Pinterest’s Problem: Getting Men to Commit | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest’s Problem: Getting Men to Commit

wsj.com

40 pointssoftdev1248 comments

Pinterest's Problem: https://www.pinterest.com/

Their front page does not explain what the hell it actually is, so all users that join them join because existing users already know what the site actually does and ask friends to join, which of course restricts new users to being close to their existing demographics.

Edit: While i typed this the teeny tiny "About" link at the bottom of the page disappeared. (?!)

Edit2: After browsing around on their about pages, they have a lot of breathless promises of virtually world peace caused by using Pinterest, but little concrete information of what the site is actually useful for. They could do with grabbing some people off the street and pitching them various explanations to find some where the person actually understands the site afterwards.

I'd go a step beyond the frontpage: every time I reach Pinterest for some reason (usually due to a picture that I found on an image search), I'm hit by a very annoying "log in to see more" banner (usually before I reach the picture I was looking for). If Pinterest is a magazine, that banner is the guy taking it from my hands and scolding me "this is not a library!"

I now actively avoid Pinterest links.

Yep. The article is the first time I've ever learned what Pinterest actually is. I'm not going to commit to an account before I know what something is - signup walls prevent me from educating myself.

I don't think the Facebook landing page is better, but more people kind of know what it's about.

... or got in before they put up the signup wall.

I have the same experience. Pinterest is the ultimate "internet" company, using free labor to curate other people's content so they can sell ads to their users.

Which is not to say that the platform they provide, and the communities created on it, don't have value. It's just not enough to convince me to use it.

I love Pinterest.

That banner is user hostile and makes me not love Pinterest. The experience on mobile is worse. There's bizarre behaviour where an appstore link can seize focus. You're in Chrome, browsing the WWW, and suddenly Chrome minimises and the app store opens. Pinterest does this and it is horrible behaviour.

If you install the Pinterest app you get asked if you want to open the page in the app instead of your browser.

I would use Pinterest everyday if it wasn't for that.

If you do that on mobile you can view the image through a portal about 20% of your screen size - the rest is crowded in with some sort of chrome.

So it's like he grabs the mag from you, scolds you and then leaves the page you wanted to see open behind the counter where you can stand and squint at it for a bit if you like.

"I'm hit by a very annoying "log in to see more" banner"

This is a fairly recent change to the site and I agree it's obstructive and intensely irritating. Imagine if Flickr were to do something similar? Clearly Pinterest want to drive further registrations to their site, but this seems like such a rude and intrusive way of doing it.

Pinterest is an excellent source of visual inspiration and research often overlooked by many designers and developers. There are lots of excellent boards that collect examples of website, app and tablet designs. There is also a huge variety of illustration and graphic design examples of every style and colour imaginable. However, the new restrictions they've placed on viewing content mean that I no longer recommend Pinterest links.

The site is now practically unusable or explorable in a non logged in state. Not sure when this change took place, but almost every page will prevent the user from exploring the site, whether it's performing a search, clicking a photo or a member's name. The only one that doesn't restrict further actions is giant banner that takes up a quarter of the screen [1]. Nothing turns me off faster.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/ApC3Zgs.png

It's mind boggling to me that another company is employing the quora style growth tactics like this despite all the backlash quora has gotten over their practices. :(

Amazing, first time to their front page and I am greeted by a sign in dialog stating "She used Pinterest to roll her first Pasta"

oh I cannot seem to exit and see anything other than this dialog.

Why would I want to use a site that forces me to signup before it shows me what its good for?

Worse ... it's purposely obtuse. The sub-heading I got (the first time) was "She used Pinterest to roll her first pasta". I'm standing at work and don't have any ingredients so obviously this site couldn't be for me!

Counterpoint, it’s really hard to explain social media for users who don’t have an account - which could be a reason to do a "mock" profile with some of the most popular accounts in the feed.

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr didn't do a good job of showing what they were good for either. Not that it's an excuse to get lazy in trying, of course.

They should do like the tech community. Make "Pinterest Boys Meetup" and "PiGuys" making free lunch paid by all the major clothing companies where girls are not allowed to participate. Also, they should host conferences and encourage guys to participate and make discounts for them. They should tell everyone how much they appreciate guys joining them.

I sense some antagonism on your part against Women In Tech groups. Here's a piece about how they are actually useful http://geekfeminism.org/2014/03/04/in-defense-of-women-in-te...

(Also all of those things would work, if men were negatively affected by our current patriarchy in the same way as women are in tech, which they aren't.)

Hey, it was surely intended as a brilliant satire on the tech industry...

Fwiw there are some groups like that for men in industries where there's historical stigma against male participation, like nursing: http://www.aamn.org/. Doesn't even seem particularly controversial; the AAMN doesn't generate nearly the level of anger that women-in-tech groups do.

There's no controversy because these goals are always seen through the lens of society as a whole. Groups like the AAMN helps people who are generally privileged achieve parity in an area where they are currently stigmatised. They don't do anything that looks like it erodes male privilege, so there is no reason for them to attract any ire.

And because the AAMN doesn't consist of a bunch of bloggers and click-bait artists attacking female nurses with a bunch of rude stereotypes.

I don't really see a problem here, I think it is a strength to have a big female audience. It's a unique selling point for pinterest.

Personally, I don't find social news/streams etc. very interesting anyway. For regular visits I much prefer sites that group content around certain subjects, not people.

42% of American women use the website. That means that they still have another 58% to go.

It would be ok if they were a niche app/website. But I don't think they aren't.

Women are not a niche.

yes they are ,Men too.

Infact Men are targeted way more openly.

It sounds like you're thinking of market segments, not niches. Semantics.

Ignoring the massive concentration of fucked up gender issues in that article, I do find it interesting how sites develop these very clear cultures and how quickly.

I recently came into an Ello account, and ultimately found myself put off by the place; there's nothing about the software that's that offputting (other than the overlarge sidebar), but I look around at who and what is on it and I feel out of place. The whole site seems to be populated entirely by 'modern artist' types and little else.

Similarly, G+ very quickly wound up being a go to for tech and general nerdery, but little else (perhaps just because no one else cared about the sales pitch).

Some of this of course is down to founder curation of a sort, Ello is run by artists so of course it being invite only meant they mostly invited more artists, while G+'s earliest adopters were Google coders and employees.

But the latter was certainly the case for Twitter as well, and it managed to claw past that reputation, just as Facebook clawed its way past its early rep for 'that place for college kids to play Scrabble'.

I wonder how one even goes about controlling or managing this kind of culture shift, and if one even should.

Orkut, which became largely Brazilian, is the classic example. There were some good articles about how that arose but cant find them (maybe the dead link from http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/07/17/2243232/language-tem... ?). In that case it was partly about language initially, Google allowed mixed languages in threads, and Portuguese put off the English speakers but not so much the other way round.

I think that was part of what was brilliant about facebook. They gradually went from restricted to Ivy league universities, to restricted to people with an .edu domain to open to everyone. When I was still in high school I used a facebook clone by some local company restricted to high school students. The same company had equivalent sites for university students and the general public, once facebook became generally available outside the US they rapidly lost market share. At that point facebook was still considered "cool" in my social circle because it was the place where american university students hung out.

My wife has a Pinterest account. She has dozens of neatly maintained boards and about 300 followers. It's an amazing space. But for my male friends and myself, it's not even on our radar. It's an odd dichotomy. So many spaces are overwhelmingly male, this one stands out for the opposite. But I've no idea what causes it.

It seems to me that maybe there's some sort of phenomenon where women really enjoy image-focused websites to a greater extent than men do.

Other examples of sites and apps that seemingly have more heavily weighted female userbases and also are image focused - Tumblr, ello, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr? And of course the greatest example which we've already discussed - Pinterest.

Mock weddings and recipes are popular. It's a little like The Sims with catalogued real-world items (and people). :)

You can't browse the site without being signed up; every time I hit it from a google image search the content I want to see is teased behind a registration wall. Does that keep men out disproportionately? Probably not but it does hurt when you're trying to catch up on users and those users might be more skeptical consumers than your existing customers. How on earth do you convince someone to use your product if you won't let them use your product?

The use cases for Pinterest have always been very vague, and the default categories keep changing.

