I don't know. I think this is what they WANT you to think, honestly. This may have been the case 5 years ago, but from my anecdotal evidence of just asking around friends, family, co-workers, etc. this isn't really the reality anymore. Most of who I have talked about this with find it old, dated, and full of re-posts/spam. I would be curious to see their actual numbers on ACTIVE users, minus their terrible dark patterns to "get" users.
>I would be curious to see their actual numbers on ACTIVE users, minus their terrible dark patterns to "get" users.
Pinterest's S-1 filing[0] on March 22 2019 says their MAU (monthly active users) is ~265 million. It also says the WAU (weekly active users) is 57% of MAU so ~151 million Pinterest accounts log in at least once a week.
Of course, the Pinterest executives could falsify that information on the S-1 to mislead and hype up the IPO but that carries the risk of the SEC slamming them with fraud and the DOJ pursuing criminal charges.
people on HN probably not that much, not sure. Out in consumer-land it's used quite a bit depending on your target demographic (>83% of US women 25-54 for example). Lots of growth outside of the US as well. I sometimes work with designers (interior, architects and the like) and they seem to use it A LOT. Decent amount of traffic from Pinterest on some sites as well, especially on long-tail stuff. Advertising options weren't available in my country previously, so can't say anything about the ROI.
I find it extremely helpful for collecting inspiration for my art / gamedev projects. I also often hire artists and animators and being able to put together a references board for them is extremely helpful and efficient for communicating my vision. [0]
I think that just shows how narrow your group of acquaintances is and how out of touch you are with a large part of the world.
250 million people use Pinterest every month. That's (approximately, though lower than) the same ballpark as Snapchat and Twitter.
I assume you are capable of Googling their monthly user numbers, just like I did. So I assume your post is just virtue signalling and not actually asking in the spirit of trying to understand others, since it is obvious that yes, people do use Pinterest.
Define 'use'. If 'use' is getting clickbaited through Google images, then the metric is useless. I can't find demographic data but I'd be super interested in that.
I'm Hispanic and have only met a single Hispanic girl who uses Pinterest, and they're pretty young. The 83% number seems wild to me.
250 million people may be using Pinterest currently, but I don't think Pinterest can maintain this position with just one product. It's outdated and most of the content is just copied from elsewhere. More and more people are shifting to Instagram/Reddit.
I personally know people who were using Pinterest back in 2015-2016 but have since then shifted to Instagram.
Boards/collections are just glorified marketing terms used to convey that Pinterest has something new to offer. Alternatively, I can create a group chat on Insta or I can create a private subreddit and share the interesting links with the people I want to share. I can create multiple Insta chats and subreddits each for different topics.
Of all the social networks, Pinterest has had the most positive influence on my life. My wife has found recipes, various birthday craft ideas, home improvement, and all sorts of other useful and interesting things through it. It has no drama, at least the way she uses it, and has just generally been helpful.
(I don't use it directly; I don't use anything that would be called a "social network" unless you count HN and "reddit, but solely a custom set of non-default subreddits" social networks.)
These comments are boring and increasingly common on HN. On almost every discussion of Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook you'll find comments like these expressing faux incredulity at the prospect that some users find these services valuable. You may not be the target market, but it really isn't difficult to understand why they're popular with minimum effort. At best, these comments convey laziness and an unwillingness to understand other perspectives. At worst, they're often used to assert moral superiority over others that use such "useless" products and services.
True it was a lazy comment. But we can easily imagine a world without these services, and it would be almost entirely better. That takes no effort at all to understand that point of view either.
I couldn't disagree more. Given how popular these services are they're obviously providing some form of utility otherwise they wouldn't be used. Regardless of what kind of utility these users derive, I'm betting the vast majority of them would disagree with your claim. You may think the world would be "better" (whatever that means), but I'm guessing you don't use these services so what difference does it make to you?
There seems to be a cognitive gap here: on one hand acknowledging these widespread comments from folks with no use for these services, and then insistence that everybody uses them. At the risk of repeating myself, its trivially easy to see the point of view that they're not useful to a large portion of humanity. The irony is thick.
What difference does it make to me? Nothing, except pointing out contradiction. A hobby of mine.
