If you’re like me, you have a love/hate relationship with some of the sites on the Internet.  Surprisingly, they’re not the little entities trying to do something different.  Rather, they fall into the bigger-than-they-should-be category.   I’m referring to sites like YouTube (2.49 billion users), Netflix (238 million users), what used to be Twitter (450 million users), and my current favorite, Pinterest.   For the last, I’m asking myself, “Pinterest – friend or foe?”

The Situation

A few days ago, I received an email from Pinterest saying my account (business) had been suspended.  Further, it said that I should check their Community Guidelines for information on SPAM, and if I believed there was an error, I could lick a clink to let them know.  That’s it.  About 5 lines in total.

Naturally, I clicked the link and told them that the pins I was creating were to promote 3 products (children’s books), they weren’t offensive in any way, and there weren’t too many of them.  Admittedly, my wording was a little terse because they have a length restriction on my rebuttal.  Go figure!  Their response was a message indicating that they decided not to re-activate my account, and to contact them through their Help Center if I had further questions.

I got back to them with more details within a couple of hours.  I’m still waiting for a response.  A point of note, there were no issue report(s) associated with this suspension, so no one logged an issue that I know of.

My Issue(s)

First, Pinterest has some 518 million users.  Middle of the road compared to the others mentioned above.  Now, I understand that these folks need to provide interesting and safe environments for their users.  And, of course, they need to make money.  I get that.  But do they have to take the I’m big, I’m GOD, play by my rules or else attitude?  I think not.

Second, If you have an issue with SPAM, be specific.   SPAM issues center around 3 things:

• content (for example, offensive, sexual, discriminatory, etc.)
• similarity (in other words, how close in word are the items to each other)
• frequency (how many occur in a unit of time)

Now, I have an Honors degree in Computer Science and 40+ years in the industry, so I know what SPAM is.  But for the sake of argument, let’s look at the details.

I don’t have a content issue.  My pins are about unique Children’s Books (Blue Jays, Squirrels, and Timber Wolfs).  They don’t use offensive, sexual, or discriminatory language.  My pins aren’t the same.  I use AI to ensure that.  But they are similar.  The question becomes, how similar can they be?  And frequency-wise, I send 3 pins a day (8 hours apart) for each of the 3 products.  Each product pin is staggered 1 hour apart from the other product pins.  This is 9 pins a day in total.  Is that too many?

And lastly, what’s taking so long?  For other support cases, and the response to their initial email, they got back to me in less than an hour.

Conclusion

So, where do we go from here?  Well, I’d like to see them do 3 things.

First,  I’d like to see them give up this GOD-mode attitude and get more personable.  For example, instead of disabling accounts, send a message indicating what the issue is and work with me to resolve it.   Second, respond with the metrics mentioned above.  I’ll adjust my pins, and it will be done.  And third, recognize that there is potential revenue for them here.  For example, I’m currently using the free automatic pin creation capability of a business account.  But it has a restriction of 100 scheduled pins which I’ll exceed shortly.  I’ll have to look at a something like partnership as an alternative, which isn’t bloody likely given their current attitude.

Without these, I’ll continue to ask myself, “Pinterest – friend or foe?”