A New Space For Fun On The Internet

It was the eve of my 22nd birthday and it was my dream (8 years too late) to be a dancing queen. Consequently, my party was to be disco themed. I bought metallic silver balloons and queued up a playlist filled with Cher. Then it was time for my favorite task of party planning— designing the invitation. I entered disco, Studio 54, glitter extravaganza, and sparkles into the search tab on Pinterest and started a new board to collect my disco-flavored pins.

My night started looking bleak when I realized I would need to copy over each individual pin to a different app in order to layer them into a pretty picture. It was looking like a complicated and tiresome process. And as someone who spent their past summer working alongside Manhattan art advisors and loved every minute of it, even I found this number of steps absurd in the name of digital artistic design.

This has been a consistent issue with Pinterest, who, while experiencing recent appreciation for being an epicenter of aesthetic curation, has grown some thorns alongside its bed of rosy pins. Besides including ads alongside every other pin on their feed, by far the biggest annoyance is that there is simply no way to create within Pinterest. You may say hold on—I use Pinterest for all my creative projects. And while that may be true, it is a starting place and never the birth canal of the final edition. In addition, the lack of social interaction with others directly on the app can make it an isolating digital experience. These limitations are pushing its users to new grounds, including me.