Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation

404media.co

95 pointstrinsic277 comments

I ran an account on Instagram that "curated" posts from other people (basically reposted images but before the current reposting functionality).

The AI generated images are so prevalent that I resorted to reposting images only if there were from 2022 or earlier (sure, filters existed then too).

The whole experience reminds me of the story about "pre-radiation steel" [0] and how future generations won't be able to trust any image after 2024. Then again, we have large amounts of literature and stories from ancient history or medieval times that are impossible to verify as true so maybe this isn't a new problem.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

I do the same in youtube etc if I want to just listen to some music. before:2020 usually works somewhat.

Didn't know about that operator before all this.

I'm a Kagi user so i genuinely forgot that Pinterest still exists.

Thank you, Kagi.

I can’t remember if Kagi auto blocks it or if I blocked it completely on my first search, but I haven’t seen Pinterest trash in search results on literal years. <3 Kagi.

Pinterest has the honour to lead the leaderboard from #1 tot #7 in the blocked domain list.

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

That's actually kind of impressive.

Pinterest - the sewer of internet image search

to be fair, yet another useful and interesting tool exploited into unusability.

Fun to look at the remaining sites.

TikTok (hated by HN as we can see on the other thread today; possibly people banning themselves from the rabbit hole)

Anti-news propaganda sites (Fox, Breitbart, Daily Mail, NY Post, and the much less offensive but more sloppy MSN)

Quora (like Pinterest, unusable without an account but shows the logged-in answer to googlebot. Ought to be against the rules but isn't)

Other low quality help sites with good SEO (w3schools, not great but usable in the way that Quora isn't)

"Lowered" (dropdown) has similar sites in a different order. "Raised" has Reddit, Stackoverflow, and HN. Highest raised news is NYT.

That list is so hilarious and so vindicating. It feels great to know so many other people hate alternativeto.net. I wish we had a prominent place to name and shame sites like these.

I would probably get along with the typical Kagi user, many of those are complete pollution with no redeeming qualities.

My favorite news feed overall: news.kagi.com

The ability to (1) block all Pinterest domains in image search and (2) click an image hyperlink and get straight to the file - these two features alone are worth my annual subscription fee to Kagi.

Brave search has similar features as well (Goggles, they call it).

Fantastic to block sites that game SEO but don’t actually find what you want (Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, etc)

Genuinely. If Kagi removed the ability to filter out trash domains, I'd stop using it. It's the only way to get real and useful results in a post-SEO world.

> (2) click an image hyperlink and get straight to the file

Does this work with images posted on Reddit, to their service?

This is the most convincing reason to use Kagi I've heard yet.

It's usually the top reason people give when recommending Kagi. I can't imagine search any other way.

Is there literally any reason why Google favours Pinterest so much? It's just seems purely bad for Google.

I have to be honest and say that I have no sympathy for Pinterest and other services destroying themselves in the clamour to jam AI and feed algorithms into everything.

That they ever thought anyone would enjoy the experience is beyond me, and it demonstrates their place in the grotty suburbs of the attention economy.

They're making money hand over fist with ads, I don't think they could care any less about the product than they currently do. The product at this point is a moldy sheath around the ad delivery system, as with any for-profit "social network".

So true. I used Pinterest for art references and inspiration and they have 3 issues that are entirely self-owned:

1. Ads, ads and more ads. I had their app and it had to go, because every third pin was an ad.

2. Ads that seem to be pins: there are ads that are a mini collage. One image, 2-3 thumbs below. All "images" with the same rounded border like the regular pins. So you click them and because the upper image is visually detached from the rest of the ad, you don’t realize that you just clicked an ad when it is too late. A very nasty dark pattern.

3. No timestamps. It’s sometimes hard to tell if something is AI-generated. I don’t want AI-generated when it comes to art. Pinterest could choose to display pin timestamps when they were pinned for the first time, but they don’t.

So, they dug their own hole and I have zero sympathy for them, too.

PINS has 5200 employees! What The actual F are 5200 people doing?

This company exemplifies the "dead internet". No way they grow, let alone hit their targets.

