Have we underestimated Pinterest?

Pinterest has become an increasingly popular platform among young people, especially among Gen Z users, who now make up over 40% of global users. Much of its success is due to the platform’s ability to engage this audience segment — a noteworthy shift for a service launched in 2010 that was initially frequented mostly by an adult and predominantly female audience. Today, Pinterest has over 500 million users worldwide. This result stems from specific strategies implemented by the company to make Pinterest more suitable for minors. One example is the notification that appears Monday through Friday for users in the U.S. and Canada aged 13 to 17, encouraging them to focus on school and pause their use of the platform until classes are over. «Focus is a beautiful thing. Stay on track by closing Pinterest and turning off notifications — at least until the school bell rings,» the message reads. At the same time, Pinterest has strengthened its parental control tools, offering parents new ways to monitor their children's activity, and introduced stricter restrictions on the sharing of nude images, including artistic content. Unlike other social networks, the company has almost eliminated the circulation of controversial content — which was already less common than on competing platforms. However, Pinterest’s core structure and functionality remain unchanged.

The pros and cons of Pinterest

The platform stands out from other social networks by functioning more like a search engine, where users can find visual references on a wide range of topics — from interior design to graphic design and photography — and save them in custom collections, either public or private. Unlike social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok, here likes and views are not that important: user attention is focused on the images themselves, not on the profiles that posted them. On Pinterest, the typical logic of influencer marketing is therefore less relevant: the system serves more to build a visual reference framework than to gain followers and personal visibility. From this perspective, the social network is more similar to Tumblr than to Instagram. Moreover, direct interactions between users are quite limited, and many members appreciate this feature because it reduces social pressure and the risk of developing forms of addiction. Differences from other social networks are also evident in the platform’s algorithm: Pinterest’s algorithm is specifically designed to show highly personalized content, unlike other platforms where posts are often shown out of context to probe new interests.

Pinterest also has some downsides that users have increasingly begun to point out. One of the most discussed issues is the overwhelming presence of sponsored content on the homepage, a result of the company’s strategy to turn Pinterest into a kind of e-commerce platform, where it’s possible to purchase directly what you see — much like TikTok Shop. Added to this are concerns related to content moderation: recently, part of the human moderation team has been replaced by automated systems, which, as is also the case on other platforms, do not always manage to properly filter inappropriate posts. Another emerging issue is the growing spread of images created with artificial intelligence, which are altering the quality of search results. According to some users, this type of content tends to make suggestions more homogeneous and less original, negatively impacting those who use Pinterest to find realistic and applicable ideas in the real world, particularly the many professionals and creatives who use the platform.