I am obsessed with Pinterest.
As my bio states, “This is where I live.”
Each week, looking at my screen time, my most used app is virtually always Pinterest.
As such a big Pinterest enthusiast, I consider myself qualified to constructively criticize different aspects of the app. Of course, there are various parts of Pinterest I love, but there are certain features of the app that consistently irritate me.
One of my most prominent grievances is how pins I’ve already saved show up in my home feed—where new pins are supposed to be. Often, I try to save a pin only to find out it is already saved into one of my boards.
Pinterest also tends to put a few of the same pins in my feed again and again… and again, after I’ve seen them many times and am not interested in looking at them. The home feed should be filled with fresh, unseen content, not the same recycled images multiple times over.
One of the most popular complaints I hear regarding Pinterest is its auto-refresh feature. When scrolling on the home page, it’s common for the page to spontaneously refresh, putting all new pins in the home feed. This can be aggravating when an interesting pin shows up, but the page refreshes before there’s time to save it.
In my first few years as a Pinterest fanatic, my preferred content on the app consisted of videos. Virtually every single one of my personalized boards had a section labeled “videos” which was typically where most of the board’s contents ended up.
I find it difficult to believe that videos’ audios aren’t available in my location because, before the past year, there were never any complications watching the same videos.
Within the past year, Pinterest adopted a new feature where it now prevents audio from playing from many videos, with the reasoning being that the “Audio [is] not available in your location.” I stumble across this message with an estimated 75% of the videos I watch, so much so that I rarely bother to look for videos on Pinterest anymore.
I find it difficult to believe that videos’ audios aren’t available in my location because, before the past year, there were never any complications watching the same videos. It surprises me, being a user who lives in the United States, that my audio is frequently banned considering that over 40% of Pinterest users live in the United States, and the app itself was developed in San Francisco.
To find new content, one of the easiest ways for users to add pins for their boards is by clicking on the “More ideas” tab within a board. This feature is designed to generate a collection of personalized images and videos similar to the currently saved pins. The tool, although useful, doesn’t appear in a few of my boards for reasons unidentifiable to me, only allowing me to find “more ideas” for some of my boards. I’m not sure of the reason for the inconsistency, but the tool should be available for every board, not merely a handful of them.
One of my final complaints about the app is its section feature. Within a Pinterest board, it’s possible to create sections within the board to further organize saved pins. I love the sections feature—almost every single one of my boards has multiple sections in it—but I wish that it would be possible to add sections within sections. As someone who values organization, sometimes I need more specific categories than a single section allows me. Additionally, within the normal sections, Pinterest does allow, it would be helpful to be able to add descriptions to them like is possible for entire Pinterest boards to explain the contents within them.
Even though multiple aspects of Pinterest annoy me, and I think it could use some revamping, it is still my favorite app. It allows me to create countless boards, build on them throughout multiple years, and access them anytime I need inspiration. Pinterest boards are my digital blueprint for how I want to live my life, and, even though the app is flawed, I will continue to be a dedicated user.
