When I was finally ready to accept that my time was being wasted, I moved most of my social media apps to a folder on my phone called “Pandora’s Box.” This seemed the next best solution to going cold turkey. Although I consider deleting Instagram nearly every time I open the app, I haven’t yet found the resolve to part with the vacation posts of people I no longer speak to and the AI-generated reels of ice cream morphing uncomfortably into dalmatian puppies. Until that blissful day arrives, this is a decent solution: the reminder that by opening these dopamine-trap apps I am also unleashing the horrors of the world (à la Pandora) has saved me from doomscrolling many times now. 

There is one social media platform, however, that I did not move to Pandora’s Box, and have no immediate plan to. Before I understood that some of the apps on my phone are a little bit evil—before, in fact, I had even downloaded the evil apps—there was Pinterest. It’s still social media, but it feels smaller in scope, slower in pace, and reminiscent of a less overwhelming Internet era.

I joined Pinterest in 2017, a year with a familiar cast of characters and themes. Donald Trump had just been inaugurated, the first Women’s March drew millions of protesters,  #MeToo was sweeping social media, La La Land had been mistakenly awarded Best Picture, and the best-selling albums of the year were Taylor Swift’s Reputation and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. 

I paid little attention to politics or popular music at the age of thirteen, instead allocating my online time to saving pictures from my favorite animated movies, reading text posts about The Hunger Games and astrological signs, devouring fanart for The Legend of Zelda, and sending my friends humorless memes (accompanied by a hearty share of crying-laughing emojis, our communication MO). All of this happened on Pinterest, and all of this happened without shame. 

In an Internet age when every algorithm is designed to siphon your attention for the maximum amount of time, when every post is intended to provoke the maximum amount of outrage, and every benign interest is regarded with the maximum amount of cringe, I’ve found myself missing the days when Pinterest was the only social media app I used—and I’m not alone.

My longtime friends Violet, Sophie, and Amelia (all pseudonyms) grew up on Pinterest. It was the first social media app any of us downloaded, and we bore witness to one another’s middle school phases with remarkable compassion—if that’s not a sign of friendship, I don’t know what is. The four of us, along with our friend Eddy, recently banded together to revive our Pinterest phases and build upon them using our new favorite love language: a collaborative board with a section for each of us, where we collect pins that remind us of one another. We call it “Kachowcore” after our group chat “Kachow.” In addition to affirming the extent of our knowledge about each other, it serves as a reminder that our childhood-turned-college friend group—which is now frequently scattered across the globe—thrives even when we are apart. 

“I used to describe Pinterest as ‘antisocial media,’ and I used to say that’s why I liked it, but I didn’t realize that it could be social,” Violet told me. “I think that we’ve made it social, and that has been so lovely and surprising. It’s very much the love language of ‘I saw this and I thought of you.’”

My section has a lot of blues and greens, barn owls, outer space, FX’s The Bear; Violet’s has elegant architecture, painted teacups, ornate libraries, and Shrek, if you’ll believe it; Sophie’s has warm pink hues, vintage fairies, seashells, ballet; Eddy’s has cowboy-esque landscapes, woodsy snapshots, and Spider-Man; Amelia’s has scrapbooks, citrus, dogs, summer in a faraway land. Threaded throughout are messages left for each of us: there’s a text post in one section that reads “in the back of the club arms folded cause i don’t agree with the music selection,” and in another, “‘i can’t do this anymore’ says a girl who is not only going to do it but do it well.”

It’s simple, it’s personal, and it works. The closest approximation of our Kachowcore might be sharing posts via direct messages, but even this format can lack the same intention and ease. How many of us are guilty of flooding a friend’s DMs with dozens of nonsensical TikToks or Instagram reels in a single day? How many of us are guilty of not responding—or double-tapping and moving on? Nobody should be blamed for resorting to this form of communication, especially when life is busy and friends are far; but my friend group has found that the basic, thoughtful act of collecting images for each other (without the underwhelming requisite responses) has only strengthened our bonds.

“Especially with ours being a long-distance friendship, it’s hard to feel connected at all moments. This has made me feel more connected—to be able to be like, ‘oh my God, you do know me.’ To see that that’s how you perceive me, and that I do come across that way, it feels like being loved,” said Sophie. “It feels like being held.”

Being perceived is frequently regarded as a frightening or undesirable thing in the modern zeitgeist, but Pinterest goes against the grain of cringe culture: “There’s a lot of discourse around being perceived,” said Violet. “Like, ‘I do not wish to be perceived.’ ‘Do not perceive me.’ People would wear that on T-shirts. I actually think being perceived is such a lovely thing. I kind of want to be perceived, and this [collaborative board] is a perfect way of helping you unlearn the mentality that being perceived is scary.”

We have all found ourselves enjoying a more insulated version of social media, and this involves a smaller and closer set of followers. “Pinterest feels like a way to curate a version of myself that doesn’t have to perform for a certain audience,” said Sophie. “I know that people who follow me on Instagram are the people I babysat for, all of my college friends, all of my home friends since I was fourteen or younger, and random people I’ve met at random things. I’m not going to show my whole self [on Instagram].”

