Pinterest's Problem: <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pinterest.com/</a><p>Their front page does not explain what the hell it actually is, so all users that join them join because existing users already know what the site actually does and ask friends to join, which of course restricts new users to being close to their existing demographics.<p>Edit: While i typed this the teeny tiny "About" link at the bottom of the page disappeared. (?!)<p>Edit2: After browsing around on their about pages, they have a lot of breathless promises of virtually world peace caused by using Pinterest, but little concrete information of what the site is actually useful for. They could do with grabbing some people off the street and pitching them various explanations to find some where the person actually understands the site afterwards.
They should do like the tech community. Make "Pinterest Boys Meetup" and "PiGuys" making free lunch paid by all the major clothing companies where girls are not allowed to participate. Also, they should host conferences and encourage guys to participate and make discounts for them. They should tell everyone how much they appreciate guys joining them.
I don't really see a problem here, I think it is a strength to have a big female audience. It's a unique selling point for pinterest.<p>Personally, I don't find social news/streams etc. very interesting anyway. For regular visits I much prefer sites that group content around certain subjects, not people.
Ignoring the massive concentration of fucked up gender issues in that article, I do find it interesting how sites develop these very clear cultures and how quickly.<p>I recently came into an Ello account, and ultimately found myself put off by the place; there's nothing about the <i>software</i> that's that offputting (other than the overlarge sidebar), but I look around at who and what is on it and I feel out of place. The whole site seems to be populated entirely by 'modern artist' types and little else.<p>Similarly, G+ very quickly wound up being a go to for tech and general nerdery, but little else (perhaps just because no one else cared about the sales pitch).<p>Some of this of course is down to founder curation of a sort, Ello is run by artists so of course it being invite only meant they mostly invited more artists, while G+'s earliest adopters were Google coders and employees.<p>But the latter was certainly the case for Twitter as well, and it managed to claw past that reputation, just as Facebook clawed its way past its early rep for 'that place for college kids to play Scrabble'.<p>I wonder how one even goes about controlling or managing this kind of culture shift, and if one even should.
My wife has a Pinterest account. She has dozens of neatly maintained boards and about 300 followers. It's an amazing space. But for my male friends and myself, it's not even on our radar. It's an odd dichotomy. So many spaces are overwhelmingly male, this one stands out for the opposite. But I've no idea what causes it.
You can't browse the site without being signed up; every time I hit it from a google image search the content I want to see is teased behind a registration wall. Does that keep men out disproportionately? Probably not but it does hurt when you're trying to catch up on users and those users might be more skeptical consumers than your existing customers. How on earth do you convince someone to use your product if you won't let them use your product?
The use cases for Pinterest have always been very vague, and the default categories keep changing.<p>Pinterest hasn’t done a good job of explaining the uses of the service, especially the great wishlist service whose rich-data pins can send you an alert, when the price on one of your items drops. I also think they haven't nailed down exactly what Pinterest is for and just keep seeing what people do with it; they didn't have a Quotes section initially, if I recall correctly, for instance.<p>On the other hand, it's a little silly to frame it as an issue that guys aren't using a particular service. I hear the demographic of women is still quite large.
> Ms. Meyers-Levy’s studies have shown that women are able to process information more comprehensively and to do so at a lower threshold. Men are more selective and tend to focus on the essentials.<p>I was expecting a cool, UI/gender studies point about pinterest's grid style getting gendered as for girls through social construction, but instead just read some bullshit gender essentialism.
Here's a key insight for the Pinterest team ... your demographics are going to look like the demographics for scrapbooking [1]. I don't scrapbook (I'm male) or know of <i>ANY</i> other men that scrapbook (or at least admit to scrapbooking). Personally, it seems like a very boring past-time and the closest I come is to look at what my wife and daughters have created.<p>I won't be signing up for Pinterest for the same reason.<p>Please note: I'm not that macho personae ... I love to cook, can sew and knit and generally do my own laundry. I'd love to be able to draw better (but the engineer in me likes his straight lines and square corners). I'll even occasionally watch (and enjoy) a chick-flick.<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.hummiesworld.com/2011/02/scrapbooking-demographics.html#.VMJN1zW350w" rel="nofollow">http://blog.hummiesworld.com/2011/02/scrapbooking-demographi...</a><p>EDIT: Yes - I know the demographics shown at the linked site are affected by Facebook's demographics.
>In other words, Pinterest’s busy design may create an information-overload for men. “If this was a magazine, they’d turn the page,” Ms. Meyers-Levy said. “It works for females because they like detail, they like more complexity.”<p>Not sure who they studied here, but I love high information density. Sparse metro interfaces and blank pages with one thing on them are far, FAR more likely to make me move on to something else. I've stopped reading more than one site when they suddenly went from high to low information density. Of everyone I know, male and female, not <i>one</i> has a good thing to say about low information density.<p>Not a Pinterest user because I always had the perception it was recipes and fashion, but might be more interested to look now.
I tried pinterest a while back (so apologies if it's changed since)... I remember the sign-up process was awful. Part of the sign up process forces you to follow a certain number of other people. I just wanted a blank page to start adding to. If I'm signing up to something "social" with my name attached, I don't want to be forced to publicly follow other people/groups that I haven't fully checked out.<p>The sign-up process was so in-your-face and demanding I gave up and never came back.<p>(I'm male, if that makes any difference or relevance).
Reddit is the Pinterest for MAN.<p>Personally, I just find the way Pinterest organizes its contents leads to low information density, maybe because there isn't any place left for text and the images are so slim make memes look bad?<p>However, I don't the lack of male participation is an emergent issue for Pinterest right now. Bigger issue may be, since the whole site already looks like a giant billboard, how to squeeze real money out of it.
I have a pinterest account, and my wife and I used it when looking at houses last year. She'd find a house online, pin it to a board, and if she really liked it, would send me the pin.<p>I think of it as a bookmarking service meant for collections of similar things.
I'm a man using Pinterest to study design, fashion, art, astronomy, and other visually oriented subjects. I follow boards for UX/UI design elements and animations which would be relevant to the HN audience but, honestly, I'm not super eager to have more "men" on the site. In this case, imho, the problem isn't Pinterest the problem is men and I'm fine with that problem; it keeps a lot of subtle porn and memes away from the site. Pinterest should be focusing on the men they do have and growing that audience instead.