data in the US is horrifically overpriced.

In Thailand I pay similar prices to you.

Anyone else thought that they would be annoyed if the ISP was able to tell me this data? I don't want them tracking which services I communicate with...

Maybe I should start self-hosted VPN if I actually cared...

You are using your ISP to contact those websites. Even with encryption you would still need to tell your isp which ip you want to connect to.

Tor is your friend if you care about hiding this kind of info.

That's what a VPN is for. Your ISP can't see the destination up addresses and only see your connection to the VPN endpoint

So you trust your VPN more than your ISP? They can just log the exact same data! And probably do with it as they please...

Virtually all ISPs collect and sell this data.

[citation needed]

They use network traffic information to figure out who needs to be peered with. This is like asking citation for someone that says gas-burning cars need gas stops to refuel. It's just not reasonable.

These logs seem to indicate some level of deep packet inspection. This is way beyond what's required for network management: IP/network level statistics are more than enough for that.

In this case, it's probably used for these "data bundles" the author mentions.

These sort of data bundles can't work without this type of logging. Thankfully here we don't have that.

And of course ISPs should track what ASNs they communicate with, but that is on general level, not per user...

You might want to turn off background app refresh entirely, as otherwise you are providing your coarse tracklog (not that anyone goes anywhere these days) via GeoIP lookup to every app that does background refreshes, even when you don't have them open.

Presumably you don't want every sketchy app on your phone knowing a complete log of dates and times you switch from your home wifi to 4G (leaving home) or from 4G to your work wifi (arriving at work).

I was astounded at how many background apps are constantly phoning home on iOS when I monitored the traffic.

I recommend the app Charles Proxy for this.

Charles Proxy is great. I think it’s a good idea to advocate NOT connecting your phone to corp wifi, email, or slack.

iOS & iPadOS can disable Background app refresh. I’ve never verified with Charles Proxy, but assume disabled Background apps don’t communicate.

Pinterest is one of the worst sites on the internet and I will cherish the day it vanishes from Google image search results which will hopefully kill it off, leaving space for a superior competitor (one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login). The same applies to Quora.

We need another panda update.

> one that doesn't hijack 50% of search results that are hidden behind a forced login

Recently Medium started to do the same thing. Google should start penalizing such results.

I always take screenshots of Pinterest images. They want to make it hard to save the pinterest image that you see on google search results. They want you to sign up. Haha. Well I guess they haven’t heard of screenshots before.

Irony being that wirthout the clickthrough and attribution, Pinterest is essentially a copyright pirating site.

I've been wondering about that actually. How do they get away with it when they are essentially just profitting off of other people's images

Because they “are just the platform”, and the early days was all about “make your own boards for your own purposes”. Once they had enough users they quickly transitioned to what we see now: game Google search results and force people to sign up.

The DMCA makes this sort of misbehavior legal. It’s a terrible law.

Without it, we also wouldn’t have YouTube, which would be a net win in my book.

What? It's illegal under the DMCA to do the shit that Pinterest/9gag/ifunny/etc. does, it's just that no one has the legal recource (i.e. lots of money) to do anything about it, save the massive rent-seeking entities like the RIAA. All the uploads of music albums by random users still exist on YouTube, but any ad revenue goes straight to the copyright holders.

The DMCA provides the platform with legal immunity as long as they honor takedown requests.

So, individuals are guilty until proven innocent, and platforms siphon money off the piracy. The government gets a single choke point for censorship.

A good way to extract original images in Firefox is ctrl+i -> the Media tab. There you should be able to download. Although some particularly hostile/fancy with their code sites have a way of breaking even that. Good thing we still have screenshots in modern computing.

It's against google rules to show different content to their crawler and the end user (images for the crawler, login for the user).

I‘m guessing players like Medium work around the rules by allowing X number of free (as in not logged-in) views. So it works if you open the link in private mode. But search engines could have the bot retry requests to check the website‘s honesty.

> But search engines could have the bot retry requests to check the website‘s honesty.

A simpler solution to this is just having a human check it.

Humans are expensive.

What I hate about Medium is that I don’t know whether I’m clicking a premium article or not on Google results.

