brai m.

Pinterest used to attract people who enjoyed collecting photos around their interests. They also had the pleasure of sharing. You would subscribe to someone else boards, to other pinner's interests. Their interest now became part of your feed and if you chose them, then automatically the image would be tagged with the others person's avatar, from which of their boards and at what time. You could also know who had enjoyed your own choices and when. This all created a sense of community. This was a very highly enjoyable social discover, enjoy and share experience, with some beautiful collections naturally curated and elevated by hundreds and even thousands of users. In the last two years Pinterest has progressively and systematically destroyed this by silo-ing people into what Pinterest wants to show and recommend. There are obviously commercial motives behind this. The more they can feed off your personal interests and push content that has advertising value behind it, the more value Pinterest might gain as a corporation that appeals to advertising and e-commerce power houses. The problem is that your feeds are now not a reflection of your subscriptions (they are plainly and simply not respected), but a reflection of what Pinterest recommendation engines think you should like. As an example I like boats and follow boat boards but recently pinned an image with a flag at the back of the boat. Well guess what? I get tons of flag pins and how to buy... but hardly any of the boats I subscribed to. Deuuhhh? The Pinterest community is in uproar. Not only do the pins no longer tell you where pins came from (it was nice to be able to remember that Jimmy's sail boat board was where I found that beautiful schooner 5 months ago.) or who re-pinned from my collections (at a glance, I could then know that Paul and Martin both re-pinned my choice on a very elegant vacation board and discover their tastes and interest). No longer - and Pinterest keeps on modifying their user experience adding more complexity, while taking away the simple information and sharing that their users liked. Go figure..