from Hacker News

User retention at Pinterest: tackling an ambiguous problem

by aarkay on 12/12/18, 9:49 PM with 31 comments

• by nuclx on 12/14/18, 9:13 AM

  The fact that registration is required for no obvious reason kinda makes the site a no-go zone for me. I only occasionally land there via Google Image search. Maybe I'm just not the right target audience, since I'm not a social media guy. For my specialized interests there are better aggregators such as specific subreddits / HN. Forcing registration is part of the user retention strategy, but for me it makes using the site a non-starter.

• by Jaruzel on 12/14/18, 12:36 PM

  > When I joined the growth team at Pinterest

  There it is, right there. 'Growth team' - a team dedicated to using every dirty trick in the book to retain users. Facebook has one too, and that team was responsible for all the shady cross-app data sharing on peoples phones.

  Instead of treating your users as 'assets' simply to be owned and controlled, why not actually ask them about their experience of using your service? Sure, you'll only get a few percent of responders but it's a start.

  Also, these sites need to factor in that a significant number of people are reducing their social media usage, and this includes sites like Pinterest. Sometimes a service just reaches the end of it's life, and that's ok.

  Personally I really dislike Pinterest, I do not see the purpose it serves, and as a non Pinterest user, I have issue with Google searches throwing up Pinterest links that are of no use to me whatsoever.

• by iambateman on 12/14/18, 2:27 PM

  Pinterest is that it’s a fantastic way to browse collections (“recipes”, “decorating ideas”, “gift ideas”) which are both stable and visual.

  I use Pinterest on a weekly basis for recipes because my wife and I share a board. Evidently I’m a power user by their metric.

  But the problem is they are bound by impossible growth projections, which prevent them from making Pinterest into the best once-weekly-recipe-tool.

  In my opinion their search for social media dominance is a real drawback.

• by technotarek on 12/14/18, 1:06 PM

  As much as I hate it, I suspect there is one answer with nearly perfect correlation as to why Pinterest is losing users and their engagement: Instagram.

• by pjc50 on 12/14/18, 9:33 AM

  It's interesting that at no point in the process is any mention made of communicating with the users. I appreciate that detailed useful feedback is hard to get, especially from people who are disengaging already, but surely it has to be in there somewhere?

• by TheHideout on 12/14/18, 2:47 PM

  For me, Pinterest works exactly how I want it to - as a store for inspiration images. I use it heavily for storing concept art to later draw inspiration from when doing game design, digital art, or screen-printing designs. Granted, I don't find the search helpful at all and the embedded pins are terribly irreverent and annoying.

  If you are a Pinterest user and are interested in a large collection of fantasy/cyberpunk artwork, you can see how I use it here (registration required of course):

  https://pinterest.com/thehideoutgames/

• by apricot13 on 12/14/18, 10:49 AM

  I can forgive the forced login but i cant forgive the extra steps and buggy login process - I cant count how many times I've ended up trying to register rather than login.

  also the recommendations get old quick its just my previous searches aggregated gets boring quick. The instagram explore page has my valuable time these days - it uses my searches plus things related to those to find new things on many topics and ability to say "not relevant" is awesome - all i need now is the ability to block anything "#lifehack"!

• by maire on 12/14/18, 3:46 PM

  Pinterest has an issue with their support. I was using it for a while to gather inspiration on a particular subject. It just started crashing with a server side error message. I submitted a bug report and the response was lame. I kept saying look at your own server side error message. You must have logs to look at. I don't think a human saw my bug responses. Now I don't use it at all.

• by At1C on 12/14/18, 2:00 PM

  Sick and tired of registrations tracking spying builtin microphones on new spytv calling it smart tv for who, I get no benefit out this game forced upon all users. Terms and service agreements of bloatware, websites never improve my viewing pleasure or work better forcing users to conform get stuffed. Hit the Back button best voting option I have right now. I have learned to live without G-You-TwitFace, even while on news.ycombinator if website has pop-up sign-up begging, forced to conform and jump through hoops I hit the back button, mostly enjoy reading the comments that's the real story people talk about, and where you find the best information. Thxs for letting us vent, other than that everything is A OK thxs