If it’s a premium article that I don’t want to read or not what I’m looking for, I’ve wasted one of three of their free premium articles a month.

Since I’m not a paying member, I will have wait another month to read a premium article that I like, if I used up my free 3 articles.

Google should find and add a way to let me know that I’m clicking a paywall link, or don’t index them, so I’m able to avoid them

Just block their JavaScript and read to your hearts content.

I can't seem to find the original comment but this at least removes those images from the results for me in uBlock Origin:

  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])
  google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)

  duckduckgo.*##.tile:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])

The above filter causes a problem with gmail as reported by some user. The below filter seems to work properly on search according to the ublock team member.

google.###search .g:has(a[href=".pinterest."])

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/f8aqi0/how_ca...

Must say as a Duck Duck Go user I can't recall ever seeing Pinterest in my image search results. Just saying ;)

as a ddg user I wish it had an option to remove stock images; some queries seem to return nothing but same-looking watermarked images for sale. but no issues with pinterest which I occasionally use directly

I see them quite frequently. And now using -pinterest doesn't work anymore, because they caught on and that string doesn't exist in their results.

Edit: "they" being Pinterest, not DDG.

You can also exclude by domain:

    -site:pinterest.com

Pinterest has had many tlds for years to beat this trick.

> Google image search results

I hate this site with passion too, but it depends on what I want to do with my search. If I desperately want to find a particular picture from my vague descriptions, Pinterest has helped me quite a few times, since at least it gets indexed reliably (the original site often is not). So if someone has ever re-uploaded the image I want there, it at least can be found now (and it sometimes even includes a source link).

If Google truly cared about improving search they would reinstitute the “block search results from this domain” feature that they used to have. They’d learn really quick which sites were relevant as I banished the ones you mentioned and many others to the nether realm. Next up would be recipe sites and blog posts that spend twenty minutes getting to the point so they can throw in as many SEO optimized keywords as they can and hit targets for length.

If Google brought that option back, I'd switch back from DuckDuckGo, privacy be damned.

DDG can exclude by domain:

    -site:pinterest.com

You can do the same in Google, but a durable option that I didn't have to type into the search field every time would be extremely useful.

It never left. You've always been able to restrict domains on Google. It's extremely useful.

You can still remove results from specific sites.

In the Google search box, you can use the minus sign (-) to eliminate results from specific queries or domains. And if you use the site: operator, you can restrict results from specific domains.

So to eliminate pinterest.com results from any search (normal or image search) just search like this:

  tallest bridges -site:pinterest.com

I added an extension to chrome that automatically adds this but unfortunately it seems to break Maps search.

No it used to have a little x by the result and you never had to see that domain again. That’s my recollection.

Recently I’ve started getting into some hobby stuff and Etsy provides nice links with things to buy. Pinterest results seem very similar and you click them and they are... a picture. Often of the same item that’s for sale on Etsy. It’s super frustrating.

I remember when Quora used to be one of the best sites on the Internet! :(

Wait, when was that?

I was using it heavily between 2013 and 2015. The content this period was great!

I 'member when it didn't camouflage sponsored posts as regular ones... Seemingly at a rate of 1:1 with normal posts

My wife also has the same issue. Of her 5 GB Internet package each month, around 4 GB is spent on Pinterest. No idea where it‘s coming from

How do you know this?

iPhone usage stats

Women like pinterest more often than not

Where are you from? I’d love to know whether it is for a single region

Germany

Disable Background App Refresh for that app

I recommend putting in a pihole on your network and dns blackhole everything going to pinterest. A pihole will verify if pinterest is a valid problem or not. Otherwise, maybe you can run network analysis tools on your router?

While I agree pihole is a great tool, if someone is trying to simply block pinterest it's one line in your hosts file on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Any loss of functionality would be immediately noticeable.

Doesn't help with GSM data tho. :)

Now if there was a hosts file on iOS that I could edit...

Pinterest is notedly toxic to the web in general, but it provides an unparalleled UX to image discovery. (E.g. I'm into asemic writing and certain kinds of typographical/typewriter art mixed with musical notation)

What's an alternative?

