What I HATE Most About Pinterest

I was a late bloomer to Pinterest. I had seen it, but I didn’t know what it was so I ignored it. I thought it was another social cesspool like Facebook. As time went on I noticed the search engine results began filling up with Pinterest content. Most quilting, crocheting, or knitting project ideas that I was searching for was pretty much always found on Pinterest. I did some research and saw that Pinterest was a free online way to organize images found anywhere online into categories called Boards. My typical way of saving content I found online was to open a Word document, copy and paste the content I wanted and then save it to carefully named folders in my Documents folder. I could absolutely see how Pinterest could work in my favor. I signed up in 2012 and I was hooked.

Over the last nearly nine years I have amassed a sizable collection of Pins on my highly organized boards. Take for instance my quilting boards. I’m sure most new Pinners start out just like I did in that I created a board called Quilting, but it soon became like a book without an index. So I started creating additional boards like Quilting – Squares, Rectangles, Quilting – Kids and Babies, Quilting – Strips, Strings, Coins, etc. I amassed hundreds, maybe thousands of meticulously selected Pins. I had over 3.4k followers. I didn’t care how many or who was following me, but obviously I was doing something right if they found my content worthy of following.

Around 2017 Pinterest added a new feature for boards called Sections which are sub-categories within a board. That was awesome. Instead of having roughly 142 different quilting boards, I would then be able to have a single quilting board with all the various sections inside.

And then… Pinterest added a new feature called Organize that allowed you to select multiple Pins at once and move them to other boards.

WARNING!!!

If you care deeply about your followers, if your boards and Pins are showing up in search engine results, if you are marketing or selling via your Pinterest account, DO NOT MOVE YOUR CURRENT CONTENT INTO OTHER BOARDS OR SECTIONS BECAUSE YOU WILL LOSE IT ALL!

Think about it for a sec. If someone is following one of your boards and you create a new section in another board like I did with my quilting boards, and you move your content to that new section, then delete the old board, YOU WILL LOSE YOUR FOLLOWERS AND EVERY LINK/URL TO THAT BOARD BECAUSE IT NO LONGER EXISTS!

The other day I started banging out new sections in my quilting board and moving content into those sections. Let me start by saying that I have three monitors on my PC. I’m a programmer and I work from home. With three monitors I don’t have to jungle multiple browser tabs on a single screen. On one screen I was creating new sections. On another screen I was querying up the old board I wanted to move. I was VERY careful moving the old content into the new sections. A message displayed at the bottom of the screen that said something like, “Please wait while we move the content.” Something like that. After I was completely sure that the content had indeed been moved, then I deleted the old board.

But then I noticed that I after doing a ‘Select All’ to select the content I wanted to move, and after selecting the board that I wanted to move it to, I could create new sections on the fly in that target board. So I had all the Pins selected, selected the target board, created a new section and clicked OK. The I deleted the source board that I had moved the content from. I was doing this for over an hour and had moved about 60 boards. Soon it was time to start my work day and I thought I’d check out what the Quilting mother board (no pun intended) looked liked. I saw all the new sections and every single one of them except like two, WHERE EMPTY, EMPTY, EMPTY. ZERO PINS. NOTHING. AND I HAD DELETED ALL THE OLD BOARDS. NEARLY NINE YEARS OF CONTENT WAS GONE.

I don’t care that I lost followers. That was never important to me. My count did drop from 3.4k down to 3.2k after this little housekeeping adventure. However, it does bug me that everyone who was following my boards suddenly lost access to my content, too. And it bothers me greatly that the content I Pin is carefully chosen. I always ask myself, “Is this something I would make? Is this something that inspires me to put my own twist on it and design my own pattern? Do I admire that other person’s work? IS IT WORTH SAVING?” If I was able to say yes to any of those questions, I would Pin it.

Like I said, I’m a programmer, and this part really pisses me off. When I was in the Organize screen and had all my Pins selected to move and I created a new section, not only did I expect the section to be created, but I also expected the content to be moved to that section BECAUSE THAT WAS THE OPERATION THAT I WAS THERE TO PERFORM TO BEGIN WITH! At the very least, after that new section was created, Pinterest should have prompted me, “Section created. Do you want to move your Pins to it now?” YES, GODDAMIT, YES! THAT’S WHY I’M PERFORMING THIS MANUEVER.

Pinterest, you seriously need to rework that Organize/Move/Create new section feature. With my content gone, I have nothing left to reference for my research.