[P]introduction
Despite having “heard” about Pinterest in the past, it was not until 2020 that I came to (sort of) understand what it was. I created a Pinterest account for The New Leaf Journal in 2020 because our SEO plugin at the time, Yoast SEO, offered an admin menu option for configuring Pinterest Webmaster Tools. While the account still exists, I have never found much use for it, although it indirectly contributed to two articles. I include this short prefatory explanation to highlight my knowledge, or lack thereof, about Pinterest.
Now join me as we slowly work our way from Pinterest to thinking about the best way to share and view media and articles on the internet.
Pinterest’s AI Problems and Complaining on Reddit
A few weeks ago, I came across an article by Nicole Carpenter for Aftermath titled Pinterest Has Become Unusable. “Has become?” I wondered, “It has always been unusable for me, at least since 2020!” In any event, my own inability to find a use-case for Pinterest does not mean that no legitimate use-case exists, which distinguishes it from, say, TikTok, for which no legitimate use-case exists. But I digress; Ms. Carpenter explains in the opening paragraph that she uses Pinterest to find reference images for drawing. I would think that Pixabay or something of that ilk would be a better choice, but given my drawing acumen, I probably cannot speak from authority. Ms. Carpenter recently found, to her dismay, that Pinterest has been “overrun by AI slop,” which negatively affects her own Pinterest use-case since she is not interested in using AI-generated “art” or “photos” as reference images for her humane drawings.
Ms. Carpenter’s article is a good read, and I encourage you to give it a read, but we now take leave of her article for one she linked to as a reference: Matthew Gault’s Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation for 404 Media. I preface the foregoing by noting that Pinterest’s AI problems do not affect me directly since Pinterest’s contribution to bringing visitors to The New Leaf Journal is very small, and even if it were greater, I am not sure its AI issues would move the needle much in any event. Thus, much like some of my recent AI-adjacent musings such as On Spotify’s SpotifAI Podcasts, this is not a rant or a call to action – about Pinterest, at least. I do have a call to action, or inaction, however. I quote from the 404 Media report:
r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. ‘Pinterest keeps automatically adding the ‘AI modified’ tag to my Pins…every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then… the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I’m stuck in this endless loop of appealing → label removed → new Pin gets tagged again,’ read a post on r/Pinterest.
This story grabbed my attention, but less because of the issue that Pinterest is flagging non-AI “content” as AI (thus effectively slandering the non-AI poster) while simultaneously not tagging actual AI “content” (or slop, it’s a matter of perspective), an issue which I hear through the grapevine is bedeviling other “content” platforms. My focus is on where this complaint is being aired out: Reddit. Reddit is a centralized “forum” platform which, from my perspective, has much in common with Pinterest. That may sound peculiar in first glance. Pinterest, insofar as I understand it, is where people, largely women, pin their design ideas while Reddit is where the “well ackshully” guys go to pontificate, Noting that I neither post many pins nor drop well ackshully bombs on Reddit, I see both of them as annoyances which invited themselves, unwanted, into my general search results (past tense, but that is a topic for another article). Reddit of course has its own AI issues to go with the issue of engagement farmers whose posts are of such quality that the AI question is rather beside the pointlessness of it all. If your complaint is about being drowned by bots while being flagged by a bot by the capricious whims of Pinterest bots, is Reddit, where much the same may occur, the best forum to air your grievances? I think not, but I think not from a far-away place, personally unaffected by the plight of malcontent Pinterest pinners and Reddit malcontents.
Back in 2021, I published a fictional dialogue titled Existential Social Media Misery, wherein one of the two interlocutors defends her Instagram usage by arguing that the feeling of misery it invokes is, in fact, Instagram’s purpose. While complaining about Pinterest on Reddit is not on all fours with scrolling Instagram to knock oneself down a peg or two or pontificating that Meta’s AI profiles do not deliver that same human sense of misery, it comes dangerously close to the real-world realization of the phenomenon I lampooned as early as 2021. If bot-driven changes in Pinterest cause one to feel frustrated, diving into Reddit will most likely compound the frustration.
Searching for Solutions
It is one thing to question the wisdom of relying on Pinterest or Reddit to host and distribute one’s creative and intellectual output before complaining about one on the other, but another thing entirely to suggest solutions. I try to be solution-oriented here in my writing and reading café in the spirit of my Positive Case for Good Tech essay. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to no longer being able to effectively rely on Pinterest or any other centralized platform of the like, we can consider some generally applicable points that one can consider in charting a new course instead of complaining about one questionable platform on another questionable platform.
