I can’t remember if Kagi auto blocks it or if I blocked it completely on my first search, but I haven’t seen Pinterest trash in search results on literal years. <3 Kagi.
I have to be honest and say that I have no sympathy for Pinterest and other services destroying themselves in the clamour to jam AI and feed algorithms into everything.
That they ever thought anyone would enjoy the experience is beyond me, and it demonstrates their place in the grotty suburbs of the attention economy.
So true. I used Pinterest for art references and inspiration and they have 3 issues that are entirely self-owned:
1. Ads, ads and more ads. I had their app and it had to go, because every third pin was an ad.
2. Ads that seem to be pins: there are ads that are a mini collage. One image, 2-3 thumbs below. All "images" with the same rounded border like the regular pins. So you click them and because the upper image is visually detached from the rest of the ad, you don’t realize that you just clicked an ad when it is too late. A very nasty dark pattern.
3. No timestamps. It’s sometimes hard to tell if something is AI-generated. I don’t want AI-generated when it comes to art. Pinterest could choose to display pin timestamps when they were pinned for the first time, but they don’t.
So, they dug their own hole and I have zero sympathy for them, too.
They're making money hand over fist with ads, I don't think they could care any less about the product than they currently do. The product at this point is a moldy sheath around the ad delivery system, as with any for-profit "social network".
Blizzard recently set up a World of Warcraft promotion with Pinterest where you could share your housing builds from in-game. Many people were insta-banned from Pinterest for "spam" after just posting one or two pictures.
It's a shame, I used to browse Pinterest for woodworking ideas. A year ago, I noticed some of the results were AI generated. Now almost ALL results are AI generated, included the obviously scammy ads they put in everywhere. If someone knows a place where you can find fun woodworking projects, I'm all ears.
I also noticed recently they changed their design completely. Instead of browsing your board and the things you pinned in the past, what you're now shown are completely unrelated items that you might want to add to your board, and most of these are things you can buy from other shopping sites.
> We define an MAU as an authenticated Pinterest user who visits our website, opens our mobile application or interacts with Pinterest through one of our browser or site extensions, such as the Save button, at least once during the 30-day period ending on the date of measurement.
Wonder if we're going to get a MAHU (Monthly Active Human Users) stat in the future.
I always assumed it to be a honeypot for ebay purchasers due to the "copy popular ebay search results and then lure them to a link" methodology of "users".
Pretty much the same with all AI slop sites (e.g. the first 10 search results) only usually they only care about serving adds instead of serving malware or scams.
15 years back I got an affiliate marketing ebook, and it had lessons on getting hundreds of blogspot subdomains and using a desktop tool to publish the same crap about, say, tropical fish to all of them. There was/is also a captcha solving service which got a nice landing page about employing people.
I do wonder what the future of using these platforms is in the era of AI. Theoretically, I feel like asking Claude to filter the results to remove "slop" would work quite well. Maybe that could be built into some kind of extension?
Because ATProto is specifically designed to allow being NON-centralized. Unlike Pinterest. Yes, ATProto is new and most of the traffic is through a single site at the moment, but it is specifically designed to allow for that to change.
I'm a Kagi user so i genuinely forgot that Pinterest still exists.
Thank you, Kagi.
Pinterest has the honour to lead the leaderboard from #1 tot #7 in the blocked domain list.
https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
That's actually kind of impressive.
My favorite news feed overall: news.kagi.com
I can’t remember if Kagi auto blocks it or if I blocked it completely on my first search, but I haven’t seen Pinterest trash in search results on literal years. <3 Kagi.
I have to be honest and say that I have no sympathy for Pinterest and other services destroying themselves in the clamour to jam AI and feed algorithms into everything.
That they ever thought anyone would enjoy the experience is beyond me, and it demonstrates their place in the grotty suburbs of the attention economy.
So true. I used Pinterest for art references and inspiration and they have 3 issues that are entirely self-owned:
1. Ads, ads and more ads. I had their app and it had to go, because every third pin was an ad.
2. Ads that seem to be pins: there are ads that are a mini collage. One image, 2-3 thumbs below. All "images" with the same rounded border like the regular pins. So you click them and because the upper image is visually detached from the rest of the ad, you don’t realize that you just clicked an ad when it is too late. A very nasty dark pattern.