Just search for 'asemic calligraphy' on Instagram on your phone. You can scroll happily ever after.= leaving the web as you knew it far behind.

Huh, interesting that he got such a breakdown from his ISP. I wonder how difficult it is to get that data without his kind of circumstance. Can I ask my ISP for it? Would they bother?

If there is a way to log this at router level, then we already have it. No need to talk to ISP.

That might depend on your country of residence, but in Europe we have the right to all non-confidential data associated with us from any company that isn't "prohibitively expensive" to obtain, such as "all video footage with me in it from 2010 to today".

In this case though, it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive to obtain, as it forms the foundation for tracking the use of your data plan. If it was prohibitively expensive to obtain, they wouldn't be able to tell you, when you hit your data cap.

Well after I tweeted they contacted me via Twitter DM and had a conversation with email, the email I have provided them, and they emailed me the breakdown, it’s a very long list of sites and protocols and data used

I have cropped the first few results only to show what’s relevant

Couldn't help but notice that a "share this on pinterest" button below the author's pinterest rant is pretty ironic.

Just thinking aloud. 1GB in 17 connections: most likely that would be videos. Could it be videos embedded in other websites? If I go to pinterest I see the images being downloaded from pinimg.com domain.

> "You might want to block Pinterest to save your data"

The irony is when the website that is posting such stuff consumes > 1mb for simple blog due to all the trackers etc.

Fellow Sri Lankan here, although I don't live there anymore.

Dialog and SLT both seem to have some hair pulling stats with their data usage, and I wouldn't even trust them for the statistics.

It is possible that they associate IP ranges with the service name, and it's probably outdated information.

It also shows TLS 1.3 and Pinterest in the same table, so that report is useless as no report.

Pinterest has been declining for 5 years: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

MAUs they report are drive-by temporary users (rather than engaged real users, like LinkedIn of Facebook), that get funneled to Pinterest by Google Image Search.

Here is some background:

Recently, it has been revealed that Pinterest reverse-image searches Google for uploaded images and adds the Google query result to the Pinterest image page for SEO: https://www.rankscience.com/blog/pinterest-image-seo-growth-...

This degrades quality of Google image search, for example this Reddit post on removing Pinterest got 77k upvotes:

Reddit r/LifeProTips to remove Pinterest from Google searches: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/hejbl0/lpt_whe...

Earlier Reddit petition to Google to remove Pinterest from search results (66k upvotes): https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/85atho/pinterest_ne...

Hacker News discussion of Pinterest's Google scraping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701998

A very recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25538586

Earlier discussion on HackerNews (1.1k upvotes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996

"Unpinterested" Chrome extension to combat Pinterest spam (10k+ downloads): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa...

Any theories on why google continues to allow them to degrade their search results?

That doesn't look like a very steep decline.

What would be a great alternative to pinterest? Asking for a friend.

Related question: what is Pinterest for, exactly? As in, why does it exist? I created an account there long ago when the site was new and tried to figure out what problem it was supposed to solve but failed. I remember trying for a short while to use it to collect news clippings on different subjects but that was really frustrating so that can't be it. Wikipedia says it's for "image sharing [...] in the form of pinboards", that it's "a catalogue for ideas" and that it "inspires users to 'go out and do that thing'". What does that even mean?

It's visual bookmarking, but your bookmarks are public so other people can see them and save them to their own bookmarks.

You can set up a board for a topic. "Tattoos I want", "ceramic mugs", "wedding locations", "cutlery" or whatever. Then you install the Pinterest browser button. Then, when you search the web for these things and you find them you save an image to your board. Or you can search Pinterest itself for these things and save the links to your boards.

Later, when you go to your board you have all these images in one place so you can easily compare them.

Of course some people find this cumbersome and limiting and prefer to usebrowser tabs and bookmarks and folders, and that's fine if it works for them.

http://are.na/ could be an alternative

This is probably not the right answer and obviously irrelevant if you want to share things but, at least in MacOS, you can actually tag your files in Finder.

What are the odds that google acquires pinterest and just replaces image search with it?

Seem's like exactly the kind of user hostile bullshit that google would do these days.

