people i know are using it less because of how buggy/slow it has gotten and how hard the basic activity of curating your boards has become. i also now avoid clicking anything related to pinterest because they break the web and make it hard to visit the source website and view their site on mobile. Too many walls around that garden.

I once clicked on a recipe that was pinned to a Pinterest board and it would not allow me to view it without registering for an account. They lost my eyeballs forever that day and I'm sure there's many others like me out there. Given their target revenue model was presumably ad/affiliate referral based, keeping potential consumers outside the wall made zero sense to me.

Same for me. I think this might be the actual reason they're losing out. The moment they started requiring to log in to view stuff discovered through Google anyway was the moment I stopped using them, even though I actually have an account.

I'd pay money to never see pinterest appear in another image search result again.

Search Google Images with "-site:pinterest.com"

You could even set a custom search engine keyword that searches Google Images with the above included automatically.

The funny thing is that you are obviously right about their problems and despite the fact that an anonymous stranger on a forum can easily answer this, the billion dollar machine won't change to save its life.

Exactly, been thinking this for years now. It's scary how fast a company can grow too big to actually do anything remotely new or change a small thing to save itself. Same actually how SpaceX came to be, stop tossing away perfectly fine rockets.

I am one of those guys. I don't really understand the value of pinterest. So a drop in performance made my exit far easier. I am probably not their target user.