Why You Should Stop Pinning Other People's Images To Pinterest

Pinners are killing the homegrown internet content machine.
Tara Bradford's How image-sharing sites are undermining photography is an absolute must-read for both pinners and content providers.

I say this because Tara provides a comprehensive list of all the rogue image scrapers and crowdscrapers that she must deal with on a daily basis. To pinners, this should vividly illustrate the negative impact that their hobby has on the very people they purport to celebrate. To content creators, the list is a reminder of all the websites that need monitoring.

I must quote Tara here, because I swear my eyes became moist reading this:

After blogging for 7 1/2 years and writing 2,427 posts, I have deleted nearly 1000 posts - and may delete more - to avoid having to track those photos all over the Internet. I've deleted category links to posts within my blog, after at least 3 phishing sites copied every post in several categories (a website was suspended, after posting 91 of my articles). I've changed the original url to many blog posts, after finding the same photos stolen over and over again (with 19 different bridal sites as the culprits!). And I've started adding prominent watermarks to every image I post.

This is what pinners and other crowdscrapers are doing to the internet that I know and love. They are eroding it now, and they will eventually destroy it, leaving nothing but corporate content.

This internet I speak of was once a place that rewarded self-publishing. Freed of the need to please an editor, the costs and delays of print media, authors, photographers, teachers, etc. could use the internet to share information, and derive revenue from advertisement, sponsorships, licensing, print-on-demand etc.

Pinterest and other crowdscrapers incite people to strip that content from the people that create it, and surrender it at the feet of corporate entities.

Loss of vital web traffic and exclusivity of distribution removes the incentive to add more content. As Tara and others start to first stem the flow of content production, block access to image search engines, get tangled up in lawyerly pursuits... the homegrown internet content machine will dry up and die.

As Predicted...

As predicted in Exploiting Pinterest's Embed Feature, semi-automated or fully automated scraper sites are re-arranging Pinterest's crowdscraped content for further redistribution but especially PROFIT.

May this serve as a reminder for those that are flattered when their material is "pinned" - when the horses run out of the barn, there is no telling how far they'll go.

To wit: craftprojectimage.com.

Every content creator's favorite byline is displayed on this scraper blog:

No copyright infringement intended. The source of each image and it's related text is always linked to with the 'source' link at the bottom of each post.

Except that the "source link" leads back to Pinterest, not to the content provider's own website.

And the below, a reminder for everyone that argues that "Pinterest makes no money!!!":

This website uses third-party advertising companies to serve ads to visitors of this site and may use information (not including visitors' name, addresses, e-mail addresses, or telephone numbers) about visits to this website to provide ads which are of interest to the visitors. It is advised to install a dependable anti-virus software and firewall on visitor's computer so as to have optimum safety from computer virus attacks.

Pinterest may make no money beyond raising venture capital by exploiting other people's content by way of crowdscraping, but there is nothing to stop fourth-party scraper sites to exploit the EMBED feature and actually profit from copyright infringement.

The "flattery" of having one's artistic material ravaged by pinners comes at the cost of being used a tool by internet pirate to draw visitors, and infect their computers.

Pinterest Sputters

Pin hags are getting bored of red velvet shit.
After a meteoric rise, and subsequent leveling off of traffic, Pinterest's 2013 second quarter appears to demonstrate that stealing images from artists, photographers and bloggers gets old after a while. One can always hope that Pinterest will myspace itself.

Let's take a closer look at the last 3 months:


Pinterest is trending down, artists hopeful
While it's reasonable to expect traffic downturns during the summer months while pin hags are out gardening, this downturn does appear more pronounced and sustained than it was at the corresponding time last year.

What factors might contribute to this excellent downturn?

• It takes a few months for pin hags to realize how futile their picture collections are.
• Bing, Yahoo and Google Image searches now show full-size images without having to visit source websites, competing with Pinterest's highly successful business model of shamelessly grabbing other people's pictorial content by way of crowdscraping.
• Even spammers are beginning to realize that Pinterest referral traffic is just a worthless trickle.
• All the pictures have already been pinned, so Pinterest is degenerating into an incestuous orgy of monotonous re-pinning.
• Maybe the "strikes" are working a slow grind?

Pinterest is not going down without a fight.

• The image displays are even bigger!
• Analytic features for overtly commercial boards, so that their owners get to see in charts and numbers how completely useless Pinterest referral traffic really is!
• Hassling the content providers: DMCA take-down requests are more error-prone than ever with the "strike system" radio buttons popup text interfering with the use of the buttons, glitches like the button that is clicked causing the button in the following entry field to unclick, error messages that wipe out the check-marks and pull-down selection menus, DMCA confirmation letters that do not list the images that have been taken down (if they have been taken down).

If Pinterest flouders, how about crowdscraping the written word, next?

Crowdscraper Is In

Added to the Urban Dictionary:

Crowdscraper

A crowdscraper is a website that makes use of volunteer manpower to scrape content from third party websites under the guise of being a social medium. The volunteers receive digital rewards such as "likes," "followers" or "friends." Crowdscrapers, by nature, promote a culture of unbridled copyright infringement. While they are probably legally protected from infringement claims by the DMCA, their volunteer base isn't and serves as a human legal shield.

