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That’s an interesting perspective but I don’t think it’s well calibrated for the modern web.

Why? Pinterest is basically a (human curated) image scraper. Most if not all images it hosts can be found on the open web. If Google blocked Pinterest the exact same images could still be found from their original locations. It's like Google image search indexing Bing image search.

Now Medium is a different story as the content is mostly original.

I was responding specifically to the notion that Google should block all paywall or signup gated sites.

I see your point and I think you understand the product better than most in this thread but I think you’re minimizing the value of enrichment that “pins” over images or static links provide. In the same way, the comment section enriches news articles on hackernews and this site is worthy of indexing by Google.

I am not minimizing the value Pinterest adds, but my personal experience is that the signal/noise ratio is not as high as you think it is. I'm not convinced that the metadata provided by Pinterest users is worth the inconvenience.

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