Pinterest acquired Jelly to build their current onsite search solution

Interesting article, but has anyone actually analysed the traffic properly to see what's going on, or confirmed this guys findings?

That’s what I’m going to do starting from this month, like I said this is from my ISP who sent me the breakdown, a 2 page pdf with protocols and sites with data I sent and received

Like I said it maybe a measuring error, or flat out lie by the ISP, but I can check once I monitored and blocked Pinterest for a month

What is the legitimate use case for Pinterest by the way? I was always regarding it as one of those websites spamming Google searches.

It’s actually a neat idea.

It’s a visual bookmarking tool. You bookmark various sites and they are shown as images from those sites.

It’s like creating a collection of ideas.

I assume that’s why it appears on search often: you’re basically finding the collections relevant to your search, and created by users.

However, like Medium, the spammy/forced login ruins it for passionate “leave me alone and let me consume your content for tree” users.

So lets say I'm interested in a specific cuisine, I would be benefitted from someone else curating it already? Is that correct?

For people to create visual collections of items from anywhere on the internet. They could be used for shopping, inspiration, bookmarks, or many other purposes.

I developed a similar site before Pinterest launched. Etsy used to have a feature called the Treasury, where members made collections of items, typically based on a theme like color, purpose, theme or aesthetic. Around the same time (2008-2009) there were sites like Wists, Wishlist or the Amazon wishlist bookmarklet. I had an etsy-related startup at the time.

We decided we wanted to make a collection site that was like the Treasury but drew from anywhere on the internet. I created a bookmarklet similar to Amazon's that would pop up, let you select a photo and a title and add any URL to one of your lists on our site. We had it 80% functional and styled, but became distracted by our primary project and unfortunately never launched it.

Now I think I understand. So it might be convenient for visually (as opposed to textually) oriented people. For me it's just pictures, pictures everywhere, but I can imagine other people's brains might work differently.

One use case is photographers / models /studios creating mood boards for a photoshoot. E.g. A studio owner might for example post a bunch of images that illustrate the type of 'look' that they are offering to photographers in terms of the lighting, outfits, make-up artist capability, etc.

Yes, this style of list making is most useful for visually oriented fields and people. The focus on having a little bit of text and links on the images makes the concept more than an image gallery. Shopping, art, food are all broad areas in which people share and publish appealing photographs, and they're also ripe for socialization.

Imagine that you and your partner are remodeling a bathroom. It's a simple way for you both - plus your designer - to collaboratively collect and view images of sinks, cabinets, fixtures, tubs, tile, etc.

Is this for mobile data, or are we talking about his home internet?

OP here, yes this is for home internet. Not mobile data

Thanks for the answer. So how do you use Pinterest? If I understood correctly, you've been only using Google as normal, and seeing Pinterest results, and that's the only interaction you've had with Pinterest?

I tried using Pinterest, I lasted 1 day

Disable Background App Refresh!

Another cancerous behaviour of Pinterest. There’s a surprise. This is the one of the nastiest pieces of software there is when combined with search engines. They should block it from being indexed.

Google has really turned "bad" over the last years. Whenever I search for anything I immediately get thrown a ton of shopping websites in my face as if my default mindset is "buy more crap". Google has more and more turned into "where to buy" instead of "where to find information". Searching for information on "Vienna"? Here are 200+ hotels you can book! It's like a game how to formulate your queries to avoid the most annoying results.

Pinterest is a cancer in the Google search results. I hate having to surgically add 10 different pinterest exclusion terms (from various countries) to my search query.

I wonder when a hybrid "wikipedia-of-search" solution arises.

I'm envisioning distributed clusters of specialized indexes for various topics. For example some enthusiasts crawl and curate tonnes of cooking websites, others technical and what have you not. Anyone with somewhat beefy servers can then make a search engine by subscribing to these indexes (bittorrent-like manner?) and pick and choose what they want included. A whole ecosystem of information indexing would pop up and we'd see blocklists (AdBlock of search) and craplists. I'm sure Pinterest would end up on one or two of those lists.

If you ask your ISP for a breakdown of your data, it's very likely they'll give you a sanitised account. Are you sure they've simply aggregated data usage from porn sites under the pinterest label?

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