Pinterest Founder on the Human Indexing Machine

Pinterest’s Founder: Algorithms Don’t Know What You Want | MIT Technology Review: " . . . We often talk about Pinterest as like a human indexing machine. Google built these crawlers that would go out, and these amazing algorithms. We give people tools that let them organize in a way that makes sense to them, and in doing that they organize in a way that makes sense to other people. It just sort of respects our philosophy of how we want to achieve our mission, by helping people organize things. That organization is different than the approach you would take if you were only using machines. Many people think or assume that Pinterest is mostly used by women. Is that the case? It’s not how we think about the site; we try to build things for the whole world. That said, most of our users right now are women. I think that’s a function of how the site and the service tend to spread along interest categories. We’ll see an area like interior decorating, and then an adjacent interest will open up. It’s becoming more diverse. I would guess that when camping opens up as an interest, fishing would be an adjacency. . . ."


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