Pinterest Etiquette (or) 7 Annoying Pinterest Users Part 2

Okay... my rage has worn off, which means it is time for round 2 of annoying Pinterest users. If you haven't read the first article, no big deal, but there should be a link to it at the bottom of this page. Let's start this off with...

4. Only pinning comics / memes / political slogans / text

This isn't against any Pinterest rule, per se, but it still irks me. Pinterest is a place for beautiful images and making your life better. The point is curation of your interests, so I want to know: are old, overused memes really your only interest? You fail so badly at the internet that you really don't know of any other place where this junk could be posted?

I have nothing against the occaisional funny picture or comic, but when that's all you post, it's a bit tiresome. Similarly, I have no problem with Pinterest-related text and memes being posted there. I don't like the political stuff, because to me, that has absolutely no value to anyone. You're simply trying to force a view on anyone who follows your feed. There's no curation or possibly quality of life increase to anyone.

Simply put, it's not the topic of the site. Continually posting content unrelated to the core of Pinterest degrades the experience for everyone. Focus is what keeps a site like Pinterest up and running. If you need a place to show people how much witty text you can attach to pictures, I highly encourage you to join Reddit or submit to quickmeme.

There's nothing wrong with having a collection or board of things you want. This annoyance is hard to describe, but here goes. This is a category of people who pin tons of (for example) crochet projects onto a board called "When I learn to crochet."

Or who you know, for a fact, can't cook and hate cooking, yet have 400 pins on the board "Things I want to cook."

I guess I don't like this type of board because these people are poseurs. (Posers? Has this spelling been accepted into common English yet?) They waste a lot of time thinking about and pinning tons of things related to a skill they will never actually bother to practice.

The kicker is that if they used the time spent pinning to actually learn to cook or crochet, they might actually make something decent. But they would rather just gawk on Pinterest and collect 400 recipes for that one magical day in the future when they figure out how to use a stove.

There is nothing worse than a liar on Pinterest. Having been raised on the dark side of the internet, I've seen the birth of a lot of popular images. An image will propagate for a while (go viral as they say now) and then fade to obscurity. And then 5 years later, someone will make a post on their blog using the image and claiming they created whatever it is. Anywhere else, this would get called out very quickly, but Pinterest users aren't super-geeky as a rule. The blogosphere from which pins often originate also doesn't have much crossover with legacy internet sites where many images were born and died.

The thing about images that used to be popular (viral) is that the source is usually unknown. Especially if the popularity originated on 4chan or forum sites. Don't scoff at 4chan- most of what is now considered "internet humor" actually originated there. Such conglomerates of massive anonymously donated content spew millions of images and ideas into the net each day, with no author to claim ownership. Additionally, content disappears after a few days at most, remaining alive only in the minds of those who caught it or saved it. This makes such content ripe for plagiarism.

The number of people who have, for instance, "discovered" how to make cake in a cup is astounding. And, coincidentally, they all use the same recipes that appeared on 4chan's cooking board for years until cake-in-a-cup was so widely known there that people ceased to post about it. Fast forward to now... it is all over Pinterest. You can search it on Amazon and books come up. There's nothing technically against any rule here, but it rubs me the wrong way.

This disingenuous usage of ideas from all over the web, stealing a photo randomly to pretend you actually did the project, can have major consequences. First of all, you could unwittingly be posting a trolling copypasta, such as the infamous fire cookies (recipe that caught your oven on fire), or equally well known ammonia and bleach cleaning secrets. Never heard of these? Exactly. There's so little overlap between the communities that something literally everyone knows in one sector, can be totally new to another.

FYI combining ammonia and bleach creates toxic gas. If some idiot posts it on Pinterest among the list of "10 new ways to use bleach for a sparkling kitchen!" please report the post or something. I'm not even sure what would be proper to do there. All I'm saying is that, with the lack of moderation, internet legacy users, and general common sense (see previous article) this type of thing could really happen. Especially if the pinner puts a picture of a ballerina twirling in a sparkling kitchen as the image. Imagine the number of repins before someone actually tried it and died.

If there is only an image, and the link dead-ends, don't do the project if it could in any way be dangerous. You don't know where that image came from, whether the project worked, or who actually completed it (a master carpenter might make it look easy, you might make it to the emergency roo).

Basically, the point is don't pretend that you actually made all those recipes, read all those books, built that shed. No one believes your superman Pinterest persona. We know you just sit at home all day drinking wine and pinning.

Best case scenario, I waste an hour of my life trying to bake a cake that ends up tasting like dirt. Worst case scenario, I'm in the shed when it topples and a board goes through my foot. If that happens, I will find you irresponsible pinner. Count on it.

The person whose ideas you were really interested to see. Maybe a facebook friend, maybe a celebrity, maybe a craftmaster at your chosen hobby.

Regardless, nothing is more frustrating than looking forward to "getting to know" the mind of someone, and being thwarted when they turn out to be a lurker.

Don't repin a few comics and give up! If you are having trouble getting inspired or figuring out what Pinterest is all about, read my other article on how to use Pinterest for maximum enjoyment.

The worst Pinterest account is a dead Pinterest account.