As a threshold matter, the best way to stop using something that makes one miserable is, perhaps unsurprisingly, to just stop. As Alex for Denshi Site wrote in Reddit Revelation:
My 13-year-old self had realized that you gain nothing from browsing Reddit. I immediately uninstalled the app and went on with my day as usual. With this, I had broken the spell of social-media addiction for the first time in my life. It wouldn’t be the last time I had to employ this reasoning either, whether with Reddit or not; A few years later, I had the exact same revelation when browsing the Technology board on 4chan.
This wisdom applies to more than social media platforms and online fora. I quote from my own An Essay on Productivity, Production, and Productive Leisure, where I shared an interesting insight that my friend had shared with me:
[My] friend noted that she had sometimes found herself reading about shows and movies she enjoyed on TV Tropes. She noted that the experience was not bad and that she did learn some interesting things on TV Tropes. Despite that, however, she realized that she came away from the TV Tropes binges feeling unfulfilled.
People should consider their own time and energy valuable. Spending time and energy on something that is unfulfilling or actively aggravating devalues one’s own time and energy.
While the foregoing may effectively caution against marching to AI and well ackshully-infested Reddit to complain about Pinterest, it does not effectively address how to proceed for someone who relied on Pinterest at one time, only to find that AI and other changes have rendered it unreliable and stress-inducing. In offering advice, I do so here in the spirit of the opinions I offered in On Improving the Environment For Gaming On Linux, wherein I suggested that Linux advocates should meet those they want to persuade where they are, and be open to suggesting imperfect solutions that are amenable to the persuadee’s specific needs and wants instead of demanding purity for the hitherto uninitiated.
That Pinterest may arbitrarily label human-created work as being AI-generated is an issue which does tend to recommend against relying on centralized platforms to share and distribute one’s work. But in recommending, we must consider whether one primarily uses Pinterest to post (or pin?), as does the Reddit complainer, or to view, as does Ms. Carpenter of Aftermath.
From the perspective of the artist, graphic designer, or photographer, there may not be a perfect one-to-one replacement for Pinterest. But the search for a one-to-one alternative presupposes that the only problem with Pinterest is its centralization and/or content moderation policies, and not its underlying structure. I have argued in past articles such as Murakami on Bad Social Media Content that the structure of the big social media platforms themselves incentivize “bad content” separate and apart from their particular implementations, and I expanded on that point in my critique of the design of many free and open source alternatives to the big social media platforms in Fediverse Clone Wars and Decentralized Social Media (see also Substack Notes’ Twitter clone war). As Alex at Denshi Site opined in Don’t Put Up Bars, open source and privacy-friendly alternatives to centralized social media platforms can ultimately come with the same issues as their big tech analogs. My point here is not to suggest a perfect alternative to Pinterest or any other platform, but instead to encourage people who are dissatisfied with Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram, or whatever the platform may be, to consider whether they are looking for the closest platform, service, or software to what they soured on or whether they may in fact be searching for a wholly different paradigm for their media. To put it starkly, as I suggested in Tomozaki Anime and Big Tech Social Media, a half-specious, half-serious essay about an anime wherein one character directed another character to pursue social clout with a “Pinstagram” account, there are some activities for which Instagram is almost certainly the “best tool for the job.” However, one ought to consider whether an activity for which Instagram is the best tool is an activity worth pursuing (exempting some obvious local business applications which do not have the essential tendency raise the questions I focused on in my anime essay).
Again shying away from decisive recommendations to people I do not know, I would suggest that someone who uses Pinterest for “pinning” his or her own work might instead consider building his or her own home on the web. In addition to not being subject to the whims of the humans and/or bots behind Pinterest, this person could display and discuss his or her art and media work as he or she sees fitting and proper instead of contorting to fit within the Pinterest pinning paradigm. The points I raised in Be the Blogger You Want to Be (Or Read) apply almost as well to humane Pinterest pinners as they do to bloggers. This is not to say that one must necessarily abandon Pinterest. It is entirely possible to have a home on the web while using Pinterest and similar platforms and services for syndication instead of rented digital homes — see generally the IndieWeb’s POSSE concept (which I follow to an extent with this site). False allegations of being a bot are less concerning to a digital homeowner than to someone who must appeal officially sanctioned “AI” tags.
Solutions are likely easier to come by for someone who peruses Pinterest for images or ideas than for someone who relies on it for pinning. For example, someone in search of reference images can browse free photo websites such as Pixabay, Unsplash, Pexels, Openverse, or other options out there with free-to-use images and photographs (Pixelfed, a federated Instagram alternative that I have covered here on site, allows posters to set licenses for photos). For people looking for “ideas” on topics such as home design, Pinterest may still be “usable” (even with the AI problems), but I will submit that there is plenty of “humane” (as in by people for people) writing and media online for those who dare to look or it.
