I only get Pinterest results when I'm searching for something generic enough, and in those cases, why not use an image from Pinterest. I don't really understand the hate.

It's a nightmare for finding the original sources of images. For example, I was looking for a new sink basin and doing some quick image searches for various styles.

All the ones I liked were pinterest posts with zero attribution. A reverse image search then just brings up dozens of ripped and reposted copies of that pinterest post, also without attribution.

It gets frustrating

I assume with the 'popularity' bias (probably not the right phrase) in the modern internet this is pretty much the future of search. Someone comes up with something cool, posts a pix, and someone else puts it on Twit/Face/Tube/whatever and it gets reposted over and over and over and since the original is some worthless peon as far as the algorithm is concerned you'll never, ever find them.

I wonder if that's something that can be addressed by embedding the right metadata into images/videos? Most people don't bother even checking e.g. Exif data (let alone stripping or otherwise altering it) when reposting content they find online.

I can't speak for every platform but when I was working with frequent photo posts, most in-camera or post-editing metadata was stripped out on instagram and facebook. Some smaller sites like Gab didn't seem to mess with it as much, but the bulk did. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the other big ones did, too.

It was incredibly disheartening to have no recourse to attribute my own work, other than to smear some gross watermark on it. The automatic removal of that metadata, along with AI image generation, are some of the reasons why I gave up on the hobby entirely.

It's incredibly hard and stressful to derive any sort of pleasure or interest from something when the second it's exposed to the internet, any sense of humanity you tried to attach to it is stripped away, burned, and commercialized for the monetary benefit of some ethereal financier. It's the sound of an invisible vacuum cleaner, whisking away any sense of joy or life you wanted to share with the world for common love; the death of sharing. For-pay hugs.

Pinterest kills meta and exif of all uploads.

Well fuck them and the horse they rode in on, then.

usually that's a good thing for privacy

From my experience it’s only because many times the original copy is gone. Without Pinterest, you wouldn’t even find it anymore.

Pinterest is always a dead end for me. I don't have an account, so I can't actually access anything that the link is taking me to. It's a giant turd in my search results.

The hate is because Pinterest is shallow but shows when folk are searching for depth. The engine can't tell and these results are tricksy and false.

Mostly because if you try and visit the page that the image was supposedly on, it won't actually be there.

Because Pinterest doesn't let you see anything without making an account and logging in.

And even if you are logged in, good chances you get redirected to some other useless page rather than the image you were trying to view. Or if you're not logged in, by the time you do get logged back in, you lose the original link and you're dumped on a random feed.