Self-expression often feels easier on Pinterest: being a photo sharing service rather than a social network like Instagram or Facebook, there is less emphasis on the outer world (physical appearance, number of followers, pressure to conform to trends and share news) and more emphasis on the inner world (interests, style, hobbies, creative pursuits). Pinterest encourages more privacy than other social media platforms, allowing users to create “secret” boards that cannot be viewed by other people—perfect for interests and hobbies that feel too embarrassing or amateurish. The lack of celebrity and influencer presence only helps: there’s less pressure to conform to popular trends, styles, and activities on the app. There is no “trending” page on Pinterest like there is on X, no account verification option for individuals (only for merchants), and less inflammatory content.

“It’s still about the curation of aesthetics, but it allows you to create your own, which is nice compared to the cookie-cutter videos on ‘how to dress dark academia,’ or ‘vampire core,’” said Violet. “Everything you’re interacting with on Pinterest is the content, and I never really look at who’s pinning it. I don’t feel like the concept of an influencer exists [on Pinterest].”

“It’s not a competitive thing where you feel like you need to have more followers than somebody else,” added Amelia. “It’s just your close friends following it, or nobody following it at all. It’s just for you.”

My friends have noticed how their habits have improved since they started spending more time on Pinterest and less time on Instagram, X, and TikTok; some of them noted a difference of hours in their screen time from before and after. “Pinterest is the first social media app that I’ll open in the morning now,” said Sophie. “I’m going to open Pinterest rather than something else because I know that it will bring me joy.” Waking up sans-phone is something to strive for, certainly (immediately checking your phone upon waking disrupts the brain’s transition from sleep to wakefulness, which can increase stress and distraction throughout the day), but when habit and dopamine receptors are both demanding a bit of blue light first thing in the morning, this seems like a good alternative to immediate doomscrolling.

The tendency to doomscroll (or excessively consume negative information online) and compulsively check the app are major pitfalls of social media platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok—they are also by design. TikTok generates its “For You” page using artificial intelligence, which identifies explicit behaviors of the user (such as likes and reshares) and implicit behaviors (such as viewing time) to recommend stimulating content and prompt further engagement. It’s a highly effective tactic: the platform has estimated that it takes only 260 videos, or roughly 35 minutes, for a user to become hooked on the app.

This differs from algorithmic models that are based solely on the user’s choices about the type of content they wish to consume: Pinterest’s model, according to its website, uses AI to flag what they call “inspired actions” (like saving a pin) to recommend more content. In an op-ed for The Hill, Pinterest’s CEO wrote: “...soon after I started, we found that Pinterest’s recent pivot to short-form video and AI-driven feed optimization had begun surfacing much of the same triggering content as the rest of the industry.” In response to this, their AI was retrained to give users more control over the type of pins they wish to see. Pinterest seemingly does not rely on the user’s unconscious behaviors to retain their attention, but instead operates based on their intentional actions, which is why it can be easier to avoid getting “stuck” on Pinterest than TikTok.

“With something like TikTok, where it’s continuously grabbing your attention in different ways, it’s so easy to get trapped,” said Sophie. “I have moments where it’s night and I’m supposed to be falling asleep, but I can’t stop, which is scary. I really don’t like it and I would like to not do it anymore. Pinterest feels like an outlet where it almost captures my attention to the same amount, but it doesn’t trap me there.”

Divisive political content on platforms like TikTok and X is especially captivating, and with little policy barring it (in the case of X, this content has been actively encouraged since Elon Musk took over), users are susceptible to the emotional toll of regularly interacting with distressing information. Outrage is a particularly profitable emotion for these social media platforms to generate in their users: the “confrontation effect” (wherein people are more likely to engage with conflicting viewpoints than similar ones) is what drives engagement and keeps people on the platform for longer. Many social media companies will allow divisive and outrage-provoking content to fester on their platforms under the guise of free speech, even when it truly falls under the categories of mis- and disinformation: Musk himself has spread misinformation about immigration, election fraud, and transgender policy on X. 

“At this point my TikTok is all: ‘Stop scrolling, please donate, we are dying.’ On repeat. I always watch those videos all the way through and I feel so guilty if I don’t,” said Violet. “That freaks me out and stresses me out. It’s either that, or the whiplash of going from that to Agatha All Along edits. That stresses me out even more, because there are elements of guilt and pleasure and privilege, all of which are at odds with each other. Pinterest is like, ‘these are all the aspects of my identity that I’m celebrating.’” 

When contrasted with other social media platforms, Pinterest is more careful about preventing outrageous, politically divisive, and false content. It has banned all political advertising, prohibited content that impedes an election’s validity, and has generally pledged to remove all mis- and disinformation from the platform—especially, as the website professes, misinformation about climate change (although its process for removing this content is not crystal clear). 

Pinterest is a far cry from being apolitical, however: “I think a lot of my political awakening was through Pinterest,” said Violet. “I have a board called ‘Equality, Rights, and Action’ that has sections on America’s policy, climate action, feminism, racial equality, LGBT rights, immigration, role models, and quotes. I do think Pinterest was really important to me back then for that, even though I don’t use it for that purpose much anymore.” 

