Sales and account management professional Christine Stroup ran into similar issues when trying to remodel two historic homes she bought in Mobile, Ala. “Now I use Miro,” she says, referring to a similar pinboard-style service. But in 2017, after Pinterest support couldn’t help Babcock restore a pinboard she’d accidentally deleted, she closed her account. Starting around 2011, Babcock would use Pinterest as a digital scrapbook for personal and work projects, with boards for weddings, crafts, home design, fashion, and user interfaces. “It was just death by a million cuts for me - can’t access source content, must download an app, can’t fix user errors, must login to view something from Google - and now I guess I hold a grudge,” she says. “I just can’t fathom making any products I work on so difficult to access and use,” says Sara Babcock, a software product manager from Atlanta, who is one of those who has forsworn using Pinterest unless absolutely necessary after being bilked by its search-result-login-page scam. HackerNews posters pleaded with Google engineers to tamp down on Pinterest’s ability to game the search engine, with one calling it “a spam blog that hijacks inbound referrers from search engines to throw up full-page sign-in screens and nothing else.” “Every image search ended up turning into that little dance.” Mkantjwa would then hit the back button and try a different result - and often hit the same wall. You’d click on it, and get asked to create an account in order to get access to that image.” A lot of the images are interesting when they come up in the results. “I’d do a search for a scarf or something, and the first 10 results would come up as Pinterest. “I used to do a lot of image searches,” he says. Unpinterested!’s creator, South African developer Sello Mkantjwa, tells Input he created the extension three years ago out of frustration. But as the old internet maxim goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product.’” Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low. Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn’t cost anything to sign up for. And it’s all seemingly for the goal of boosting Pinterest user numbers. This state of affairs creates friction in the image-grabbing process, which has been fine-tuned over the last 20 years to become as frictionless as possible. The problem? Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account.Īnd it’s managed to achieve an extremely strong presence on many popular image searches. More than 28,000 Chrome users have installed Unpinterested!, an extension to remove Pinterest from Google search results, while countless others trade tips on how to craft search queries to exclude the photo-sharing website.
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