Pinterest seems to be the new OMG HAVE YOU SEEN IT thing lately, which, okay, fine.
It took me a while to get into it and then only a few moments to forget about it again. This probably says more about how my brain works than any particular thing wrong with the premise of Pinterest. I’m not a designer home kind of girl and pretty things usually just make me grumpy that my house is falling down and my finances are limited at best.
Every few weeks though, I would click through to Pinterest to see what was happening in the gardening and food sections. Gardens and food are something I can do and there were some nice ideas.
Ignoring the fact that I seemed to see the same pictures pinned over and over and over and fucking over again, I was able to peruse photos of walkways and overgrown vegetation and delicious foody things.
Until, one day, I found something that looked interesting. So I clicked on it, to find it’s source, so that I could read more about it.
Source: Google.com
Huh. Just one image, snagged by a Pinterester, using Google image search. There was no accreditation for the original photographer, and nothing available to tell me what on earth it actually was, or how to cook it.
Slowly as I found myself clicking on more and more things, I was finding more and more images grabbed from Google, with nothing about the original author.
And okay, I get that kittens or fuzzy bunnies or whatever maybe don’t technically NEED a source, recipes.
Artwork, crafts and awesome ideas however, definitely DO.
It’s like a giant game of Chinese Whispers, once things have been pinned half a dozen times, no one knows what it was originally about.
I am a big believer in not watermarking images, instead choosing to resize to “Internet friendly, but you can’t print it out”. I think watermarks distract from a photo and make things look messy.
But Pinterest makes me want to start watermarking things. It also makes me want to put a giant padlock on my site and disallow third party search engines from collecting images that Pinteresters could then pin, with no thoughts of accreditation.
Also, I think Pinterest enables people to use images in blog posts and then only give source credit to Pinterest. I’m sorry, but “found on Pinterest” is not source credit.
NO, NO IT ISN’T.
I’m calling you out Pinterest. I think you’re damaging for artists, for craftspeople, for food bloggers, for photographers and for people with interesting ideas that they kindly share with the Internet.
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