Ask HN: What Happened to Pinterest? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinterest?

33 pointsnight-rider21 comments

It was cute and novel at the start and really shined on a big screen like an iPad, but I haven’t used it in years. Seems to be taken over by black hat SEO types. What happened to it?

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How you see Pinterest depends on how you came across it. If your first experience with it was fron a Google image search link that threw up a login wall, you likely see Pinterest negatively.

If you used it via the app (or gave up with GIS and went to Pinterest permanently, like I did), you might change your mind.

GIS is good for finding specific images on the basis of search queries. It is bad for surfacing things that are similar to your search result, which is where Pinterest excels. Example: if you're searching for an image of say a Dell Inspiron 1420 from 2006, you don't want your search results to include pics of the Latitude 2420. Pinterest would be better for fuzzier searches like "2000s Computer" that would surface different types of results. The fuzziness is the feature, as the assumption is that you're not necessarily looking for one exact thing.

Another benefit of Pinterest is likely something that HN users especially dislike: that it replaces a link to the original image with one to the Pinterest page. I say this is a benefit because, after over a year of clicking through to original links, I've discovered that more than half the time, the original site is dead, or redirects somewhere else. Short of automatically sending these links to archive.org, Pinterest is probably the best solution for keeping those images online and having them be discoverable.

I block it from ever showing in my search results using ublock origin:

  ! block pinterest rubbish on google
  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest.*"])
  google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:upward(1)
  
  ! Block pinterest rubbish on ddg
  duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href\*=".pinterest.com"])

  g:has
  ...
  div:has

Interesting. "has" has poor browser support - https://caniuse.com/?search=has . I wonder what uBlock Origin uses to polyfill or whatever.

"The :has(arg) operator is actually a planned pseudo-class in CSS4, but as of writing no browser supports it. Instead of waiting for browser vendors to provide support, uBO provides support for :has(arg) as a procedural operator."

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...

Thank you for this

It's one of the many horrible ideas which ruined google search. There was time when Image search was very useful, then Pinterest came along and made google image search unusable. If you did see an interesting image it prevented you going to the original page unless you log in. Luckily we found a number of ways to block Pinterest so we never see it these days.

Pinterest is still popular. When it adopted mandatory sign-in to browse the site many years ago, it undoubtedly turned some users away.

I've been using Pinterest for a long time and more recently it feels that adverts are more prevalent and more prominent than in earlier years.

Despite those changes, Pinterest is still useful for finding visual inspiration. It's a richer source of finding images compared to Google images.

Some popular image categories:

- Recipes (searching for recipes by photo results can be more effective than text-only search)

- Travel

- Architecture

- Interior design

- Anything relating to visual design (illustration, typography, web design, comics, etc.)

One final point: many 'pins' link to blogs and sites that would never turn up in a Google search (or are buried in Google results). Sometimes that makes Pinterest a more serendipitous browsing experience compared to Google search.

It just grew, is all. Pinterest the search results page application and spam receptacle, and Pinterest the personal collection tool don’t have a ton in common. It’s still a very nice experience on iPad and you can use it without being affected by the bad things it does and that are done on its platform.

They started with a good idea (let people create collections of images from the web), hired marketing people to drive DAU (scrape every other image on the web and spam Google image search), created an impossibly expensive problem (store copies of all the other images on the internet), and then hired business people to try and squeeze a profit out (figure out how to turn a picture of a sofa into a purchase of a sofa).

They are currently trying to figure out how to make the last step successful. The company has some insanely valuable users (wedding shopping brides, people planning an interior redecoration, etc.) that are worth keeping, but they are buried in the 99% of users that are effectively window shopping with no intention ever to buy - and even worse - use the product heavily.

Wait, what? They don't actively scrape images. Users have to choose to post ("pin") images

I don't honestly believe a real user was so excited about the Microsoft Paint wiring diagram I made of my garage to share with a friend that they decided to pin it.

They can't make hires? Haven't seen Houzz?

Wonder what it is.

It is thriving.

Once you realise how the PR, marketing and media industry works. Along with Social Media which acts as an amplifier or extra feedback loop.

Nothing happened to it. It was always an SEO playground that infected more relevant results. I wish I could block it from search results.

Taken over? That was their whole business from the start.

Architects like it.

Indeed. We are moving into a new house and the first thing my architect sister told us was "create a Pinterest account" and start collecting ideas

Use it daily for collecting photos/art. It’s recommendation engine is surprisingly relevant sometimes. It does centralize/ruin web search results.

>Seems to be taken over by black hat SEO types

You think SEO is blackhat? Are they taking over servers to put their copy up?

It’s still very useful for digital artists!

I'm always wondering what's the rules for using pictures/ art/ etc. for inspiration. Specifically where the border is between inspiration and heavily inspired (almost copied).

Edit: Like, to what point it is accepted by the 'community', but also legal boundaries.

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