COW Here: Mooing About Pinterest

I didn't jump on the Pinterest bandwagon as quickly as many people did, but when I finally did, it turned out to be a near record-setting broad jump. The statistics at the top of the page show that I have 83 boards and no fewer than 4.5k pins!

It's a great place to store recipes until I get a chance to try them, to dream about future quilts, hang on to words of wisdom, and all kinds of other things. Over time, I organized and reorganized, breaking down "recipes" into several subdivisions and more recently "desserts" into smaller categories. My Pinterest base is, perhaps, the most tidy and organized piece of my life. A couple of months ago I learned how to move the boards around and now mine are filed with sewing and quilting boards first, cooking boards second, followed by all the others. I tell you, it's a  marvel.

So, what's the Moo? It's "Picked For You." I totally understand that there have to be paid advertisement pins show up. I get that. This thing has to be funded somehow. I see the paid ads and nod acknowledgment. Unwelcome they are, but not the issue. "Picked for You" populates my home page with all kinds of stuff that somebot things I want to see. I have a crowd of other people's boards that I follow; I'm genuinely interested in what they're saving and sometimes I save those things to. People I've chosen to follow and boards I've chosen to follow.

Lately I've noticed that my feed is providing more and more "Picked for You" pins. It's like for every ten pins there will be three paid ads, three that I'm truly following and four that the bot wants me to see. I wish I understood why Pinterest insists on this feature. More than that, I wish I could turn it off. I've complained to Pinterest, but to no avail. Cannot be turned off. Cannot be decreased. But oh how aggravating to get these picked-for-me pins of shrimp scampi and crab souffles. Can Pinterest be trying to kill me? If it knows me so well, why is it pretending I don't have a serious shellfish allergy?

Moo!