I’ve been a Pinterest fan for years: One of the best places to find great graphics in almost any category from animals, to people to landscapes to art, news, history, etc. Beyond being able to look at all these great pictures, you can also setup your own filing system and save these pictures to a filing system that suits your needs.

Despite my love of Pinterest and despite its great features, I have watched Pinterest change for the worse over the years. Their visions of additional functionality have overrun their ability to provide an enjoyable end user experience. Many of their improvements have caused the site to run so much slower as to make it almost unusable. One great feature is their AI (Artificial Intelligence) that can fairly accurately guess the category in which you will place a picture you are viewing. Other improvements have caused the user’s browser to fill its cache, lose his place, requiring the user to start over at the beginning of his search for new photos wasting the user’s time reviewing previously viewed photos. In short, it seems that each and every tacked on feature has caused their program to run slower and slower and become more and more inefficient. Through all these improvements, Pinterest has lost its major asset which I call its ‘game play’. There is no game play anymore. What is left is a kludgy, thickly coded behemoth that does not and cannot scale as more and more photos, users and categories are added. So if Pinterest is interested in continued growth, they are faced with some serious decisions. Either they have to slim down and go back to their roots or they must rethink, re-architect and reprogram their codebase from the ground up so that it can scale as they add features.