Comment by adrianmonk
8 years ago
I don't see why Pinterest does this to themselves. My main exposure to them is through Google image search and links to their site.
So my first several experiences were like this. It left me with a terrible first impression. It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time.
I usually don't sign up for an account the first few times I encounter a site, so in my mind it's a pretty critical time to make a good impression. Instead they annoyed me so much I've practically decided never to create an account.
The main exposure I get from Pinterest is only frustration.
When I click, accidentally, on a pinterest link on google images, I land on a site which does not work unless I enable some javascript. Once enabled, it'll proceed to load several images, none of which are the image I look for because the google result linked to some tag or search result. After the page loaded, I might be redirected to a screen that suggests I should get a pinterest account.
Pinterest is basically search result spam, it isn't what you're looking for but hey, you could send the Pinterestian Prince your data anyway!
Agreed on this. What's surprising to meis their success despite the logged in experience not being better at all.
We're getting married, so my fiancée is (obviously) using pinterest for everything - her dress, themes, you name it. And the wedding planner we work with uses Pinterest too, we (try) to share it with them so they get an idea.
Even such a simple feature as sharing a board is a nightmare and wastes 5-10 minutes in every calls we have so the planner can finally find the board. Or a crucial feature as "pinning" is even bad and obstructive. Be it with the chrome addon or whatever other system.
Really don't see how they got so popular and really wonder why no other competitor is entering the market and crushing them.
Network effect. Pinterest has claimed its niche (arts and crafts, wedding inspiration (the size of this niche never ceases to amaze me), home decoration, pictures of smoothies in mason jars (but never with a matching lid oddly enough), clothing, accessories, etc.), and has its share of loyal users. Any competitor would need to be at least twice as good to attract enough users for the network to shift to them.
My 2 cents : they are popular because they are pretty much the only ones in that pretty specific space.
It does not explain why no other company has tried to copycat them though.
Shout out to the guy that runs pinboard. He posts here sometimes (regularly? Rarely? Often?), and goes into his experience running a site like that by himself.
6 replies →
A vast array of companies tried to copy Pinterest, after their usage began to soar. They all failed to gain user uptake. For a short while copying their layout was all the rage. People thought you could just copy the layout (as though that was the special thing), throw together the base features, and you might be the next Pinterest.
Copying & beating competitors doesn't actually work like most people seem to think it works. It's the same mistake people on HN have always made in claiming Uber can be smoked by a weekend MVP, and that they'll just face perpetual endless competition because it's so easy to do what they do.
It's dramatically more difficult to beat the existing competitor, even when they're mediocre, than it is to claim the initial territory (and doing just that, is extremely difficult).
To the extent your competitor is mediocre, you may only need a product several times better than theirs. If they're only slightly mediocre, you'll need a product 10x superior.
That's why the search engine wars were mostly a shit race of mild to severe mediocrity, until Google smashed them all with a 10x solution. Before that, they were all competing with barely better solutions and features. Excite? Lycos? AltaVista? Yahoo (Inktomi etc)? Who cares, it was mostly about who annoyed you the least, because the search quality largely sucked all around.
If you want to beat Pinterest, here's what you need to do, in no particular order:
- Produce a product that is leaps and bounds beyond Pinterest. A product that is slightly better, won't dent the market at all in this case. You'll waste years of your life getting to 100,000 users - what Pinterest accomplishes daily.
- Figure out how to get vast, endless media attention for a now rather boring product that has already been done to death, and for which a giant existing solution is already in place. The media has no interest, forget about that. And, alternatively, you don't have the tens of millions of dollars to bribe their attention. Free media attention is extraordinary for a hungry start-up: every time some media outlet ran an article about the latest outrageous thing (a kidney here, virginity there) to be auctioned on eBay back in the day, it was a boon to their growth.
- Convince millions of users to leave something they already know and are comfortable with. This is nearly impossible unless you're offering something extraordinarily superior. The product segment is mostly saturated by Pinterest now, so overwhelmingly you'll have to steal users from them.
- Plausibly raise venture capital. No VC firms want to back the 37th Pinterest clone. So you can forget about this, they consider that land already claimed. Once again, you'll need a radical new thing here, a 10x outcome, that blows them away versus what already exists.
