Pinterest manages to do something horribly stupid and kind of abusive that I usually associates with adult sites ads: show you a preview of something that gets your interest, if you click to get access to it put you through a maze of forms and links all promising the result you asked for at the end, and then when you get to it they don't deliver and instead show other stuff you might like but really you don't because you did all that for this specific thing.
I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...
I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.
They have actually had one positive influence on my life.
After having dealt with exactly what you described a few times, I learned that I don't need anything that's on Pinterest. If a search results returns a pinterest link, I ignore it. If I can't find it anywhere except that link, it's as good as a dead link so I move on.
This can be extended to much of the internet.
So much peace now.
I've added Pinterest to my reverse image search extension [1] to avoid having to sign up when there is no alternative source for the image. It returns Pinterest search results [2], and you can access the image directly from the image icon.
I plan to release the image extraction module in a separate extension, so you can just click on the page area with the image, and it opens the image in a new tab. This way you will not need to do a reverse image search to get to the image, or manually look for it in the page source.
I just created an account with an email but after few minutes of clicking around it locked me out. I can only use it again if I give them my phone number, too -.-
As if this wasn't enough of their invasive procedures my profile officially says "Account is blocked because of suspicious behavior".
This is some advanced trickery to fool users into giving them more data than they intended to do when creating a profile and it sucks.
There are more examples: Have you tried browsing Facebook or Xing as a user? It's all a really crappy experience.
fwiw, this has happened to me a few times with fresh twitter accounts. In my experience, if you care enough and have the time, you will probably be able to get support to unblock your account without handing over your phone number.
I'm not saying this to defend twitter, this is definitely some aggressive, disingenuous behavior.
I think Twitter does that for some email services, definitely saw that behaviour with ProtonMail and Tutanota, Gmail was safe to use then (a couple of years ago, when I wanted to create a secondary account).
Don't worry it sucks as a user as well. Curiosity pushed me to use Google SSO to circumvent their crap one time, and they allowed themselves to subsequently spam my inbox with a flurry of emails. I proceeded to click the "unsubscribe" link in one of them, but to my surprise the spam kept coming. Turns out they have more than a dozen mailing settings and you have to painfully disable each one of them individually. Of course the simpler option is to mark all emails from pinterest.com as spam in the email client.
Especially as a site that specializes in hosting nearly exclusively non-original content, it's so ethically wrong for them to use such tactics.
Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, I never understood why people keep using these clearly unethical websites. Stop using them and other better alternatives will pop out, it's not like you depend on them like you depend on grocery shops or clothing stores. Voting with your attention is easy and cheap.
> I proceeded to click the "unsubscribe" link in one of them, but to my surprise the spam kept coming.
I despise it when this happens. The only solution is to create a gmail filter to catch the entire domain and archive it or mark it as spam. It's surprising how many companies willfully ignore the unsubscribe option.
nolok|6 years ago
I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...
I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.
moccachino|6 years ago
dessant|6 years ago
I plan to release the image extraction module in a separate extension, so you can just click on the page area with the image, and it opens the image in a new tab. This way you will not need to do a reverse image search to get to the image, or manually look for it in the page source.
[1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image
[2] https://i.imgur.com/L2wv2Wk.png
VvR-Ox|6 years ago
I just created an account with an email but after few minutes of clicking around it locked me out. I can only use it again if I give them my phone number, too -.-
As if this wasn't enough of their invasive procedures my profile officially says "Account is blocked because of suspicious behavior".
This is some advanced trickery to fool users into giving them more data than they intended to do when creating a profile and it sucks.
There are more examples: Have you tried browsing Facebook or Xing as a user? It's all a really crappy experience.
ben0x539|6 years ago
I'm not saying this to defend twitter, this is definitely some aggressive, disingenuous behavior.
r721|6 years ago
leppr|6 years ago
Especially as a site that specializes in hosting nearly exclusively non-original content, it's so ethically wrong for them to use such tactics.
Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, I never understood why people keep using these clearly unethical websites. Stop using them and other better alternatives will pop out, it's not like you depend on them like you depend on grocery shops or clothing stores. Voting with your attention is easy and cheap.
IGotThroughIt|6 years ago
I despise it when this happens. The only solution is to create a gmail filter to catch the entire domain and archive it or mark it as spam. It's surprising how many companies willfully ignore the unsubscribe option.
iamthepieman|6 years ago
pirocks|6 years ago
eps|6 years ago