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CNN Business published this video with Pinterest’s CEO. Warning, it’s autoplaying!

Founder and CEO Ben Silbermann explains why he hopes Pinterest will inspire users to eventually take their activities offline.

It’s a good message. The Internet and social networks originally held the promise of encouraging creativity and engagement with the real world. Think of sites like Flickr in the early days. Social networks today are all about monetising your attention, which necessarily means keeping you rooted to your computer or phone.

It’s also surprising and encouraging that Pinterest have been able to maintain their independence for this long. Too many of these sites are created to be bought, which invariably creates privacy concerns. With Tumblr now gone, this is even more important.

But Pinterest is itself a maddening service filled with dark patterns. If you’ve done any image search, you would have experienced landing on a Pinterest page that slowly covers the results with a pop-up you can’t dismiss, demanding you sign up. It’s the image equivalent of Experts Exchange from back in the day.

I’m researching plugins now that explicitly remove Pinterest from any search result, such is my frustration with encountering it.