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Like so many social media platforms, Pinterest has gone way down the plug, and sadly I don’t think it was redeemable.
Way back in the early 2010’s, when there was no AI or shit algorithm, you uploaded what you wanted — no spam, slop or mass editing. That was the way it should be.
Inevitably, with the rise of online protection laws, AI junk effort (both the users and the staff) and mass internet creeps, Pinterest has become a cesspool of utter crap. All the best images gone — either banned for crap reasons, or the former account owners are driven away, or they may still exist out in the aether but the damn ai algorithm makes it impossible to find.
Sadly, as many people here point out, Pinterest is completely (and out of control) so sodden with AI that it’s barely even worth using anymore.
Today, I randomly remembered a bunch of images I’d seen and, feeling nostalgic, I went to look. I typed in some search words related to the pre-AI age images I used to love. Instead, I was met with nothing but AI generated images. Crap, crap, CRAP!!! I couldn’t believe how far it had fallen.
In some way, it almost makes me hope that the dead internet concept will come true, if only to slap open the eyes of these big AI corporations and force them to scale back the damage they are doing, and maybe, just maybe, formerly decent platforms like Pinterest might possibly return to some form of normalcy. For now though, I think I’ll retire from that ‘platform’.
To be clear, it’s not AI images in and of themselves I am complaining of. I have no issue with such things in moderation (like say you upload 10 natural images, complemented with 1 or 2 AI things. That is fine for me). My gripe is with the sheer mass of uploads and the way such things have vastly changed the social media/image sharing platform landscape in the last 5-6 years.
Mini-rant over, thanks for reading (if you did).
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A few days ago, I took the liberty of reporting a 10+ year-old Pinterest bot account (or possibly bot-aided account) that was stealing images from everywhere for clicks. That account received ‘Limited Distribution’, which is effectively a shadow ban.
Unless they appeal which is unlikely to be successful in any case, since they received it for ‘adult content’ their thievery content is most likely not going to be pushed out to the masses anymore.
You’re welcome, Pinterest.
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For many years, multiple Pinterest accounts used a very sly method of exploitation to garner more clicks. They all followed a very similar approach that can be broken down into something like this:
- Identify target
- Create fake content en masse (both before and after the advent of AI and deepfakes)
- mass Publication and promote for clicks
They would first identify a ‘target’, which would usually be someone with limited view in the public eye. The reason that they would choose someone who had limited public visibility is to avoid detection. If they chose a big-name celebrity like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp (not that some haven’t, but were not successful) then they would be found out and banned very quickly. Most instead chose to use more obscure celebrities, such as small-scale actors and models (people who have some pubic visibility, but not so much that they would be easily identified as an exploitation target).
Once they had selected their target and built up their accounts around such personas, they would then use whatever they could (photoshop, AI, etc.) to mass-produce fake or misleading media around them. This sort of media would often contain controversial aspects, yet because of Pinterest’s poor detection algorithms and user’s abilities to circumvent systems, these accounts would often go undetected, sometimes for years.
Interestingly, I believe that the rise of AI content has been both beneficial and detrimental to these people: while the mass production of AI content on Pinterest (and other platforms) has undoubtedly diluted the reach and appeal of these accounts contents, these accounts still exist out in the aether of Pinterest’s murky web, and likely get off on the use of modern AI tools to further their greedy exploitations for clicks.
Signs to look out for
If you use Pinterest, the main signs to look out for are:
- accounts centred around real celebrities
- accounts centred around obscure celebrities (Google the name of in doubt)
- accounts which are not necessarily named after a celebrity, but primarily posts media based around a specific celebrity or small group of celebrities
- accounts which produce unsettling content around celebrities
One of the biggest getaways these creeps have is a general behaviour habit on Pinterest, that general scrollers don’t tend to visit often the profile of the account that has uploaded, instead usually looking and either liking, saving, or simply scrolling past. But we can break these habits by scrutinising suspicious pins all the better.
Thanks for reading. I’m aware I’m probably not saying anything that’s ‘new’ or ‘unknown’, but it’s something I’d like to help bring to attention, if only to help in the pushback against it.
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Make no mistake, I do believe Pinterest has problems. Many, many problems. But, I personally don’t think that ‘review bombing’ is any sort of way to solve such issues. That’s not going to do anything, and might even just make more issues.
