
Pinterest’s Problem: Getting Men to Commit - softdev12
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterests-problem-getting-men-to-commit-1421944331
======
Mithaldu
Pinterest's Problem: [https://www.pinterest.com/](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.

~~~
probably_wrong
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.

~~~
zamalek
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.

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

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

------
oellegaard
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.

~~~
rockmeamedee
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...](http://geekfeminism.org/2014/03/04/in-defense-of-women-in-tech-wit-
groups/)

(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.)

~~~
_delirium
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/](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.

~~~
seabee
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.

~~~
jquery
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.

------
nkuttler
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.

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

~~~
EvaK_de
Women are not a niche.

~~~
mkawia
yes they are ,Men too.

Infact Men are targeted way more openly.

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

------
jarcane
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.

~~~
justincormack
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...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/07/17/2243232/language-tempest-at-
orkut) ?). 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.

------
CapitalistCartr
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.

~~~
istorical
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.

------
siegecraft
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?

------
kmfrk
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.

------
rockmeamedee
> 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.

------
smoyer
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...](http://blog.hummiesworld.com/2011/02/scrapbooking-
demographics.html#.VMJN1zW350w)

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

------
blueskin_
>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.

~~~
sehr
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

~~~
blueskin_
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.

------
stusmith1977
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).

~~~
smcl
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.

------
eva1984
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.

------
pionar
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.

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

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rabbyte
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.

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aroch
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.

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

------
V-2
As a non-native English speaker, and a programmer, I thought this was a piece
about version control at first

