I use it for ideas and references. Back when I drew, it was a great source for models. Also nice for projects. They have a plethora of patterns for crafting, not to mention just straight inspiration if you’re looking to design pretty much anything. I don’t use it to just look at pictures, I go to it looking for something specific.

My d&d dm asked us (the players) to create pin boards with stuff relevant to our characters. Lime clothing style, weapons, that kind of stuff. Never used it before…

My experience with Pinterest is:

• Search for some recipes and you click a link to Pinterest it takes you to a meta page with a lot of pictures but no recipe.
• While image searching you find a nice picture click on the link to Pinterest and it’s gone, just use the cached image instead.

Increasing shareholder value, of course.

They took an existing real-world idea, made it a website, and then tried to microsoft it by locking people in, refusing to let others play without paying, and generally making every interaction suck. It’s been quite a ride from “hey that’s interesting” to “oh god - them again”. I think the thrill lasted maybe the first six months they existed.

I actually find it invaluable. I am constantly designing new products so I need a lot of inspiration. Google image search is too focused and I need broad strokes to start. I can type in a few keywords in Pinterest, find one image I like and click on it, then get a large amount of similar designs. I’ve used it for lots of stuff from a variety of unique knurling options on dials to flower knolling layouts for ad shoots. It’s a better image search for my purposes.

It exists to fuck up search results.

It’s a pinboard. You collect idea’s in a visual way to create moodboards or visual collections of idea’s.

I used to be a big fan and my daughter and wife still use it a lot when researching a project. It works really well but is cluttered with paid content these days.

I forgot it existed because some lovely person made an extension to block it ☺️

Whoever does their SEO is a genius but should also have been drowned at birth

It gloms onto the mental capital around how the internet is supposed to be free and open. But if you make an account you can then download the images etc. When I did make boards and pin things it felt like I was just indicating to interested commercial parties the things I like. But it does show you a large amount of related images quickly which can be handy if you’re looking for something specific.

I try to avoid the site like the plague, have never really attempted to use it, and when the internet inevitably dumps me there is my search for something I’ve never found any value in it.

But I think the idea is that it’s supposed to be sort of a brainstorming tool.

Think back to the days when physical magazines and catalogues were more of a thing. When you were planning or designing or working towards some goal you might gather up a bunch of clippings, pictures, articles, recipes, your own notes, sketches, and doodles, etc. and pin them up on a cork board (sort of a “vision board”) or maybe put them in a book or folder or something so they were readily available for you to look at for inspiration or reference as you go about your planning.

I think that’s what Pinterest was supposed to be. Sort of a place to save all your little inspirations and reference pictures for whatever project or goal you have in mind.

And I kind of suspect that for that purpose it does its job well enough (though I don’t really get what benefit it has over a folder full of pictures and word documents, spreadsheets, etc. saved to your computer or phone)

And I guess maybe having a platform where you can share that sort of virtual vision board and get feedback on it and see what others are planning is maybe useful for some people’s creative process.

But it’s also kind of like glimpsing into someone’s personal notebook full of their illegible handwriting, half-finished sketches and doodles, and made-up shorthand. It probably makes lots of sense to that person, but since you don’t know what was going on in their mind when they put it together and it was never edited for someone else to make sense of, it might as well be the ramblings of a mental patient.

And since most of the rest of us only stumble onto Pinterest in search of a source for something - a place we can buy something, the recipe for food, an article or the context for a picture, a how-to guide, etc. it seems like a total waste of time because most people only share the picture and a couple quick thoughts or hashtags or whatever, it’s basically useless.

I haven’t used it in a while, but when I did I used it sort of as an idea / vision board. For instance, when remodeling the kitchen I created a board where I just pinned a ton of kitchen pictures that had things I liked. Sort of a way to group images together based on themes.

Killing the internet.

It has no other purpose.

It exists to abuse and profit off search engine optimisation. More than half of most image search results are polluted with their results which forces you sign up to do anything useful with them.

I agree with the other commenters, it is mostly awful, screws up image searches, and I’ve had the browser extension that blocks it from searches installed for years.

But I have also used it, so can partly answer your question. Basically, it lets you build image collections on topics, and has convenient (but also intrusive and data harvesting) extensions / apps that make it easy to add any image you come across online to one of your boards. In the past I’ve used these boards for home renovation, DIY projects, world building, D&D inspiration / mood boards to share with new players, etc. And as well as just gathering together the images you save, it’s pretty good at suggesting similar images.

If it wasn’t so awful as a site (the out of control SEO, demanding you’re logged in, presumably vast data harvesting) I’d actually use it a lot more. But I generally don’t, and I’m looking for an alternative. There’s something called Hoarder that you can host yourself, which could be useful. But without the network effects of humans effectively tagging and linking millions of images, it’ll sadly never be as good at suggesting relevant new images as Pinterest.