My love for Pinterest just withered away and died, all in a matter of a day or so.

A while pack they started putting “promoted pins” in my feed, which wouldn’t have been too bad if they actually related to what I was interested in seeing. On fasting days I don’t want to see food, so I unfollow the food-related boards of everyone I follow. But I did have a board of recipes and the new feature decided this meant I wanted to see food pins.

So I deleted that board. After clicking “I don’t want to see this” to get rid of some of them, they stopped appearing.

Now “picked for you” pins have suddenly flooded my feed. Almost as many of them as legitimate pins. The quantity is only half the problem, too. I have the same issue with pins appearing that I don’t want to see. Having a board with machine knitting pins in it means I get hand knitting pins. Having a weaving board means I get beginner instructions and pics of those retro wall hanging things that are all the trend on hipster interior design blogs.

And I can’t turn these ones off.

I figured plenty more pinners would be pissed off about this and complain, so maybe in a week or two things would go back to normal or an option to turn off this feature would appear. But when I did a google search, it seems it’s been a problem since at least September 2013. I don’t know why I haven’t had the problem until now, but it seems pretty clear that “pinned for you” is here to stay.

The weird thing is, the pins aren’t ads, and it’s just doubling up on the search feature. It doesn’t make sense why they’d do this.

Anyway, as always when a social media site changes in a way that doesn’t work for me, I’ve been asking myself if I really need it. It took me all of a few hours to realise… no, I don’t need Pinterest. It’s not of benefit to my work. It’s not a way to keep in touch with friends. At the most, for me, it’s a conduit to new ideas and a way to bookmark useful pages on the internet, available on all my devices, home and out.

Which is why I’ve been a big advocate of making sure links are legitimate on pins. If they aren’t, they’re a lot less useful. Some of the “picked for you” pins I investigated didn’t link back to a source, so Pinterest obviously doesn’t value that much any more.

Since Twitter stopped listing tweets chronologically in the feed, which I find too confusing, I’ve not used it much. I only joined Facebook because my friends were there, and I hate it for the same reason. I am so over social media sites fixing what wasn’t broken.

I’m not leaving Pinterest, as there are still ways it can be useful, but I have a few ideas in mind to replace its function as a pinboard of interesting craft and DIY ideas.