I have been a Pinterest Addict for a few years now. Ask any of my friends. If I am "gone", it's because I am doing something on Pinterest. I love the learning process. I love being able to satisfy my curiosity on just about any subject. I have three pages, one just devoted to photographers. And I can say without reservation, I have learned more about those photographers than through any class I have taken.
So it is with a lot of dismay that I look to a future without Pinterest in it. In the past year, Pinterest has made it abundantly clear that they do not consider themselves a social media forum. They are in the business of attracting businesses to sell pins to, and monetizing the whole process. I have no objection to people making money. What I take issue with, is throwing out the people who built Pinterest, with utter disregard for what you owe them. Without those of us with huge pages, and lots of followers, there is nobody for the businesses to sell to, is there?
My biggest issues are these:
1. My photography page was suspended (as close as I can figure) on December 11, 2016. This is the board where I collect nothing but professional photographers. I never received an email saying I had violated standards, nor any warning this was going to happen. And in fact, I can’t figure out how I could possibly have violated the policies (and yes, I’ve read them). These are all well-known, well-respected, professional photographers whose work is in museums around the world. What is most irritating, is that I have asked for assistance with the suspension at least 11 times since it happened, plus a letter to Tim Kendall, the President of the company. The only response I have gotten are surveys asking “how did we do?”. When I requested more help from that source, I have been ignored. I have seen many boards (and have reported one when I was being harassed by the owner) that are frankly pornographic and are still in business. What I object to most is being ignored. That page represented a year's worth of effort on my part, and had about 1000 followers.
2. I started the year with about 37,000 followers on my oldest page.. By mid-December, I was down to
32, 800. Every week, I lose about 80 followers. All on a Tuesday or Wednesday night. I have reached out to Pinterest Help many times over the year. The answer I consistently get is “1. Don’t count your follower adds from notifications (thank you, I am not an idiot, and I don’t). and 2. “We periodically clean out fake accounts”. That would account for the first few “purges”, but not all of them. Since they have been doing this all year, at some point they would have gone through my 37k followers fairly quickly. The math doesn’t work. Nor does logic. I simply cannot only be adding fake accounts. Since I only add maybe 25 followers a week (I can’t add pins to this page because I am at the limit) they are purging more than I add. The first week in December I lost 400 followers in one week. No one can explain why. Oddly, this never happens to my other two accounts. Nor does it happen to a few friends whose followers are in the 200k range.
3. The use of “experts” (who often reply before reading the whole issue), and who are clearly unsupervised (since they close questions without troubling to answer them) is simply insulting. They solicit feedback on these “experts”, yet don't not take action on that feedback. Pinterest recently initiated a change in the notification system. I saw at least 5,000 comments on ONE announcement pin begging Pinterest to re-evaluate for well-thought out reasons. If one contacted Pinterest on the issue, they were told to submit feedback at a specific spot designed to collect it. Nothing was ever changed. It would have been nice if there had been some explanation for the change. If they are going to be making sales, and working with business people, they are going to need a real customer service department. They are obviously understaffed there.
I recently conducted an informal survey with some long-term pinners. It turns out that the week I had the loss of 400 followers was the same week that many of those pinners had an account suspended. All with no explanation, all with no response to repeated requests for assistance. None could understand why.
I am not sure why Pinterest thinks they will succeed when they treat their users so shabbily. I suppose they think they can coast on the efforts of those who made their success to-date possible. I am deeply saddened by this. Pinterest was a special community and a unique product. I hope someone who will value us is listening.
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