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’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.
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.
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
Would you be so kind to share more about that extension please?
The one I use is called “Unpinterested!”, and is on both the Firefox and chrome extension stores. You can also use uBlacklist to block the domains.
Sweet, I see in the comments many others have an extension for this. Crazy I didn’t even think about it as an option!
There’s also one called “Personal blocklist” which is very handy.
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.
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.
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.
It exists to abuse and profit off search engine optimisation. More than half of most image search results are polluted with their results which forces you sign up to do anything useful with them.
My d&d dm asked us (the players) to create pin boards with stuff relevant to our characters. Lime clothing style, weapons, that kind of stuff. Never used it before…
It’s for creating mood boards / inspiration boards
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.
It kind of reminds me of a visual bookmark manager.
Some people will use it to gather recipes. They might even group some, like “Thanksgiving dinner ideas” or “new diet.” When you do this, you can even get a little thumbnail that will make it easier to find later.
It’s not limited to recipes. You can link a lot of stuff, like maybe tutorials on how to build a shelving unit. You could put it in a group called “organizing my garage,” along with other stuff you want to do.
You might not even necessarily use it for links, maybe you have an idea for a costume or a picture you want to draw. You can find picture inspiration. Once you find a picture, it can suggest more you might like.
One can of course achieve this type of thing without Pinterest (I do just fine with my own system) but Pinterest does make it very convenient, especially for people that aren’t as tech savvy.
It’s the web version of a vision board where you cut out images and put them on a board. But it links to the source as well.
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 fucking hate it. It’s unintuitive, it’s clunky, it doesn’t do a good job at what it claims it does, and it makes locating the original images harder unless you log in.
It’s a social network version of browser bookmarks.
I use it for art insoiration and reference. Also recently inspiration for a new haircut
