Do I Need To Follow You? Examining the Utility of The Pinterest Follow Mechanism

Pinterest is a Social Network Site (SNS) centered around the curation and sharing of visual content. The site encourages users to form ties with (follow) other users based on mutual interests, and use these ties to discover and share content. In this work, we examine the efficacy and relevance of the Pinterest follow mechanism in driving content discovery and curation. We collect a sample of user activity and find that the vast majority (88%) of the unique users who interact with an average user's content are non-followers. Conversely, only 12.3% of a user's followers interact with any of their pins. Users who discover and repost content from outside their follow network also do not subsequently follow the contributors of that content. Our results strongly suggest that following is neither heavily utilized nor strongly effective for driving content discovery and sharing on Pinterest.