You can't equate a service not being useful to a large portion of humanity as meaning that it's a net negative on the world. That was your claim, but it's not qualified in any way whatsoever or immediately obvious what your viewpoint is when ambiguous descriptors like "better" are used.
Visual note taking has so much potential, I’m really not sure how Evernote and Pinterest cornered the market and ruined it at the same time. Same with LinkedIn, these players somehow break their whole spaces.
We're making good progress and have a GREAT hacker user base but working to take it to the masses.
The next goal is to launch it on product hunt in 1-2 weeks.
We're also adding sharing and improving our web and mobile apps which is super important to getting adoption.
It's also Open Source and we're going to raise money soon with a 'kickstarter' style campaign to ask the community to fund continued development.
I want to build a platform that respect user rights and isn't trying to lock up the users data in a proprietary platform.
The reason it's called "Polar" is that it's designed to 'freeze' your knowledge in a safe place.
Safe being that it's Open Source and based on web standards.
I'm going to have it based on a .org style non-profit sort of like Wikimedia / Wordpress.org but also a for-profit company which has commitments to the non-profit which funds it in perpetuity.
Ah Pinterest, strip-mining the incredible library of images across all of the Internet, then converting them all into 200px thumbnails, and replacing the original search results with your own, all in the noble quest to serve more ads to more eyeballs.
This is increasingly what passes for a billion dollar company in SV today. Aggregating other peoples stuff and putting yourself in the middle to skim a bit off the top.
I don't get why Google hasn't cleaned up the Pinterest spam in Google Images:
- Using Google Images search for: fun crafts.
- Results loaded with Pinterest hosted images.
- Visit any of those Pinterest hosted image pages
- The page on Pinterest may not include the image you are looking for (anymore)
- Or the Pinterest page may be an intermediary page that links to some other external website with the original image (Google doesn't give the original website the traffic)
- After 5 seconds you start getting prompts to create a Pinterest account
Maybe they or their executives have some investments tied up in Pintrest. But yeah I hate landing on a Pintrest page for search results. It's like the mid-2000s all over again.
My bet is simply that Pinterest managed to game Google's algorithm while technically doing nothing wrong, so there's little Google can do other than explicitly blacklist them - which they obviously won't do.
If I can at least see the image I looked for in the Pinterest link, then I wouldn't have hated it as much. However the reality is every Google image search click to Pinterest is wasted time because the actual image is pretty much never there.
It's amazing that since HN's main interaction with Pinterest seems to be Google Images (from all the complaining comments that always show under any mention of Pinterest), commenters here assume they don't actually have a product people love (aka the source of success)
The fact that HN's (or most people's, really) main interaction with Pinterest is Google Images spam should be concerning.
They are basically pissing off a huge chunk of people (anyone who searches for images on Google) for their own benefit.
This shouldn't be considered acceptable. I am not sure why anyone is defending that nasty company. You usually wouldn't defend someone in the physical world who does something similar (simple example: littering), why should it be considered OK just because it's on the Internet?
Is "searching for images on a search engine" specific to the HN demographic? Your reply makes it look like search result spam is only a nuisance to HN people and everyone else is enjoying it.
I use Google Image search fine :) utility still kicking!
seriously I'm googling common items surrounding me and not getting ruined by Pinterest results. I even searched "wedding ring" (a common Pinterest topic) and got like 2 Pinterest results among my many non-Pinterest results.
Pinterest's results in Google Image search isn't remotely analogous to littering. It's more like a hoarder who allows tour guides to show off their home.
If you mind pinterest in your google image results, add "-pinterest".
Well it can be both. I use Pinterest once in a while and enjoy the product. But I also highly dislike the spam in Google Images. One doesn't prevent the other.
I’m not assuming anything about Pinterest; I’ve had an account there since 2013., although today it lies unused like my Tumblr account.
What exactly is Pinterest’s “product”? Shareable mood boards? They have been around for the majority of this decade and still do not have a consistent way of identifying products in pictures and giving the user the option to buy it directly from Pinterest.
As it stands, it’s still a glorified vision board, but with the industrial-scale detritus of low-resolution thumbnails across all image search engines.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadI used that for w3schools before.
