[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Demimonde

[Demi's entire whole awesome post.]

Yes, I agree with all of that!

Something that used to bother me on the facebook and the blogosphere ... wait, let me time travel to earlier than that. Something that used to bother me my whole life, and I got this from my mom, was people who would say what they "wish" they could do without actually doing anything to make it happen. Oh, I wish I could ... lose weight, go back to school, learn another language, learn an instrument, learn to sew, get a job traveling the world, etc. etc. etc. Mom would get pissed because people would say she was "lucky" and she would be like "lucky?! fuck you! I worked my ass off."

Okay, fast forward to the present, and here's the thing that bothers me on facebook and the blogosphere. The same shit. People post all this shit that's supposed to be motivational, or shit they want to try, but they never get around to it. They get all the satisfaction of it just by facebooking it, and they forget to actually do the thing. It's like, if you want it so bad, quit talking about it and get off your ass and do it! Or maybe they do about half the time, but it still means their internet front end is a big fat lie. I refused to do that, not because I didn't want to be a liar, but because I didn't want to unmotivate myself from doing something by getting the satisfaction of talking about it on the facebook or blog. This is a real thing.

So I wouldn't talk about redecorating my living room, for example, until I had photos to post. It is great for motivation, but it meant I never got to crowdsource my plans. I could show results, but anything I was designing or planning or thinking about I kept to myself and didn't get the benefit of anybody else's suggestions.

So then pinterest comes along, and for whatever reason I get it into my head that pinboards are supposed to be inspiration boards. I think about when you are planning your wedding, you buy a bunch of bridal magazines and look at photos of $500,000 weddings and fantasize. Of course you can't have that wedding, but you can cut out pictures of flowers you think are pretty or an creative idea for a favor, and make a collage and have a visual repository of "things I like" and use that to further plan your event. Same with home decor. Imagine you have your decorator come over and you want to show them what you like, so you show them a collection of pictures you've saved of things you like, and they can tell at a glance what your style is and what you like as far as textures and colors and amount of business or sparseness and plan their design accordingly with your budget in mind.

I don't know, maybe I'm just starting to fall victim to that TED effect from above, but it's like I feel like the pressure's off. I can spend as much or as little time as I want posting pictures of wallpaper and bedding I'd like for the guest room, and I don't feel the pressure to run out and get the stuff right now and have it done this weekend. It gives me a chance to think and plan on things first, and be less impulsive, and if the thing never comes to fruition then maybe it was never that important in the first place.

Originally Posted by Demimonde

Yeah, during the set up, when they ask you about your interests, what they are actually doing is finding popular pinners in those sub-categories to network you with. The problem is, you end up subscribing to a bunch of their other stuff that has nothing to do with that interest, so there is a bunch of clean up to do. They really need to come up with a better system, or at least let you know they are going to do that.

Yeah, I immediately unfollowed all of those streams. They are easy to differentiate from the streams I wanted (possibly I have facebook friends with different names and avatars on pinterest that I didn't want to accidentally unfollow because I didn't recognize them), because they have like 20,000 followers.