alt.hn

2/23/2026 at 4:03:58 AM

Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation

 https://www.404media.co/pinterest-is-drowning-in-a-sea-of-ai-slop-and-auto-moderation/

by trinsic2

2/23/2026 at 2:03:45 PM

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.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

by alexpotato

2/23/2026 at 2:10:02 PM

I do the same in youtube etc if I want to just listen to some music. before:2020 usually works somewhat.

Didn't know about that operator before all this.

by bergheim

2/23/2026 at 12:48:18 PM

I'm a Kagi user so i genuinely forgot that Pinterest still exists.

Thank you, Kagi.

by estimator7292

2/23/2026 at 1:06:17 PM

Pinterest has the honour to lead the leaderboard from #1 tot #7 in the blocked domain list.

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights

by clydethefrog

2/23/2026 at 2:44:00 PM

Fun to look at the remaining sites.

TikTok (hated by HN as we can see on the other thread today; possibly people banning themselves from the rabbit hole)

Anti-news propaganda sites (Fox, Breitbart, Daily Mail, NY Post, and the much less offensive but more sloppy MSN)

Quora (like Pinterest, unusable without an account but shows the logged-in answer to googlebot. Ought to be against the rules but isn't)

Other low quality help sites with good SEO (w3schools, not great but usable in the way that Quora isn't)

"Lowered" (dropdown) has similar sites in a different order. "Raised" has Reddit, Stackoverflow, and HN. Highest raised news is NYT.

by pjc50

2/23/2026 at 2:19:47 PM

Pinterest - the sewer of internet image search

by benrapscallion

2/23/2026 at 5:00:59 PM

to be fair, yet another useful and interesting tool exploited into unusability.

by damnesian

2/23/2026 at 1:17:32 PM

That's actually kind of impressive.

by sethops1

2/23/2026 at 6:52:46 PM

I would probably get along with the typical Kagi user, many of those are complete pollution with no redeeming qualities.

by plagiarist

2/23/2026 at 2:49:13 PM

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.

by pooploop64

2/23/2026 at 2:19:05 PM

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.

by benrapscallion

2/23/2026 at 7:14:42 PM

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.

by estimator7292

2/23/2026 at 5:40:51 PM

Brave search has similar features as well (Goggles, they call it).

Fantastic to block sites that game SEO but don’t actually find what you want (Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, etc)

by Esophagus4

2/23/2026 at 2:39:45 PM

This is the most convincing reason to use Kagi I've heard yet.

by pooploop64

2/23/2026 at 7:15:18 PM

It's usually the top reason people give when recommending Kagi. I can't imagine search any other way.

by estimator7292

2/23/2026 at 12:52:53 PM

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.

by ohyoutravel

2/23/2026 at 4:56:31 PM

Is there literally any reason why Google favours Pinterest so much? It's just seems purely bad for Google.

by YetAnotherNick

2/23/2026 at 1:43:36 PM

My favorite news feed overall: news.kagi.com

by hereme888

2/23/2026 at 12:14:56 PM

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.

by CrzyLngPwd

2/23/2026 at 1:44:09 PM

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.

by WA

2/23/2026 at 12:50:24 PM

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".

by rchaud

2/23/2026 at 11:09:01 AM

And the world is drowning in more pinterest google image search spam.

by micw

2/23/2026 at 2:05:24 PM

PINS has 5200 employees! What The actual F are 5200 people doing?

This company exemplifies the "dead internet". No way they grow, let alone hit their targets.

Going short.

by DudeOpotomus

2/23/2026 at 2:36:53 PM

What if the dead internet is where the profits are?

https://investor.pinterestinc.com/news-and-events/press-rele... "Pinterest Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results, Delivers First Billion Dollar Revenue Quarter"

(presumably the money is from advertisers, and the 5200 people are on the phone to advertisers persuading them to increase spend)

by pjc50

2/23/2026 at 4:37:59 PM

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.

by DudeOpotomus

2/23/2026 at 7:48:36 PM

> Q4 Revenue of $1.15 billion, an increase of 18%

That's unreal tbh. Clearly I'm living in a bubble thinking "who the hell still uses Pinterest".

by beAbU

2/23/2026 at 6:05:17 PM

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.

by osullish

2/23/2026 at 11:05:52 AM

Pinterest sucks.

You can create your private archive with Bookmarker. Share collections publicly if you want.

https://bookmarker.cc/

by kaizenb

2/23/2026 at 12:56:37 PM

I had a Pinterest account back when there were genuinely great resource for niche things like Japanese graphic design.

Since then, I've moved to simply having a local image/video database UI app like Eagle[0] and checking Are.na[1] for interesting collections.

