Pinned, for No Good Reason

Some nameless expert with a blog and too much confidence declared that Pinterest was the next big thing—that my internet life before it was incomplete, that I needed to be there immediately, organizing images into boards, curating desire into folders. This was 2012. I believed him, because that’s what you did in 2012.

So this journal joined Pinterest. I made some boards, dumped images into them, added captions of varying stupidity. If you want to know the strategy, I can tell you there isn’t one. Why Pinterest and not the seventeen other platforms I was apparently also obligated to maintain? Because someone said so, and I’m a follower, and following is what followers do.

The list at that point looked genuinely embarrassing: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Last.fm, Formspring, and now this—which I’d already started calling "Tumblr 2.0" before I’d figured out what it actually was. Each one arrived with the same promise: reach, connection, relevance, maybe even money. Each one delivered the same result: more tabs, more upkeep, no money.

Pinterest at least made visual sense. The board format was clean, the image-forward layout worked for collecting references, and for someone who spends a lot of time accumulating visual material it wasn’t entirely useless. But I wasn’t there because I’d thought it through. I was there because the hype had reached critical mass and opting out felt like opting out of the internet itself, which in 2012 still felt like a meaningful threat.

That anxiety looks quaint now. All those platforms are either dead, irrelevant, or owned by people with worse politics than I’d like to support. Pinterest is still around, which is more than I can say for Formspring. Whether that counts as winning, I genuinely don’t know.