Over the years, though, they've just degraded the whole experience. Features have been disabled, and it's not a tradeoff where you lose one thing and get another. You just lose options one by one. Also their content and censorship policies have tightened to the point of just nuking entire boards out of existence.
Not a great humanitarian disaster, but it makes you wonder. Another company could probably have huge success just by offering what Pinterest did, say, twelve years ago. Nobody's going there, though.
2 comments:
I first learned about Pinterest when a blog friend told me she'd 'pinned' a couple of my paintings. Having no idea what she meant I had a look at the place and found it was simply a forum for people to post images and objects they liked. Since there was no interaction among the users other than their collections I didn't really see the point. Facebook and Twitter both made far more sense at the time but I didn't feel like joining either of them either.
Nowadays, when I go in search of images e.g., Calvin and Hobbes, Gary Larson etc. there are always a number of links to Pinterest rather than to the artists websites or galleries. A more recent look at the site itself shows it to be much more commercial than it was originally. I'm not sure this wasn't always the plan of the guys who developed the place.
I agree the internet in its entirety was a far better environment for people 12 years and even longer ago than that. In point of fact despite its being kind of cool we'd probably all be better off without it.
I think there used to be more opportunity to interact with other users, but it's receded into the past without much record so it's hard to say exactly what you could do. Twitter and Facebook do at least afford opportunities to talk to people. Of course that's under social media rules, so there's a pretty heavy caveat emptor.
The pinning/bookmarking of images from people like Watterson and Larson comes mostly from sincere admiration/not wanting to lose them, I'm pretty sure. Would be nice if they were the ones getting the traffic, though. It seems like a pretty good guess to say that the intention was always to develop a new ad space.
Losing the Internet would be a big adjustment for a lot of people. Probably true of smartphones as well, although I'm not a user myself. But it might be an adjustment we have to make eventually, and that's not an entirely bad thing.
Post a Comment