- You'll need a lot of talented individuals to work with. You'll have to convince them to sign on to the mission - a truly challenging mission that will take years of grinding and struggle. All to work on a Pinterest clone. So there went your talented co-workers, they're not interested at all. They're interested in the next big thing, rather than cloning the last big thing. Can you build a product 5x or 10x better than Pinterest, and build it to scale, without a lot of talented people to do it with? Doubtful.
1 reply →
Pinspire?
From 2012: https://readwrite.com/2012/01/13/pinspire_the_hottest_new_st...
Happy to help you share a board or pin from outside Pinterest. I've absolutely never had a problem with any of the things you mention. My problem with Pinterest is that it is way too commercial now with lots of links to buy and spam contained within images. I used to enjoy it but not so much now.
but you are the average HN user right? I'm sure I'd be able to share a board easily to you if I wanted to.
What I witnessed is constant struggle between my 30yo fiancee and our 50yo wedding planner. It happened multiple time, so there is an obvious issue either on the sharer's side or on the receiver side.
Look I know this is after the fact but it might help other people. You could just create one account and have the wedding planner log into the account. No sharing hassle involved.
I think a lot of their design is aggressively optimized for SEO and growth. Sadly though, this strategy seems to work (up to a point) even though the experience of individual users gets worse.
One of the things that makes me a little bonkers is when people A/B test, find something that works well for, say, 50% of the people, and then dust off their hands and call it done. Because 50% is a lot of people, so it must be good.
I'd rather that they ask, "Hey, is there something that would be good for the other half of the users?" Software being infinitely soft, we can often find ways to serve both groups.
If Pinterest were a person, we'd think it an asshole, always pulling a bait-and-switch and asking us to create an account in the same brusque way. How much would it really cost them to be more neighborly?
I had friends in Groupon who used this technique. They claimed that forced sign ups didn't really result in a high enough bounce rate, compared to the number of sign ups they got.
Data driven does a poor job of capturing user annoyance. Someone will tolerate being screwed a few times to get a discount. But after a while, it builds momentum.
Though in many cases, startups don't care. They just want to sell off their numbers and exit.
50% is overselling the success rate of login-walls from Google Images by a lot - probably multiple orders of magnitude. And I think you're significantly misrepresenting the A/B test's goal. It's not to find what works best for the most people, it's to find what works best for the company running the test.
If a login wall causes an account creation from 0.5% of people presented with the bait-and-switch, that's not compared to a 99.5% failure rate. It's contrasted with an account creation from 0.1% of people presented with the image they wanted with a "Click here to create an account" prompt in the corner, and it's five times as effective as that alternative.
The same story gets repeated here over and over again regarding the email newsletter sign-up form that steals focus halfway through a blog post. Yes, they increase your traceable readership more than anything else you could put in your blog (again, counting 1% vs 0.1%) . But there is a large percentage of the population who will close your blog permanently if you use them.
Yes, I made up an example for simplicity's sake. And my exact critique is that they don't work best for the company in the long term, because the people using them are often obsessively focused on the short term metrics.
The bait and switch may get them 0.5% signups instead of 0.1% for that interaction. But rarely do people ask, "What distinguishes the people who signed up? What effect are we having on the people who don't sign up? Can we serve those people as well?"
As you say, the long-term effect is pernicious.
> It makes me wonder if the whole site plays games and tries to waste my time.
They seem to be desperate for traffic. I've been using it for a while, but recently they've sent me a wave of spam emails "suggesting" to me various content which has no relevancy for me and is not connected to anything I've been doing. I've unsubscribed from all their mails (I hope so) but now I am hesitant to even use the site again, so that I don't get more spam sent to me.
Most likely someone was told that his bonus depends on improving the number of sign ups. Which he then did.
My guess is a very narrow focus on optimizing certain metrics and a mindset that encourages "growth hacking" and any other means to reach those goals, even at the cost of everything else. *
They even described the design process that lead to some of their terrible UI elements in their tech blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226029
(* which, I suspect, is the kind of mindset spammers need to rationalize their actions.)
Pinterest has no product. They only want traffic.