Pinterest's S-1 filing[0] on March 22 2019 says their MAU (monthly active users) is ~265 million. It also says the WAU (weekly active users) is 57% of MAU so ~151 million Pinterest accounts log in at least once a week.
Of course, the Pinterest executives could falsify that information on the S-1 to mislead and hype up the IPO but that carries the risk of the SEC slamming them with fraud and the DOJ pursuing criminal charges.
[0] page 67 for user metrics: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1506293/000119312519...
Can you clarify what you mean by this stat? Surely not 83% of US women aged 24-54 use Pinterest?
Perhaps the numbers mentioned initially refer to everyone who happens to sometimes end up on Pinterest by clicking on an image on Google Image Search?
I'm pretty sure Google Image Search is indeed a major contributor.
[0] https://www.pinterest.com/thehideoutgames/
250 million people use Pinterest every month. That's (approximately, though lower than) the same ballpark as Snapchat and Twitter.
I assume you are capable of Googling their monthly user numbers, just like I did. So I assume your post is just virtue signalling and not actually asking in the spirit of trying to understand others, since it is obvious that yes, people do use Pinterest.
I'm Hispanic and have only met a single Hispanic girl who uses Pinterest, and they're pretty young. The 83% number seems wild to me.
I personally know people who were using Pinterest back in 2015-2016 but have since then shifted to Instagram.
(I don't use it directly; I don't use anything that would be called a "social network" unless you count HN and "reddit, but solely a custom set of non-default subreddits" social networks.)
There seems to be a cognitive gap here: on one hand acknowledging these widespread comments from folks with no use for these services, and then insistence that everybody uses them. At the risk of repeating myself, its trivially easy to see the point of view that they're not useful to a large portion of humanity. The irony is thick.
What difference does it make to me? Nothing, except pointing out contradiction. A hobby of mine.
I'm trying to revamp things on the Evernote side but in a different way.
https://getpolarized.io/
We're making good progress and have a GREAT hacker user base but working to take it to the masses.
The next goal is to launch it on product hunt in 1-2 weeks.
We're also adding sharing and improving our web and mobile apps which is super important to getting adoption.
It's also Open Source and we're going to raise money soon with a 'kickstarter' style campaign to ask the community to fund continued development.
I want to build a platform that respect user rights and isn't trying to lock up the users data in a proprietary platform.
The reason it's called "Polar" is that it's designed to 'freeze' your knowledge in a safe place.
Safe being that it's Open Source and based on web standards.
I'm going to have it based on a .org style non-profit sort of like Wikimedia / Wordpress.org but also a for-profit company which has commitments to the non-profit which funds it in perpetuity.
This is increasingly what passes for a billion dollar company in SV today. Aggregating other peoples stuff and putting yourself in the middle to skim a bit off the top.
- Using Google Images search for: fun crafts.
- Results loaded with Pinterest hosted images.
- Visit any of those Pinterest hosted image pages
- The page on Pinterest may not include the image you are looking for (anymore)
- Or the Pinterest page may be an intermediary page that links to some other external website with the original image (Google doesn't give the original website the traffic)
- After 5 seconds you start getting prompts to create a Pinterest account
They are basically pissing off a huge chunk of people (anyone who searches for images on Google) for their own benefit.
This shouldn't be considered acceptable. I am not sure why anyone is defending that nasty company. You usually wouldn't defend someone in the physical world who does something similar (simple example: littering), why should it be considered OK just because it's on the Internet?
seriously I'm googling common items surrounding me and not getting ruined by Pinterest results. I even searched "wedding ring" (a common Pinterest topic) and got like 2 Pinterest results among my many non-Pinterest results.
Sites like keyword-suggestions and such? I can't think of anymore off the top of my head, but they exist and they suck.
If you mind pinterest in your google image results, add "-pinterest".
And adding -pinterest is like requiring everyone to pull down their window shade each time they drive down that street.
What exactly is Pinterest’s “product”? Shareable mood boards? They have been around for the majority of this decade and still do not have a consistent way of identifying products in pictures and giving the user the option to buy it directly from Pinterest.
As it stands, it’s still a glorified vision board, but with the industrial-scale detritus of low-resolution thumbnails across all image search engines.