Pinterest Irks – Kill the exclamation point

I will admit that I do like Pinterest, but I think I use it for different purposes than most people do. I use it to save ideas for later. It’s a visual filing cabinet for me. I know it’s billed as a social network. I do get ideas here and there from what other people have pinned. And my sister used my “filing cabinet” to get ideas for things to crochet for Iddo. But how is that social interaction? I don’t get it. Mostly I pin things from stuff I found elsewhere on the internet, not on Pinterest itself.

But there are definitely several things that just really irk me about it, or, to be more precise, that irk me about the way most people use it.

1. Source Citations

Since that’s how I use it, it’s very important to me for the pinned image to actually link back to the original source of the image with all the good information about it. Pinned images to Asian sites that have clearly stole the images do me no good and irk me. Links that go to the entire blog rather than the specific post leave me frustrated. Links to that go to just an image file frustrate me even more.

Maybe it’s the graduate student/researcher in me, but the lack of proper citation on Pinterest is probably my biggest complaint about the site. Find the source people!

2. Irrelevant Descriptions

And then there are the descriptions of the posts. You can change those, you know. If you see a pin that says “This would be perfect for my son John” and you don’t have a son named John, that description is going to make no sense. And if I know you do not have a son named John, I’ll be irked.

3. Over-the-Top Descriptions

It also irks me when the description is along the lines of “This is the BEST most AWESOME doohickey I’ve ever made/baked/done!!!!”

For starters, I’m pretty sure at that point the person whose account I’m seeing the pin on has actually not done a single thing with that idea yet. How do they know it’s the best? They don’t. So stop saying it.

Maybe the person who originally pinned it had done it and it was totally awesome, but since you do have the option of changing the description when you pin something, change it to reflect what your actual experience is with the idea.

Also, I’m pretty sure every idea on Pinterest is not the most awesome thing you have ever seen. Stop it with the over the top descriptives already!

The best descriptions are those that just say what the thing is. Let me decide how totally awesome it is.

4. The Exclamation Point

And that brings me to my final irk, the biggest one. The exclamation point. I would love to see Pinterest implement something that removes every single exclamation point on the site. People use the exclamation point with wild abandon there.

The overwhelming excitement for brownie recipes and hairdos scares me a bit. What do these people do when something actually exciting happens to them? Would an actual exciting event kill them from the intensity of it?

I get excitement for new ideas. I do. But I can’t live at the level of excitement a lot of people on Pinterest apparently do. That’s just way to intense for me.

Conclusion

I think to summarize this post I could just say – I like technology, like Pinterest, but humanity keeps finding new ways to bug me, especially with technology. 😀