Pinterest hasn’t done a good job of explaining the uses of the service, especially the great wishlist service whose rich-data pins can send you an alert, when the price on one of your items drops. I also think they haven't nailed down exactly what Pinterest is for and just keep seeing what people do with it; they didn't have a Quotes section initially, if I recall correctly, for instance.

On the other hand, it's a little silly to frame it as an issue that guys aren't using a particular service. I hear the demographic of women is still quite large.

> Ms. Meyers-Levy’s studies have shown that women are able to process information more comprehensively and to do so at a lower threshold. Men are more selective and tend to focus on the essentials.

I was expecting a cool, UI/gender studies point about pinterest's grid style getting gendered as for girls through social construction, but instead just read some bullshit gender essentialism.

Here's a key insight for the Pinterest team ... your demographics are going to look like the demographics for scrapbooking [1]. I don't scrapbook (I'm male) or know of ANY other men that scrapbook (or at least admit to scrapbooking). Personally, it seems like a very boring past-time and the closest I come is to look at what my wife and daughters have created.

I won't be signing up for Pinterest for the same reason.

Please note: I'm not that macho personae ... I love to cook, can sew and knit and generally do my own laundry. I'd love to be able to draw better (but the engineer in me likes his straight lines and square corners). I'll even occasionally watch (and enjoy) a chick-flick.

[1] http://blog.hummiesworld.com/2011/02/scrapbooking-demographi...

EDIT: Yes - I know the demographics shown at the linked site are affected by Facebook's demographics.

>In other words, Pinterest’s busy design may create an information-overload for men. “If this was a magazine, they’d turn the page,” Ms. Meyers-Levy said. “It works for females because they like detail, they like more complexity.”

Not sure who they studied here, but I love high information density. Sparse metro interfaces and blank pages with one thing on them are far, FAR more likely to make me move on to something else. I've stopped reading more than one site when they suddenly went from high to low information density. Of everyone I know, male and female, not one has a good thing to say about low information density.

Not a Pinterest user because I always had the perception it was recipes and fashion, but might be more interested to look now.

Maybe it's your group of friends? Lots of folks I know seem to appreciate the cleaner sparse designs, larger fonts etc... It seems a lot a easier to just move your thumb and scroll than zoom in or squint tbh

Meh, I don't use touchscreens other than a phone, and even then, if I'm anywhere near a real computer instead, I'll use that over it.

I tried pinterest a while back (so apologies if it's changed since)... I remember the sign-up process was awful. Part of the sign up process forces you to follow a certain number of other people. I just wanted a blank page to start adding to. If I'm signing up to something "social" with my name attached, I don't want to be forced to publicly follow other people/groups that I haven't fully checked out.

The sign-up process was so in-your-face and demanding I gave up and never came back.

(I'm male, if that makes any difference or relevance).

I went through that same process to view one recipe, then deleted my account - and then started getting unwanted marketing mail by pinterest every couple of days. When I tried to disable the mail\unsubscribe it asked me to login (to the account I'd deleted) to update my marketing preferences. They now get filtered to my trashcan.

Reddit is the Pinterest for MAN.

Personally, I just find the way Pinterest organizes its contents leads to low information density, maybe because there isn't any place left for text and the images are so slim make memes look bad?

However, I don't the lack of male participation is an emergent issue for Pinterest right now. Bigger issue may be, since the whole site already looks like a giant billboard, how to squeeze real money out of it.

I have a pinterest account, and my wife and I used it when looking at houses last year. She'd find a house online, pin it to a board, and if she really liked it, would send me the pin.

I think of it as a bookmarking service meant for collections of similar things.

The problem should be to attract more users in general, be they men, women, or otherwise.

I'm a man using Pinterest to study design, fashion, art, astronomy, and other visually oriented subjects. I follow boards for UX/UI design elements and animations which would be relevant to the HN audience but, honestly, I'm not super eager to have more "men" on the site. In this case, imho, the problem isn't Pinterest the problem is men and I'm fine with that problem; it keeps a lot of subtle porn and memes away from the site. Pinterest should be focusing on the men they do have and growing that audience instead.

I'm male and have a Pinterest acccount -- it is used solely when I plan on spending time baking with my girlfriend or my mother.

A visual bookmark is only an advantage when the sight of something is better for your memory than a title and/or tags.

As a non-native English speaker, and a programmer, I thought this was a piece about version control at first

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