
Pinterest Is a Unicorn, It Just Doesn’t Act Like One - raleighm
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/technology/pinterest-growth.html
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blackbrokkoli
As others mention here, I would say we shouldn't overdo the praise.

I can't really comment on the financial/entrepeneur side of Pinterest, but on
the user side:

* It's a walled garden, closed source, force signup, the UX is bad even if aren't a user (dominating Google Image Search taking you too pictures you can't click), it has lot's of dark patterns

* It heavily suggests signing up with Facebook or Google, making all the critic on privacy of those platforms also theirs

* It has all the features for the mob-mentality, abuse and so on (Like system, sharing, popularity based rankings)

There aren't as many of these problems visible because of the content(no
sensitive fotos, banking information or much politics) but that's not because
of their great buiseness model but the theme of the platform...

~~~
swalling
I think one point you're missing is that the vast majority of people use
Pinterest for reasons that are different than a social network. Even if it may
have some of the same surface-level mechanisms (like a personalized feed or
share buttons), it is very much _not_ used as a tool to broadcast personal
updates, read news, or cultivate relationships among people. The average user
treats it much more like a visual search engine with a bookmarking system
built into it than a social network.

Also, this is a minor quibble, but Pinterest does not have a Like system any
longer. I know because I worked on deprecating it.

~~~
dfsegoat
Being totally ignorant of the site myself, the use case you mentioned was
roughly how I had it described to me by my wife and her friends a few years
ago: They use it as a 'scrapbook' for fashion/craft etc. ideas. -- not
necessarily even sharing them.

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xeromal
My girlfriend uses it to store dessert recipes and workout clothes.

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wlesieutre
My only interaction with Pinterest is that it dominates Google Image Search
results, and then when you click on the result the image is nowhere to be
found. Wish Google would do something about that.

~~~
lemoncucumber
To make matters worse, Google Image Search removed the feature that let you
follow a link directly to the image itself.

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jacobsenscott
DuckDuckGo has a far superior image search just for this reason. You can
actually get a link to the image from the search results. As a bonus the link
is often a DuckDuckGo proxy, so you don't even need to send someone to the
source site - which is usually awful.

~~~
DannyBee
And when they get big enough, Getty will sue them as well, since this feature
was removed as a settlement of a lawsuit.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Then someone else will come along and offer exactly the same functionality...

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hexo
Sorry to say, i've found pinterest to be the most annoying "nothing" of the
web. It never served anything i wanted to do on the web, it just interfered
with my image search all the time in a horrible way. In the last days it only
shows content in the search engine for me and when i follow the image i get
blank page that wants me to log into my google account - and you can imagine
me doing that, really... so, what unicorn again? I've never found myself being
thankful to its existence, and it leaves me wondering for whom that service
really is and why

~~~
onion2k
_I 've never found myself being thankful to its existence, and it leaves me
wondering for whom that service really is and why_

There are plenty of valuable businesses that don't count me as a customer, but
I can still see why they're worth a lot of money. Sometimes it's not about
you.

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bogomipz
>"Pinterest, by Mr. Silbermann’s design, is the opposite: the web’s last
bastion of quaint innocence."

A lot of people would argue that aggregating other people's content and
sticking it behind a login wall is neither quaint or innocent.

~~~
joegahona
It looks like a login wall, but there's a link that reads "continue without
account" under all the login buttons.

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aszantu
As a google user, I see pinterest as cancer, its results shouldn't appear when
I have to login because I want to see a pic that showed up in the search
results. I find it complicated to use if I ever log into it.

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smt88
Does Pinterest really have users anymore, or is it just search engine spam?

~~~
joshenders
175M MAU according to [https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/175-million-
people-di...](https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/175-million-people-
discovering-new-possibilities-on-pinterest)

~~~
smt88
I've seen lots of highly active accounts posting hundreds of images. That's
the spam I was referring to. Pinterest seems uninterested in policing/removing
them, which makes sense because they draw traffic.

I suspect those are counted as MAUs (and I can't see any reason Pinterest
wouldn't count them, even though a human can tell they're just bot accounts).

Unless Pinterest has written transparently about their massive bot problem,
I'm reluctant to believe any self-serving metric they publish.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Comscore reports ~111 million monthly uniques for US only, so 175 million MAU
seems plausible, though I'm sure you are right that it includes a few million
bots.

[https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/](https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/)

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egypturnash
"slow and steady wins the race"

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Skrillex
The dark patterns on that site are piled pretty high, but that is not my issue
with it. My issue with Pinterest is that it has taken the Google image search
results by storm, and often does not actually lead me to the source of the
image. The effect that it has on Google image search is like if Wikipedia made
you sign up to use it but then did not actually have anything in the article.

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sleepychu
Pintrest's algorithm is trying desperately to tempt me back (I used it briefly
to look for some UI examples). Last week it sent me... what I can only
describe as a bunch of racist mexican jokes.

If anyone from pintrest is here and wants to see the email, let me know and
I'll dig it out.

