This is a classic example of the HN bubble. Nobody of my "tech" friends uses Pinterest, everyone who's not in that group uses it heavily for finding furniture, clothes or recipes. It's usually the app they use instead of googling for something.

Anecdotally, when I've mentioned my hate for Pinterest appearing in search results, several of my coworkers have reacted with surprise. They use it regularly, and mentioned something about pinning interesting results. Our individual minds boggled at each other.

You know, maybe it's really good! I never considered this possibility because of its hostile UX.

Any service that pops up a login and won't let you access any content without logging in I just nope out of and have for many years. Especially user-hostile on mobile (Twitter and Reddit websites work really really hard to force you into using their apps and/or logging in on mobile, much more than on desktop). But maybe we're missing something and Pinterest is super awesome. Maybe I've been using this anti-user UX pattern as a signal for "crapware" but it's not accurate. Maybe fantastic services are hiding behind this pattern.

I'm not gonna sign up to find out but it's interesting to think about.

Or maybe I'll setup a VM for this and finally get FB/Insta/TikTok/Pinterest/Twitter, check em all out, and find out what the rest of humanity has been up to.

Google will have all those signals that people like using Pintrest and will keep it on the first page.

As much as I hate walled garden sites like Pinterest, Quora, Instagram it is huge for looking up clothes, recipes, jewelry.

So it serves a function for non-tech people. Its format works for them.

Using it daily for inspiration for radio controlled cars and trucks I scratch-build from styrene. I also use it for interior design ideas, fashion and if the odd pitcure of a VW T4 van build pops up I tend to save to a collection for when I start my own conversion in the spring.

I love it.

The only people who hate Pinterest are computer nerds, which are an extremely tiny minority of the population, and not Pinterest's target user anyways). Everyone else either likes it or doesn't have a strong opinion on it.

Pinterest is very popular in my friend group (which contains zero computer nerds outside of myself).

> Seriously, how does something so hated continues to exist?

Something hated by billions of nonusers (but not to point of outlawing it) and liked by 25 paying consumers can happily survive as a business.

And Pintereset is actually liked by many people who have user accounts there.