The fact that registration is required for no obvious reason kinda makes the site a no-go zone for me. I only occasionally land there via Google Image search. Maybe I'm just not the right target audience, since I'm not a social media guy. For my specialized interests there are better aggregators such as specific subreddits / HN. Forcing registration is part of the user retention strategy, but for me it makes using the site a non-starter.
the site disgusts me because it pollutes google image searches so thoroughly and combined with the mentioned required registration just makes it poison overall.
when I have to filter a site to get results I can use there is a problem and there needs to be an easy method to permanent filter such sites.
Google briefly had a feature (back in the ExpertSexChange days) where you could ban a ___domain from your search results. I miss that feature. Now Pinterest gets blocked at DNS via pi-hole. At least it is something.
That is perhaps the most frustrating part of it. Often I'm looking for the original source of something and then Pinterest comes inbetween like some viral search spam.
(Kind of makes me wonder if the early days of printing press with no copyright were comparable)
Basically, even if you have an account, logging in to the site isn't enough. You can’t really save items or do anything without using Pinterest’s browser extension and doing everything through there. And this browser extension (like most browser extensions in general) can see the address and contents of every page you visit on the web, regardless of VPNs or incognito mode or HTTPs or anything like that, because it’s code that’s now built into the browser itself (which can also see all those things because that's its function).
There it is, right there. 'Growth team' - a team dedicated to using every dirty trick in the book to retain users. Facebook has one too, and that team was responsible for all the shady cross-app data sharing on peoples phones.
Instead of treating your users as 'assets' simply to be owned and controlled, why not actually ask them about their experience of using your service? Sure, you'll only get a few percent of responders but it's a start.
Also, these sites need to factor in that a significant number of people are reducing their social media usage, and this includes sites like Pinterest. Sometimes a service just reaches the end of it's life, and that's ok.
Personally I really dislike Pinterest, I do not see the purpose it serves, and as a non Pinterest user, I have issue with Google searches throwing up Pinterest links that are of no use to me whatsoever.
I like Pinterest. I'm bad at decorating, and I'm a bad cook, so having recipes and decorating stuff that I can sift through and save into distinct idea books is nice. However, the website/app is basically glorified bookmarks. Trying to turn this into a Social Networking Empire is just pure greed, and I agree with you: the "Growth Team" concept is wretched. Sure, it's an interesting problem from a CompSci perspective, but the underlying motivations make me ill. Stop trying to manipulate your users. If they like and have a use for it, they'll use it. If they no longer have a use for it, they'll stop. BUT, if it's good enough, then the incoming users should eclipse the outgoing, and you'll float on just fine. Alas, for Social Network Empire wannabes, that's just not good enough!
I really enjoy using are.na (https://www.are.na/about) for collecting images and random bits of text into spaces where I can view them together. It's a small, creative community and definitely not of the repost, repost, repost quality that you find at Pinterest. It is run by a small team and they offer a very useful free plan for getting started and membership is only $45/year.
I am not affiliated are.na. I am just a happy user.
Yeah, you do, you said so in the first paragraph. But as I just told my wife, it’s why I (and you, I presume) aren’t billionaires: I’m all focused on how it serves the user, while completely ignoring that I’ve built a Christmas wish list for adults and I can beat that monetization drum until the head breaks.
You can tell they don't want to be a useful tool, rather they want to suck in as many users as they can and extract as much eyeball time as they can.
I have multiple friends who are addicted to just scrolling through pinterest. The few times where I've thought it might be useful I've been stopped from using it and told to make an account (I don't want to post anything back to them, I don't see why I should have to keep track of yet another set of credentials just for them.)
If they where less aggressive toward their current and potential users and instead looked at them with realistic and helpful attitude they would probably be awesome. Right now I want nothing to do with them and I personally stay away.
As much as I hate it, I suspect there is one answer with nearly perfect correlation as to why Pinterest is losing users and their engagement: Instagram.
It's interesting that at no point in the process is any mention made of communicating with the users. I appreciate that detailed useful feedback is hard to get, especially from people who are disengaging already, but surely it has to be in there somewhere?
> While we were building the model we also wanted to figure out what to do for these Pinners once we could target them. We thought it would be best to ask them, as they surely would know why they were using Pinterest less. So we did an in-product survey for a sample set, and found the most common reason for not using Pinterest was that they got busy.
They did mention contacting users and, as is usual, got only the symptom, not the underlying cause. Talking to users is great to understand why something happens is great, but it has to be translated through deep product insight to be useful.
Why would "being busy" be the symptom and not the cause?
I used similar platforms in the past. When I have time I'd spend a lot of it on there, and when I didn't have time anymore (new job, etc) I didn't use the platform much. This is perfectly normal and no amount of "retentions" or "re-engagement" bullshit will make me spend more time on there unless they pay me enough where spending time on the platform becomes more lucrative than my day job.
Because everyone is busy, and the users probably always were busy. The thing to figure out is why they were using pinterest before but now they aren't.
That means what's changed is now it's not enough of a priority to use vs other things in their busy lives. The next interesting "why" question is not "Why are you busy?" but something like "Why isn't pinterest valuable enough for you to use, given that you are busy?"
If you want people to use your product, you need to focus on things you control (making the product more valuable to users) rather than shrug your shoulders and give up at things you can't control (the fact that your users are busy).
For me, Pinterest works exactly how I want it to - as a store for inspiration images. I use it heavily for storing concept art to later draw inspiration from when doing game design, digital art, or screen-printing designs. Granted, I don't find the search helpful at all and the embedded pins are terribly irreverent and annoying.
If you are a Pinterest user and are interested in a large collection of fantasy/cyberpunk artwork, you can see how I use it here (registration required of course):
Be careful here — I maintained several active boards with quite a few followers, but was flagged for "inappropriate images" which Pinterest mods themselves deleted.
In the main, I'd only ever pinned images I found on the site itself, so I thought "why pick on me, I'm not the one who originally pinned it?"
But I didn't go though my stuff and look for any other TOS violating images (I really didn't think I had any) and then I was perm-banned. You have no recourse once that happens.
Caveat emptor — its puritanical standards are likely to bite anyone who plays outside the recipes and sewing categories into anything interesting in the art and photography domains.
I can forgive the forced login but i cant forgive the extra steps and buggy login process - I cant count how many times I've ended up trying to register rather than login.
also the recommendations get old quick its just my previous searches aggregated gets boring quick. The instagram explore page has my valuable time these days - it uses my searches plus things related to those to find new things on many topics and ability to say "not relevant" is awesome - all i need now is the ability to block anything "#lifehack"!
Pinterest has an issue with their support. I was using it for a while to gather inspiration on a particular subject. It just started crashing with a server side error message. I submitted a bug report and the response was lame. I kept saying look at your own server side error message. You must have logs to look at. I don't think a human saw my bug responses. Now I don't use it at all.
Sick and tired of registrations tracking spying builtin microphones on new spytv calling it smart tv for who, I get no benefit out this game forced upon all users. Terms and service agreements of bloatware, websites never improve my viewing pleasure or work better forcing users to conform get stuffed. Hit the Back button best voting option I have right now. I have learned to live without G-You-TwitFace, even while on news.ycombinator if website has pop-up sign-up begging, forced to conform and jump through hoops I hit the back button, mostly enjoy reading the comments that's the real story people talk about, and where you find the best information. Thxs for letting us vent, other than that everything is A OK thxs