Pinner Obituaries

It's October already and we've been exploring the conflict between the crowdscraper Pinterest and the content creators who suffer the scraping since May. Today, we're pausing to look at the big picture.

Once a robust tool to support faster and better creative outputs, computers have now devolved into perma-obsolescing digital consumption platforms.

It wasn't so long ago that computers revolutionized how we type, archive, and design; machines were welded to every work desk. Some of us may even remember some warnings about how anyone not proficient with PASCAL or COBOL programming languages would be unemployable. The internet became a repository for volunteered information, a virtual encyclopedia of human knowledge and pursuit.

Would there come a time where there the marginal value of an extra bit of information on the web would approach zero, and we'd just piss time away re-arranging and re-exploiting what is already there and accessible? We would have hoped not.

On the other end of what has become a spectrum, cell phones, after a bout of getting smaller, started to get smarter.

For a while we fumbled and put tiny keyboards on cell phones, but by and large, the tendency is to drop the keyboard. With this trend, written communications reached unprecedented brevity (think: Twitter). Their worth diminished, and the time invested in each communication suffered a similar fate.

Laptop keyboards aren't particularly ergonomic, and don't get much love. The touchscreen tablet was born.

Technology has progressed in a way that has led us down the path of least resistance. Instead of using computers to create, build, and transform, our hands firmly on the mouse and the keyboard, we are now consuming farmvilles, images, illegal music downloads, youtube pratfalls and social rewards such as likes and followers. It must be depressing for microprocessors these days. Like The Hitchhiker's Guide robot Marvin, brain the size of a planet, reduced to performing menial tasks like fetching meek, cooperating ship intruders.

This is where Pinterest fits in. Scroll with your index, press the pinmarklet, and you've scraped content for Big Brother. You moved some electrons, re-arranged some zeros and ones off a big server somewhere, and completely wasted your time. Each like represents one unit of someone acknowledging your existence from the anonymous time-wasting masses, and the illusion that you're doing something worthwhile. It's an illusion. Pinning is doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Someday, when the pinners from the Pinner Hall of Shame are laying in their coffins, the survivors will say, in their obituraries: "she pinned a lot of pictures on the internet." And the kids will laugh, because there may be no internet left to speak of, abandoned the same way computer punch cards once were. "What's the internet, mom? Is it what you used before we switched to the stratocube?"

I Will Crowdscrape

I Will Crowdscrape

Pinterest, I love you
You give me many likes
You give me followers
From lawsuits, I shield you
I'll bite the legal bullet
And run the gauntlet

Pinterest, I love you
You line up pictures
You host my folders
From artists, I steal for you
Master, are you pleased?
I serve, so you be enriched.

Crowdscraping

Why are we referring to Pinterest as a crowdscraper?

"Scrapers" were once considered the #1 scourge of the internet. Automated scripts would crawl the web for topical content and images from third party websites, collage it together without sense or logic, slap ads on it, and voilà! A mish-mash website is created, honed with automated search engine optimization trickery, and acts like a honey pot to draw search engine traffic and befuddled visitors, who hopefully will befuddledly click on the advertisements. Most of the time, visitors walked away at the first sight of the bizarre, keyword-stuffed, content-less gibberish that made scrapers instantly recognizable.

Search engineers would work hard to weed out this nuisance out of their result pages. They hired linguistics experts to find ways to distinguish normal syntax from robot word salad.

They also strove to ferret out duplicate content, and set out to find ways to distinguish the copiers from the originators.

The ever-inventive scrapers responded by hiring English-speaking "writers" from the third world with no actual understanding of the topic beyond some ability to concoct stock, sensical sentences such as: "Everyone loves dolphins. Dolphins are important to the world. Without dolphins, there would be no dolphins, etc."

Welcome to the next generation of content scraping: crowdscraping.

There is no doubt that Pinterest is a content scraper.

• Nearly all its content is directly taken from other websites.
• Stolen content is collaged and re-organized.
• No original content anywhere.
• Sophisticated search engine optimization techniques geared towards massive traffic draw to itself (giving no credit to the links to the original websites with nofollow attributes).

Instead of bots, or third-world manpower requiring salaries, Pinterest has enlisted volunteer scrapers. These volunteers serve two key purposes: (1) scrape content for Pinterest and (2) act as a legal human shield, taking the hit of C&D demands for damages while Pinterest has made itself legally untouchable via its TOU.

The volunteers' reward? Completely meaningless "Likes," "Repins" and "Followers" from complete strangers, which are like catnip to the social animals that we are.

Yet, Pinterest barely qualifies as a social medium. Most social media, even those that are plagued by a fair amount of infringement, have the merit of having been designed as a means of original self-expression. Despite Pinterest's marketing claims that the pictures we like or the images of things we would buy if we had the money are "self-expression," they are in fact the expressions of others.

OTHER PEOPLE'S STUFF ≠ WHO I AM

We can only hope that this will dawn on pinners, that Google will penalize the practice, and that crowdscraping will be but a passing fad.