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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

Is the team aware of the hate by non-users this is causing Pinterest? If so, what’s the calculation for doing it anyway?

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If “this” is the signup nag, then yes. It’s largely ignored because the nag can be easily closed and only non-expert users don’t understand this.

OK, I guess I'm not an expert user. I've just tried pinterest.co.uk in Chrome and I get the "Welcome to Pinterest" popup after clicking on almost anything. How do I close this and proceed to the image I selected?

I was able to repro with a VPN on .co.uk . It looks like for some ccTLD (target markets) the nag UI isn’t directly dismissible. This seems to have happened after my time there. I understand the frustration. Either create an account, use a US VPN, or redirect yourself to .com with a specific cookie value set. I’ll leave that exercise to you.

Here are some test URLs which should all be publicly accessible without an account:

User page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/

Board page: https://www.pinterest.com/joshenders/herpetology/

Pin page: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/46232333644621276/

You get unclosable ones on .com too, at least on phones: https://imgur.com/a/cRyAwIW

You’re in a country (well, technically connecting from a non-US IP) which does not have a ccTLD redirect. This is the same issue as above. It appears the updated code sends a non-dismissible UI for non-US markets (the US is saturated, this is a user acquisition/growth strategy).

Easily closed? You mean by nixing the DOM element in the inspector?

Snark aside, most people clearly aren’t expert users.

By “expert user” I just mean “power user”. Didn’t intend for that to come across as an insult.

Scroll a little bit, the X is in the top left. We made that change in 2017 or so.

Just confirmed it still behaves this way on .com for keyword landing pages and direct links to pins (e.g search results, or shares from users).

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