Going short.

What if the dead internet is where the profits are?

https://investor.pinterestinc.com/news-and-events/press-rele... "Pinterest Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results, Delivers First Billion Dollar Revenue Quarter"

(presumably the money is from advertisers, and the 5200 people are on the phone to advertisers persuading them to increase spend)

Except machines dont pay for products or services... show all the fake ads you want to all the fake profiles you can, inflate your figures to the moon but in the end, the results for the advertiser will determine media value not the fake metrics.

All digital media is a race to the bottom. It appears that Pinterest is falling very fast.

There definitely is a line you can cross with ineffective advertising sniff but that line can be hidden pretty well by now.

> Q4 Revenue of $1.15 billion, an increase of 18%

That's unreal tbh. Clearly I'm living in a bubble thinking "who the hell still uses Pinterest".

I work in the same building as Pintrest - they have prime real estate in the centre of Dublin, with an office that looks to be tricked out to the max - and sometimes I see some people in there, but nowhere near the numbers the space can accommodate.

And the world is drowning in more pinterest google image search spam.

Pinterest sucks.

You can create your private archive with Bookmarker. Share collections publicly if you want.

https://bookmarker.cc/

I had a Pinterest account back when there were genuinely great resource for niche things like Japanese graphic design.

Since then, I've moved to simply having a local image/video database UI app like Eagle[0] and checking Are.na[1] for interesting collections.

[0] https://eagle.cool/ [1] https://www.are.na/explore

Thanks these are genuinely helpful. I also use/d Pinterest for this kind of use case and haven't managed to find many good alternatives

I've entirely replaced Pinterest with tumblr for that kind of stuff. It comes with the added bonus of having a community of other queer weirdos like myself

Blizzard recently set up a World of Warcraft promotion with Pinterest where you could share your housing builds from in-game. Many people were insta-banned from Pinterest for "spam" after just posting one or two pictures.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/pinterest-suspended-...

Something is very broken over at Pinterest.

If you use google image search recently, it's mostly Pinterest and Facebook.

...or stock images.

And google forum search, which is pretty great overall, is often full of facebook comments. I don't mind the reddit results, since they still usually (somehow) contain the best answers to my queries. It would be great if it could be further filtered for actual forums.

Not just recently. Google image search was semi-useless for years due to being spammed by login-walled pinterest images.

knowing how to game Google Image search years ago is exactly how Pintrest got it's footing. Shocked they haven't been totally blacklisted. Well not shocked because Google doesn't care about image search and actively makes it worse often.

Not if you use `-pinterest -facebook`.

“MAUs were 619 million, an increase of 12% compared to December 31, 2024” [1].

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1506293/0001...

> We define an MAU as an authenticated Pinterest user who visits our website, opens our mobile application or interacts with Pinterest through one of our browser or site extensions, such as the Save button, at least once during the 30-day period ending on the date of measurement.

Wonder if we're going to get a MAHU (Monthly Active Human Users) stat in the future.

Not to mention so many ads it’s no longer usable.

Pinterest is so bad it's one of those sites I just skip over on search results. But it's been that way for years - nothing new.

I always assumed it to be a honeypot for ebay purchasers due to the "copy popular ebay search results and then lure them to a link" methodology of "users".

Pretty much the same with all AI slop sites (e.g. the first 10 search results) only usually they only care about serving adds instead of serving malware or scams.

Pinterest is such a fascinating product. I've tried to use it a few times over the many years the product has been out. Never ever saw a point of sticking around. Constantly getting annoyed at some Google search pinterest links and that's about it. With AI now filling it up, I completely fathom to understand what this is good for

It's a shame, I used to browse Pinterest for woodworking ideas. A year ago, I noticed some of the results were AI generated. Now almost ALL results are AI generated, included the obviously scammy ads they put in everywhere. If someone knows a place where you can find fun woodworking projects, I'm all ears.

Instructables is pretty good.

Definitely not Etsy, because it's the same deal over there.

Yeah had to close my account with Etsy. The think that its ok to spam you recommendation emails and not let you opt-out. Feel bad for creators now... :(

There must be a subreddit?

