Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office lease

Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by jeffbee on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:06AM (#24332190)

I expressed this same view on Twitter and I got a DM from a Pinterest software engineer who seemed to be an intelligent and thoughtful person but also seemed to be puzzled by my position, and genuinely unaware that this perception of Pinterest exists. There must be some other side of Pinterest that I've never seen, where it performs a useful function for its users?

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Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by lucideer on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:19AM (#24332331)

I know two people who love Pinterest.

Both use the mobile app exclusively & basically just use it for moodboarding/inspiration. They interact with it entirely within the app and don't leave the app.

Is it possible this engineer is working on a part of the product that doesn't directly touch the web publishing side and is (relatively) unaware of that side of the business.

I've definitely met engineers who don't dogfood and wouldn't be aware of aspects of their company's product since they haven't used it themselves.

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Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by sah2ed on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:17AM (#24332316)

> There must be some other side of Pinterest that I've never seen, where it performs a useful function for its users?

Lots of female users use Pinterest for organizing pins for a wedding. Essentially, they are great as a wedding checklist planner.

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Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by johnfn on Monday August 31, 2020 @12:42PM (#24333184)

I use Pinterest all the time. It has a truly _phenomenal_ similar image recommendation engine, which I use for finding art and design inspiration pictures. Particularly if I want to find reference images for drawing, I find one that looks roughly like I want and then scroll down to the recommended list and get inundated with an endless amount of similar images in that style. It is _so_ useful!

I agree that Pinterest's practices with Google search are pretty poor. But Pinterest as a standalone product is amazing.

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Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by gowld on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:15AM (#24332290)

70% of pinterest users, and 93% of pinterest usage is female. That's probably highly correlated to your (and HN userbase's) confusion about how Pinterest is perceived.

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Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by lucideer on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:21AM (#24332353)

Yeah I signed up for Pinterest once and ticked "prefer not to specify" on the gender question. I also opted not to select any favourite/followed categories.

I was immediately inundated with bridal content and very little else.

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Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by jeffbee on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:19AM (#24332334)

There's lots of things mainly used by women but I still know what they're for and generally haven't needed to denounce them.

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Re:Pinterest pays $89.5M to terminate San Francisco office l... by heavenlyblue on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:12AM (#24332262)

Bummer - that engineer is not an intelligent person.

I am yet to find at least a single spamming company whose owners would not be well aware of what they are - because if they are stupid enough to believe their own story they will be quickly taken over by someone who is well aware of their own BS.

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