3. No timestamps. It’s sometimes hard to tell if something is AI-generated. I don’t want AI-generated when it comes to art. Pinterest could choose to display pin timestamps when they were pinned for the first time, but they don’t.
So, they dug their own hole and I have zero sympathy for them, too.
They're making money hand over fist with ads, I don't think they could care any less about the product than they currently do. The product at this point is a moldy sheath around the ad delivery system, as with any for-profit "social network".
I had a Pinterest account back when there were genuinely great resource for niche things like Japanese graphic design.
Since then, I've moved to simply having a local image/video database UI app like Eagle[0] and checking Are.na[1] for interesting collections.
[0] https://eagle.cool/ [1] https://www.are.na/explore
And the world is drowning in more pinterest google image search spam.
If you use google image search recently, it's mostly Pinterest and Facebook.
...or stock images.
Blizzard recently set up a World of Warcraft promotion with Pinterest where you could share your housing builds from in-game. Many people were insta-banned from Pinterest for "spam" after just posting one or two pictures.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/pinterest-suspended-...
Something is very broken over at Pinterest.
It's not just Pinterest though. IG, Reddit, even LinkedIn.
It's a shame, I used to browse Pinterest for woodworking ideas. A year ago, I noticed some of the results were AI generated. Now almost ALL results are AI generated, included the obviously scammy ads they put in everywhere. If someone knows a place where you can find fun woodworking projects, I'm all ears.
Definitely not Etsy, because it's the same deal over there.
There must be a subreddit?
Instructables is pretty good.
Pinterest sucks.
You can create your private archive with Bookmarker. Share collections publicly if you want.
https://bookmarker.cc/
I also noticed recently they changed their design completely. Instead of browsing your board and the things you pinned in the past, what you're now shown are completely unrelated items that you might want to add to your board, and most of these are things you can buy from other shopping sites.
“MAUs were 619 million, an increase of 12% compared to December 31, 2024” [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1506293/0001...
> We define an MAU as an authenticated Pinterest user who visits our website, opens our mobile application or interacts with Pinterest through one of our browser or site extensions, such as the Save button, at least once during the 30-day period ending on the date of measurement.
Wonder if we're going to get a MAHU (Monthly Active Human Users) stat in the future.
Deserved. Pinterest has been enshittifying itself and the Internet at large for quite a long time.
Not to mention so many ads it’s no longer usable.
Pinterest is so bad it's one of those sites I just skip over on search results. But it's been that way for years - nothing new.
I always assumed it to be a honeypot for ebay purchasers due to the "copy popular ebay search results and then lure them to a link" methodology of "users".
Pretty much the same with all AI slop sites (e.g. the first 10 search results) only usually they only care about serving adds instead of serving malware or scams.
Pinterest is the OG slop, long before LLMs ever existed
15 years back I got an affiliate marketing ebook, and it had lessons on getting hundreds of blogspot subdomains and using a desktop tool to publish the same crap about, say, tropical fish to all of them. There was/is also a captcha solving service which got a nice landing page about employing people.
I do wonder what the future of using these platforms is in the era of AI. Theoretically, I feel like asking Claude to filter the results to remove "slop" would work quite well. Maybe that could be built into some kind of extension?
We need camera hardware to be able to sign photos
Seems like something that would be miss-used against people in horrible ways.
Then I can take a photo of an AI generated image.
futures going to AI platforms built by AI coders with AI users and moderated by AI
it seems in history trajectories always continue although they take new forms
like maybe AI users will be renamed to something more palatable, agentic consumers.
not sure where the people will be. probably not somewhere good.
Any ATProto based replacements available?
How would that solve the slop problem?
And why ATProto when it would result in just another broken centralized service?
Because ATProto is specifically designed to allow being NON-centralized. Unlike Pinterest. Yes, ATProto is new and most of the traffic is through a single site at the moment, but it is specifically designed to allow for that to change.