I also noticed recently they changed their design completely. Instead of browsing your board and the things you pinned in the past, what you're now shown are completely unrelated items that you might want to add to your board, and most of these are things you can buy from other shopping sites.

It's not just Pinterest though. IG, Reddit, even LinkedIn.

Especially linkedin from my experience. That place is a shithole even more than usual lately.

I hate that to get a job nowadays you essentially need a linkedin, I hate that shithole

Pinterest is the OG slop, long before LLMs ever existed

15 years back I got an affiliate marketing ebook, and it had lessons on getting hundreds of blogspot subdomains and using a desktop tool to publish the same crap about, say, tropical fish to all of them. There was/is also a captcha solving service which got a nice landing page about employing people.

Deserved. Pinterest has been enshittifying itself and the Internet at large for quite a long time.

We need camera hardware to be able to sign photos

Then I can take a photo of an AI generated image.

That might impose enough effort to stop most slop from being spammed everywhere.

Could offer a service that automates it with a DSLR pointing at a screen laundering images one after another.

This would probably still be way better than the status quo, because it would introduce a higher barrier for entry and more friction into the slop delivery system and give the moderation and spam detection a chance to catch up. Much easier to detect and delete 5000 laundered slop images than 500.000.

I think it would be hard to make that look like an image you'd taken naturally, rather than one of a screen

Seems like something that would be miss-used against people in horrible ways.

I think it might be enough to be able to verify that a photo was taken by a particular manufacturer's camera, not necessarily a specific camera/owner.

TIL this exists... C2PA can digitally sign the complete lifecycle of an image, starting from capture on the camera:

https://petapixel.com/2026/02/21/a-look-at-an-image-verifica...

(I submitted this article to HN too as I thought it was pretty interesting)

I do wonder what the future of using these platforms is in the era of AI. Theoretically, I feel like asking Claude to filter the results to remove "slop" would work quite well. Maybe that could be built into some kind of extension?

Some guy on here built a tool like this… can’t remember the thread but it was called browser-code on GitHub.

Any ATProto based replacements available?

How would that solve the slop problem?

And why ATProto when it would result in just another broken centralized service?

Because ATProto is specifically designed to allow being NON-centralized. Unlike Pinterest. Yes, ATProto is new and most of the traffic is through a single site at the moment, but it is specifically designed to allow for that to change.

The bulk of the traffic will stay quarantined on the major sites like these because most people are passive and undiscerning. The new generation of smaller, higher quality sites doesn't have to worry about the Eternal September coming over and attracting the scammers, slop merchants, etc.

Lol, naive in the extreme. The majority of the slop is not eternal September noobs, it’s commercially motivated, people selling things, PR, like farming, bots astroturfing public opinion. It’s much cheaper to push slop than to moderate it.

These “small higher quality sites” will not have the resources to gatekeeper it. If, that is the at protocol world ever gets past one big site. You’ve actually got a lot more chance with smaller communities that are not connected with any protocol.

The slop can come from anywhere, including captive apps like Pinterest, so why use Pinterest? The ask is: how can you get a similar experience on non tech controlled systems? That does not mean you won't get slop, it means that Pinterest is not the gatekeeper to the user experience. There will likely be slop, but that is a distinct problem statement to solve for.

My concern is the gatekeeper (in this case, Pinterest), and avoiding them at all costs using the ability to build replacements swiftly using vibe coding on open protocols (although vibe coding is not required of course, it will simply speed time to market). ATProto cannot be controlled by design, so it is ideal for building apps that need social rails (as a Pinterest replacement might). What is Pinterest besides an app, a search engine, and an object storage system after all?

Tangentially, ATProto moderation primitives might be of use in detecting, tagging, and filtering AI slop (via media, metadata, and author/publisher signal), but more research is required on this topic.

> The majority of the slop is not eternal September noobs, it’s commercially motivated, people selling things

Right, and those people go where the traffic is. They're polluting Twitter. They don't find Mastodon/Bluesky etc. important enough to take over. Hopefully it stays that way.

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