I ran an account on Instagram that "curated" posts from other people (basically reposted images but before the current reposting functionality).
The AI generated images are so prevalent that I resorted to reposting images only if there were from 2022 or earlier (sure, filters existed then too).
The whole experience reminds me of the story about "pre-radiation steel" [0] and how future generations won't be able to trust any image after 2024. Then again, we have large amounts of literature and stories from ancient history or medieval times that are impossible to verify as true so maybe this isn't a new problem.
That list is so hilarious and so vindicating. It feels great to know so many other people hate alternativeto.net. I wish we had a prominent place to name and shame sites like these.
The ability to (1) block all Pinterest domains in image search and (2) click an image hyperlink and get straight to the file - these two features alone are worth my annual subscription fee to Kagi.
Genuinely. If Kagi removed the ability to filter out trash domains, I'd stop using it. It's the only way to get real and useful results in a post-SEO world.
I can’t remember if Kagi auto blocks it or if I blocked it completely on my first search, but I haven’t seen Pinterest trash in search results on literal years. <3 Kagi.
I have to be honest and say that I have no sympathy for Pinterest and other services destroying themselves in the clamour to jam AI and feed algorithms into everything.
That they ever thought anyone would enjoy the experience is beyond me, and it demonstrates their place in the grotty suburbs of the attention economy.
So true. I used Pinterest for art references and inspiration and they have 3 issues that are entirely self-owned:
1. Ads, ads and more ads. I had their app and it had to go, because every third pin was an ad.
2. Ads that seem to be pins: there are ads that are a mini collage. One image, 2-3 thumbs below. All "images" with the same rounded border like the regular pins. So you click them and because the upper image is visually detached from the rest of the ad, you don’t realize that you just clicked an ad when it is too late. A very nasty dark pattern.
3. No timestamps. It’s sometimes hard to tell if something is AI-generated. I don’t want AI-generated when it comes to art. Pinterest could choose to display pin timestamps when they were pinned for the first time, but they don’t.
So, they dug their own hole and I have zero sympathy for them, too.
They're making money hand over fist with ads, I don't think they could care any less about the product than they currently do. The product at this point is a moldy sheath around the ad delivery system, as with any for-profit "social network".
Except machines dont pay for products or services... show all the fake ads you want to all the fake profiles you can, inflate your figures to the moon but in the end, the results for the advertiser will determine media value not the fake metrics.
All digital media is a race to the bottom. It appears that Pinterest is falling very fast.
I work in the same building as Pintrest - they have prime real estate in the centre of Dublin, with an office that looks to be tricked out to the max - and sometimes I see some people in there, but nowhere near the numbers the space can accommodate.
I've entirely replaced Pinterest with tumblr for that kind of stuff. It comes with the added bonus of having a community of other queer weirdos like myself
Blizzard recently set up a World of Warcraft promotion with Pinterest where you could share your housing builds from in-game. Many people were insta-banned from Pinterest for "spam" after just posting one or two pictures.
And google forum search, which is pretty great overall, is often full of facebook comments. I don't mind the reddit results, since they still usually (somehow) contain the best answers to my queries. It would be great if it could be further filtered for actual forums.
knowing how to game Google Image search years ago is exactly how Pintrest got it's footing. Shocked they haven't been totally blacklisted. Well not shocked because Google doesn't care about image search and actively makes it worse often.
> We define an MAU as an authenticated Pinterest user who visits our website, opens our mobile application or interacts with Pinterest through one of our browser or site extensions, such as the Save button, at least once during the 30-day period ending on the date of measurement.
Wonder if we're going to get a MAHU (Monthly Active Human Users) stat in the future.
I always assumed it to be a honeypot for ebay purchasers due to the "copy popular ebay search results and then lure them to a link" methodology of "users".
Pretty much the same with all AI slop sites (e.g. the first 10 search results) only usually they only care about serving adds instead of serving malware or scams.
Pinterest is such a fascinating product. I've tried to use it a few times over the many years the product has been out. Never ever saw a point of sticking around. Constantly getting annoyed at some Google search pinterest links and that's about it.
With AI now filling it up, I completely fathom to understand what this is good for
It's a shame, I used to browse Pinterest for woodworking ideas. A year ago, I noticed some of the results were AI generated. Now almost ALL results are AI generated, included the obviously scammy ads they put in everywhere. If someone knows a place where you can find fun woodworking projects, I'm all ears.
Yeah had to close my account with Etsy. The think that its ok to spam you recommendation emails and not let you opt-out. Feel bad for creators now... :(
I also noticed recently they changed their design completely. Instead of browsing your board and the things you pinned in the past, what you're now shown are completely unrelated items that you might want to add to your board, and most of these are things you can buy from other shopping sites.
15 years back I got an affiliate marketing ebook, and it had lessons on getting hundreds of blogspot subdomains and using a desktop tool to publish the same crap about, say, tropical fish to all of them. There was/is also a captcha solving service which got a nice landing page about employing people.
This would probably still be way better than the status quo, because it would introduce a higher barrier for entry and more friction into the slop delivery system and give the moderation and spam detection a chance to catch up. Much easier to detect and delete 5000 laundered slop images than 500.000.
I do wonder what the future of using these platforms is in the era of AI. Theoretically, I feel like asking Claude to filter the results to remove "slop" would work quite well. Maybe that could be built into some kind of extension?
The bulk of the traffic will stay quarantined on the major sites like these because most people are passive and undiscerning. The new generation of smaller, higher quality sites doesn't have to worry about the Eternal September coming over and attracting the scammers, slop merchants, etc.
Lol, naive in the extreme. The majority of the slop is not eternal September noobs, it’s commercially motivated, people selling things, PR, like farming, bots astroturfing public opinion. It’s much cheaper to push slop than to moderate it.
These “small higher quality sites” will not have the resources to gatekeeper it. If, that is the at protocol world ever gets past one big site. You’ve actually got a lot more chance with smaller communities that are not connected with any protocol.
The slop can come from anywhere, including captive apps like Pinterest, so why use Pinterest? The ask is: how can you get a similar experience on non tech controlled systems? That does not mean you won't get slop, it means that Pinterest is not the gatekeeper to the user experience. There will likely be slop, but that is a distinct problem statement to solve for.
My concern is the gatekeeper (in this case, Pinterest), and avoiding them at all costs using the ability to build replacements swiftly using vibe coding on open protocols (although vibe coding is not required of course, it will simply speed time to market). ATProto cannot be controlled by design, so it is ideal for building apps that need social rails (as a Pinterest replacement might). What is Pinterest besides an app, a search engine, and an object storage system after all?
Tangentially, ATProto moderation primitives might be of use in detecting, tagging, and filtering AI slop (via media, metadata, and author/publisher signal), but more research is required on this topic.
> The majority of the slop is not eternal September noobs, it’s commercially motivated, people selling things
Right, and those people go where the traffic is. They're polluting Twitter. They don't find Mastodon/Bluesky etc. important enough to take over. Hopefully it stays that way.
Because ATProto is specifically designed to allow being NON-centralized. Unlike Pinterest. Yes, ATProto is new and most of the traffic is through a single site at the moment, but it is specifically designed to allow for that to change.
The AI generated images are so prevalent that I resorted to reposting images only if there were from 2022 or earlier (sure, filters existed then too).
The whole experience reminds me of the story about "pre-radiation steel" [0] and how future generations won't be able to trust any image after 2024. Then again, we have large amounts of literature and stories from ancient history or medieval times that are impossible to verify as true so maybe this isn't a new problem.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel