The only time I seem to interact with Pinterest is when I’m searching for images of something on my phone, let’s say “pictures of mountains”. I want to get the image in full res so I go to the site, then I can’t copy it or download it.
From these brief interactions and exploring the site I just don’t see the appeal. Pinterest just seems like a terrible image search engine with the ‘feature?’ that every few scrolls pulls up similar-ish categories to the image search you did(Mausoleum might bring up Pharaohs for example). It could be that I’ve just never taken the time to use it properly, so I thought I would ask people: what is Pinterest good for / why does it exist.
Hopefully is not too harsh I am high atm.
It exists to fuck up search results.
Kagi lists the top domains that Kagi users have blocked results from.
https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
The top 7 blocked domains are all Pinterest domains.
That’s a pretty damning vote, I’d say.
That’s… Amazing. What a worthless site.
Interesting, thank you for sharing
I forgot it existed because some lovely person made an extension to block it ☺️
Whoever does their SEO is a genius but should also have been drowned at birth
It’s a pinboard. You collect idea’s in a visual way to create moodboards or visual collections of idea’s.
I used to be a big fan and my daughter and wife still use it a lot when researching a project. It works really well but is cluttered with paid content these days.
What’s a mood board?
You ever see in the movies, those teen girls and young women with a cork board full of magazine cutouts? That’s a mood board.
You kind of get an idea for something, like “the ideal vacation” and any time you see something that fits that theme for you, you put it on the mood board. When you’re done, you are able to see your details together in a big picture view.
Pinterest is kind of neat because it gives you the convenience of a digital medium.
On top of the definition provided by the other commenter, it’s vaguely analogous to shopping for something, and opening a new tab for everything that looks vaguely good. Then doing a pass to winnow down and close items.
There’s also structure for organizing things that are related. So if you weren’t sure if you wanted a toaster or a toaster oven, you could spatially have two separate groups.
It only clicked for me once I saw someone else use it. I’m used to it just being hostile to search traffic.
I actually find it invaluable. I am constantly designing new products so I need a lot of inspiration. Google image search is too focused and I need broad strokes to start. I can type in a few keywords in Pinterest, find one image I like and click on it, then get a large amount of similar designs. I’ve used it for lots of stuff from a variety of unique knurling options on dials to flower knolling layouts for ad shoots. It’s a better image search for my purposes.
When looking for something to paint it’s a good tool too.
My experience with Pinterest is:
- Search for some recipes and you click a link to Pinterest it takes you to a meta page with a lot of pictures but no recipe.
- While image searching you find a nice picture click on the link to Pinterest and it’s gone, just use the cached image instead.
Looks like Pinterest is the reason for all these dying pixels.
I haven’t used it in a while, but when I did I used it sort of as an idea / vision board. For instance, when remodeling the kitchen I created a board where I just pinned a ton of kitchen pictures that had things I liked. Sort of a way to group images together based on themes.
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The only time I encounter it is when doing image searches for normal things and it seems to exist to make it maximally annoying to search for and download images. If I ever end up on Pinterest it’s just a guaranteed headache.
I agree with the other commenters, it is mostly awful, screws up image searches, and I’ve had the browser extension that blocks it from searches installed for years.
But I have also used it, so can partly answer your question. Basically, it lets you build image collections on topics, and has convenient (but also intrusive and data harvesting) extensions / apps that make it easy to add any image you come across online to one of your boards. In the past I’ve used these boards for home renovation, DIY projects, world building, D&D inspiration / mood boards to share with new players, etc. And as well as just gathering together the images you save, it’s pretty good at suggesting similar images.
If it wasn’t so awful as a site (the out of control SEO, demanding you’re logged in, presumably vast data harvesting) I’d actually use it a lot more. But I generally don’t, and I’m looking for an alternative. There’s something called Hoarder that you can host yourself, which could be useful. But without the network effects of humans effectively tagging and linking millions of images, it’ll sadly never be as good at suggesting relevant new images as Pinterest.
I use it for ideas and references. Back when I drew, it was a great source for models. Also nice for projects. They have a plethora of patterns for crafting, not to mention just straight inspiration if you’re looking to design pretty much anything. I don’t use it to just look at pictures, I go to it looking for something specific.
High too ATM, that’s exactly what its for, images.
I was suprised to learn most teens exclusively use Pinterest for looking up images, as opposed to web searching.
it also has features like creating boards, for example you can “pin” images to your board, and others can see it. So people try collecting the most images or the rarest ones of a specific person or something else idk, to compete.
I hate the platform, because it puts the whole algorithm thing on images, essentially creating doomscrolling potential for what was supposed to be an image host & share platform. Also its a really fucking slow app & website. +ads, so I wouldn’t ever use it anyways.
Killing the internet.
It has no other purpose.
It’s a social network version of browser bookmarks.
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I’m not entirely sure what people actually use it for, but I do regularly chuckle when I remember my (very manly man) father in law asking for help setting up his Pinterest account.