70% of the user base on Pinterest is made up of women (contrast this with X, where 60% are men, or Facebook, where 56% are men), something that is apparent in the content and comment sections on the app. The type of content found on Pinterest after searching the word ‘feminism,’ for example, is a bright collection of text posts, art, protest pictures, and quotes—none of it is news (or posing as news), none of it is ironically anti-feminist, and none of it is outrageous for the sake of outrage. In a time when men can proclaim “your body, my choice” on other social media sites and go completely unchecked, this is a place for discussion, civility, and optimism—more importantly, this is a place where thirteen-year-old girls, like myself when I first joined, can feel safe. 

Call us change-resistant, but my friends and I hope that the future of Pinterest won’t diverge too much from the present; the changes we’ve noticed recently have primarily impacted our experiences in a neutral or negative way. All three named excessive advertising as their least favorite aspect. “I noticed that the ads are getting smarter, so that they’ll look like text posts. I have really disliked that lately. They’re weirdly integrated into your experience,” said Violet. 

“When I was younger I feel like there were barely any [ads], and now that’s what most of my feed is,” added Amelia. 

Pinterest makes its money through advertising, and over the past few years, it has ramped up its efforts to advertise more effectively: in 2019, when the company went public, the words “ads” and “advertising” appeared hundreds of times in its updated prospectus. When Pinterest’s CEO Bill Ready (who was previously the president of commerce and payments at Google) took over in 2022, this mission was further enunciated. Ready is heavily focused on the shopping components of Pinterest, something he expressed in an interview with Fast Company: “How do we make it so users want to engage for daily shopping activities versus occasional shopping activities?” Users such as my friends, however, who go on Pinterest not to shop but to explore their interests, are likely to be driven away if the app becomes oversaturated with ads.

Another prospective development that my friends are wary of on Pinterest is AI, which the company has started to integrate into its platform, albeit less heavily than other social media companies. It switched from CPUs to GPUs (central processing units to graphics processing units) back in 2022 in order to more accurately recommend content and increase user engagement—which it has by 16%. GPUs are able to handle generative AI applications like image and text generation more effectively: Elon Musk purchased 10,000 GPUs last year for generative AI projects on X, which have emerged in the form of their AI assistant “Grok” and image-generation technology “Aurora.” 

Pinterest’s upcoming AI projects mostly pertain to advertising campaigns, with a few existing user-oriented features that can group search results by skin tone, body type, and hair pattern—this was a move towards inclusivity on the app, and a refreshing step away from its origin as a space primarily for thin people with Eurocentric features. Although Pinterest has yet to introduce AI image or text generation for its users like Instagram and X have, it is testing a feature that would generate background images for ads.

“If AI makes its way onto Pinterest, I don’t think it will be well-received,” said Violet.

“It already feels like such a creative and ‘homemade’ kind of place,” added Sophie.

“There’s already so much content on Pinterest for every little thing you could think of,” said Amelia. “You don’t need more.”

Since Pinterest is a place for creatives to gather and share ideas, and since it is a self-proclaimed bastion of positivity and inspiration (“We’re building a more positive place online. A place that inspires the people we serve and protects the planet we share,” reads the tagline on Pinterest’s “Impact” webpage), implementing generative AI, which is trained on human-made art without consent from the artists, would be as much of a betrayal to its creative community as it would be a moral failing. 

The company’s environmental goals are promising: their global offices are completely powered by renewable energy and they plan to cut significant greenhouse gas emissions by 2027. However, GPUs already require a tremendous amount of energy to power—training AI models can produce over 600,000 pounds of carbon dioxide—and a single AI-generated image uses the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. Pinterest has not prohibited the posting of AI art on its platform, and likely won’t any time soon, but it could stand to avoid encouraging the practice by creating pages dedicated to it. I have always appreciated that Pinterest does not immediately jump at the chance to implement cutting-edge technology just for the sake of having it; thus far, they seem to have made decisions that value their core concepts and the desires of their user base, and I sincerely hope they continue to uphold the status quo on this front. 

In many senses, I love Pinterest for what it is not: it is not a place where you are encouraged to comment on the lives and physical appearances of your friends, family, and acquaintances. It is not a place where the spread of mis- and disinformation tips the scale of elections or sucks people into conspiracy theories. It is not a place that thrives on the emotional turmoil of its user base, banking their implicit reactions and recommending inflammatory content to prompt more distress for profit. It is not a place that wants you to determine whether you’re “bunny, deer, or fox pretty” (although it will probably try to sell you makeup regardless). It is not a place where you are constantly bombarded by generative AI features. It is not a place where your follower count matters. It is not a place where you wind up wasting hours of your life.

Pinterest is one of the few online spaces that still feels quiet, and I hope it stays that way. In the absence of all the external noise, I am able to focus on what matters: the latest cover photo for my Zelda board (which I still have and will not be deleting), and the fact that somebody just saved a pin to Kachowcore, and a friend somewhere is thinking of me.