Sometimes I use pinterest when I'm looking for cooking inspiration. It is absolutely nothing like 4chan, I have no idea what you are talking about.

Well Pintrest and 4Chan are quite similar in their underlying ideas, both are twitter (yes i know 4chan predates twitter) with images basically.

There are quite a few differences but they aren't that far apart as people think.

Forget the "quality" of content and trolling for a moment, you can't really say that these 2 do not look similar.

http://boards.4chan.org/ck/catalog

https://uk.pinterest.com/categories/food_drink/

IMHO with pinterest the long-term memory aspect is quite important (collect things and look through them later), which 4chan is completely missing.

One is a catalog of images with description.

The other forces login or an app download.

I see what you did there, kudos :)

I don't get the 4chan comparison in any way.

Pinterest helps people catalogue things they find inspiring or are shortlisting to buy. They're right there between someone with an intent and a product for sale.

That's a valuable position to be in.

What similarity do you see between pinterest and 4chan?

"They both run on HTML."

Both use images as the primary subject of the post and media, posting structure is also quite similar (although Pintrest introduced poster pages/aggregation).

Facebook was just a better myspace. Google was just a better askjeeves/altavista/etc.

A Boeing 747 is a better donkey.

But it's a way better donkey.