In the Wild West of Pinterest, pinners have to defend themselves.
As Pinterest swells to a size comparable to Facebook, it’s attracting an equally formidable number of “bad guys,” bots and spammers that aim to take advantage of uninformed users.
Pinterest has armed pinners with tools to help combat spam, but a new team of vigilantes is taking this battle of good versus evil one step further.
Pin Watch is a community of spam-fighting users that hopes to expose scams and keep the citizens of Pinterest safe.
“It’s like neighborhood watch for Pinterest,” Pin Watch claims on its profile.
Tipped off by #Pinchat’s Jewel Fryer, Pin Watch is the first profile we’ve seen dedicated exclusively to monitoring articles, community alerts, scam offers, and spammer profiles. Like @spam is to Twitter, this group’s an essential follow for anyone concerned about new developments in black-hat activity on the network.
While founded less than 24 hours ago, Pin Watch has already identified 50+ spammers for users to unfollow and avoid. The board encourages pinners to submit new profiles by tweeting them @PinWatch.
But who are these masked women and men anyway? Pin Watch calls itself a “small community” but doesn’t go into detail. So far, all we know is that there are at least four do-gooders. (Their profile says they are located in “California, Georgia, New York, Texas.”)
We’ve reached out to the good Samaritans behind PinWatch for comment.
Photo by Moyan Brenn