The Amazing Moral Fables of Pinterest

If you’re not paying attention to the always incredible goings-on at Pinterest, some recent updates:

• Pinterest is perfect for people to find and buy things. That’s why this spammer is making a minimum of $1,000 a day, all from affiliate links. Nothing really wrong with that: affiliate links to Amazon are a good business! And so is shoving up thousands of Pinterest pics a day, with affiliate links attached, apparently. BRB, gotta get on this, hate to watch a gravy train pass me by.

• Last week, when Pinterest rolled out new terms of service, which including banning thinspiration blogs — wait, sidebar? The poor anorexic bloggers! They are to the Internet what racists are to the real world! And vice versa, right? It’s quite easy to be rewarded in public for being emaciated, and also very easy to be rewarded on the Internet for being a racist, but never the other way around. Okay, sidebar over — the company encouraged people for the first time to promote their own work. Ha, well, that makes sense, since promoting other people’s work is… copyright infringement.

• Because Pinterest has a bizarre and inexplicable auto-follow system, it makes sense that site founder Ben Silbermann was one of the most popular people on Pinterest. But as of today, Ben’s Pinterest page has disappeared, and he has a brand new one! “Starting a fresh new account to remember how new Pinterest user’s feel!” is what it says in his profile. Well, that’s one view. Here’s another, that makes more sense: “it’s pretty clear what happened here: Silbermann’s old page didn’t jibe with the site’s new terms of service. It’s less trouble to start a new page than it is to clean up the old one.” Also, currently, Ben’s “Books Worth Reading” board has zero pins. 🙁