>things beloved primarily by women and children are the exact things the mainstream marginalizes<p>Is that really true? Pinterest seems to be pretty popular and is considered a "must have" in terms of social media strategy. There's huge markets in women's magazines, stores like Kohls and Payless as mentioned in the article, Curves, Weight Watchers, and don't forget the makeup and popular music industries. Taylor Swift isn't singing to all the men or old women in the audience.<p>It seems to me that women and children basically <i>define</i> mainstream.
The bad thing about WeHeartIt is that people post images on it without sourcing them. So if you're searching for where a specific image came from, and somehow end up on weheartit page, then tough luck. Worse yet, they're often reposted to Tumblr which only increases the spread of unsourced images.
Weheartit is pretty fascinating actually. It isn't a household name in the states because it is a Brazilian product if I recall correctly. It's also older than pinterest, and almost the exact same model (image clipping from the web). I suspect pinterest was heavily inspired by it.<p>Another thing that keeps it interesting is that it was created by one guy, and is almost entirely bootstrapped. They only recently raised outside capital mid last year (<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/27/weheartit-raises-8m-for-its-less-popular-version-of-pinterest/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/27/weheartit-raises-8m-for-it...</a>). Reminds me a lot of imgur.
I find this website way more fascinating than Instagram or Pinterest. The name and the visual appeal is a bit too girly also.<p>* SPOILER: I'm a man <i>
It shouldn't come as a surprise that every X months there's a new teen thing. IIRC, FormSpring was one such thing that seems to have faded from the zeitgeist. Will be interesting to see which way SnapChat, Yo, etc. go.