It was mostly ruined by ads/SEO spam many years before. AI is probably the final nail in the coffin for any of the users who appreciated its original appeal, which was basic image curation from mostly blogs.

Wait, are you telling me that before LLMs, this was the good version of Pinterest?

This is the most common blocked site on ublacklist lists and kagi and probably it is also on many of the common dns blocklist.

I don’t really get the Pinterest hate, but from what I understand it’s because their walled garden content came up in web search results. Anyway I’ve been using their app for over a decade. It’s the best place on the internet to explore visual art. The content is manually curated by users and the feed/recommendation algorithms are super good. It’s got very few and inoffensive ads too. The only issue with it is now the occasional AI content.

It seems most sites that allow user generated content, and allow images/video, have been ruined by AI.

Before long we’ll need a second internet just for real people, as this internet will just be all bots and AI content. Dead internet indeed.

Or better yet, maybe I can get some real hobbies outside of tech.

I still have no desire to use it, but reading the complaints and explanations of AI wrecking Pinterest has finally given me some understanding of what people do there and why they bother.

Cara (cara.app) has images - art, photos, etc - that are not AI.

Incidentally, it is a site blessedly free of extra features that add nothing to the use case (sharing things you make).