[0] https://eagle.cool/ [1] https://www.are.na/explore

by rchaud

2/23/2026 at 2:52:21 PM

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

by mghackerlady

2/23/2026 at 2:16:40 PM

Thanks these are genuinely helpful. I also use/d Pinterest for this kind of use case and haven't managed to find many good alternatives

by michaelscott

2/23/2026 at 1:21:50 PM

If you use google image search recently, it's mostly Pinterest and Facebook.

by feverzsj

2/23/2026 at 2:39:35 PM

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.

by hydrogen7800

2/23/2026 at 3:26:58 PM

Not just recently. Google image search was semi-useless for years due to being spammed by login-walled pinterest images.

by m-schuetz

2/23/2026 at 4:20:07 PM

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.

by whywhywhywhy

2/23/2026 at 4:25:23 PM

Not if you use `-pinterest -facebook`.

by layer8

2/23/2026 at 1:27:02 PM

...or stock images.

by kleiba

2/23/2026 at 7:01:30 AM

“MAUs were 619 million, an increase of 12% compared to December 31, 2024” [1].

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1506293/0001...

by JumpCrisscross

2/23/2026 at 11:59:23 AM

> 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.

by properbrew

2/23/2026 at 12:55:16 PM

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.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/pinterest-suspended-...

Something is very broken over at Pinterest.

by jameskilton

2/23/2026 at 11:48:16 AM

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.

by easywood

2/23/2026 at 12:51:03 PM

Definitely not Etsy, because it's the same deal over there.

by rchaud

2/23/2026 at 11:27:09 PM

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... :(

by trinsic2

2/23/2026 at 1:30:08 PM

There must be a subreddit?

by Steve16384

2/23/2026 at 12:34:13 PM

Instructables is pretty good.

by everyday7732

2/23/2026 at 11:23:27 AM

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.

by tebbers

2/23/2026 at 8:13:17 AM

Not to mention so many ads it’s no longer usable.

by interstice

2/23/2026 at 10:39:21 AM

Pinterest is so bad it's one of those sites I just skip over on search results. But it's been that way for years - nothing new.

by AdamN

2/23/2026 at 10:49:22 AM

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.

by consp

2/23/2026 at 1:36:17 PM

It's not just Pinterest though. IG, Reddit, even LinkedIn.

by mv4

2/23/2026 at 2:17:50 PM

Especially linkedin from my experience. That place is a shithole even more than usual lately.

by PacificSpecific

2/23/2026 at 2:53:22 PM

I hate that to get a job nowadays you essentially need a linkedin, I hate that shithole

by mghackerlady

2/23/2026 at 11:11:31 AM

Pinterest is the OG slop, long before LLMs ever existed

by cap11235

2/23/2026 at 12:08:03 PM

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.

by aitchnyu

2/23/2026 at 12:38:22 PM

Deserved. Pinterest has been enshittifying itself and the Internet at large for quite a long time.

by nusl

2/23/2026 at 12:52:13 PM

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?

by maplethorpe

2/23/2026 at 5:45:32 PM

Some guy on here built a tool like this… can’t remember the thread but it was called browser-code on GitHub.

by Esophagus4

2/23/2026 at 12:03:12 PM

We need camera hardware to be able to sign photos

by petesergeant

2/23/2026 at 12:36:02 PM

Seems like something that would be miss-used against people in horrible ways.

by m4rtink

2/23/2026 at 2:09:55 PM

I think it might be enough to be able to verify that a photo was taken by a particular manufacturer's camera, not necessarily a specific camera/owner.

by Octoth0rpe

2/23/2026 at 12:29:09 PM

Then I can take a photo of an AI generated image.

by carlosjobim

2/23/2026 at 2:10:47 PM

That might impose enough effort to stop most slop from being spammed everywhere.

by Octoth0rpe

2/23/2026 at 4:22:50 PM

Could offer a service that automates it with a DSLR pointing at a screen laundering images one after another.

by whywhywhywhy

2/23/2026 at 11:34:48 AM

[dead]

by Kalpaka

2/23/2026 at 4:22:57 AM

Any ATProto based replacements available?

by toomuchtodo

2/23/2026 at 10:38:40 AM

How would that solve the slop problem?

by badgersnake

2/23/2026 at 10:56:11 AM

And why ATProto when it would result in just another broken centralized service?

by jasonvorhe

2/23/2026 at 11:04:49 AM

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.

by mcherm

2/23/2026 at 2:38:55 PM

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.

by add-sub-mul-div

2/23/2026 at 4:30:48 PM

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.

by badgersnake

2/23/2026 at 6:25:24 PM

> 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.

by add-sub-mul-div

2/23/2026 at 5:26:04 PM

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.

by toomuchtodo