I’ve been on on Pinterest since the beginning. I loved the idea of finding and curating images for events, vision boards, and lots more. It was all so easy, as well! You could build a board with a hundred relevant images in only a few minutes.
Unfortunately, now Pinterest has become a haven of AI slop without meaningful moderation. Of course, on an image sharing platform AI slop was going to become an issue almost immediately. But now, even with the feature to hide AI images, most of what you’re seeing on Pinterest is still clearly AI generated. This is because it will only hide images that are tagged and labeled as AI. Which, most of the slop creators, don’t feel the need to do.
Another pain point has been the fact if you pin an image that Pinterest later decides to remove, for whatever reason, they will send you a notification that your pin was removed and identify the pin only but a string of numbers. Without going to the website, you would have absolutely no idea which image has been removed at all. Also, being that you are not the originator of the pin, its removal means very little to you. It simply disappears from your board. But the severe language in the email always makes it sounds like you have done something wrong.
Of course, there is also their campaign against “nudity.” I’m not sure what the story is here, but when I collected images for a tattoo board, it became a disturbingly common occurrence for pins of a person’s shoulder, ankle, or any other innocuous body part with a tattoo on it to be labeled as nudity and removed. Which granted, yes, their shoulder was nude. But is a nude shoulder somehow inappropriate or potentially damaging?
Not to metion, I had plenty of pins of women in strapless ballgowns, where, get this, both of their shoulders were nude (gasp!). Yet none of those pins were ever targeted for removal. My only guess was that bots were crawling the website for bare flesh and when they found some, regardless of what it was, and then they would rely on the creator and all the people who had pinned that image to tell Pinterest that it wasn’t actually genitalia, just a shoulder.
The Pinterest subreddit caught my eye recently. Mostly because almost every post is people trying to find alternatives and figure out how to stop using it. Recently, with Pinterest proudly leaning into the AI slop that is degrading the platform, I have become one of them.
When I finally had enough, I searched up some alternatives and there isn’t really a similar website that hits all of Pinterests good points, but doesn’t contain all the things currently causing their users to lose interest. Without another website to simply signup with, I decided I was going to have to do this the old fashioned way…
First, I downloaded the Orion browser so I could search images and exclude AI content (as much as possible). I liked this idea better than having to use multiple search tags on a Google Image search or downloading extensions.
Then I started looking for decor for our vow renewal. I saved the images I wanted and then uploaded them to my Notion page. Although I’m clearly not going to collect the sheer volume of pins I used to, I actually liked creating this board more. Because now I wasn’t just pinning anything that was even remotely related. I was very focused on what I actually liked and would work for the event.
Then I did something I would have thought unthinkable a few years ago: I deleted my Pinterest. Dozens of boards, thousands of pins, gone. Maybe one day a new image collection platform will emerge from the ashes, but right now, Pinterest is driving themselves right into the ground and I am not hanging around while the company lays off their workers for the promise of AI and hemorrhages unhappy users.
One final thought, when I looked up the app on the Apple Store to leave a review stating exactly why I was abandoning ship almost 15 years later, I noticed something. First of all, Pinterest has a 4.8 out of 5 starts. The top reviews are critical of the app, but strangely still give it five stars. Which, that really sounds like Pinterest finding a way to delete negative reviews.
Then I noticed that apparently when I download Pinterest I am agreeing to let them access information taken by my health app. That includes, my weight, measurements, periods, sleep, etc. I didn’t realize they were harvesting that data, but now the ads I was seeing and the pins served to me first made a lot of sense.
It sucks to have to press that delete button. I would have rather these events have gone another way. But they didn’t. So, not much left to say now.