Skip to main content

New custom feed tools will help streamline your Pinterest brainstorms

What’s pinned today may be irrelevant next week, so Pinterest is giving users more ways to control what ideas they see. On Tuesday, October 15, Pinterest launched home feed tuner controls, along with more pin-level control over what pops up in the home feed. The change, Pinterest says, is designed to help the home feed evolve as user needs evolve, such as removing wedding ideas after the wedding.

The home feed tuner, found in the settings, or by navigating to pinterest.com/edit, allows users to use a toggle a certain topic on and off temporarily or indefinitely. The tuner lists the user’s boards, topics, and followed accounts, as well as the recent search history, which is also included in the home feed. If you search for your Halloween costume but find something epic and don’t want any more ideas in your feed, you can turn off that recent search topic.

The change also introduces the option to get ideas for a secret board delivered to the home feed. Secret boards still aren’t visible to other users, Pinterest says, but you can now turn on recommendations to see suggestions based on those secret pins in your home feed. Previously, users didn’t have an option to include secret boards in the recommendations.

The new controls are located under the “…” menu and Tune your home feed option on desktop. Mobile users can find the controls from the settings menu on the profile page (for iOS, users can find it under the Account Settings submenu, while on Android the option is in the main settings menu.)

Along with the toggles to control the news feed as a whole, users have more tools to help teach the Pinterest algorithm what belongs in that feed and what doesn’t. On individual pins, a new option in the “…” menu allows users to see why they are getting that suggestion in their feed. Users will also be able to give feedback after hiding a pin to help avoid seeing similar ideas in the future.

“We built these features in direct response to pinner needs and to give people a way to turn recommendations on or off, while more easily controlling content that might be irrelevant or sensitive,” said Omar Seyal, head of pinner products. “We approached this in the same way our engineers build recommendations on the backend, by handing a control panel over to the pinner so she can tune her home feed and have the most relevant and inspirational experience possible.”

The updates are rolling out beginning Tuesday.

Editors' Recommendations

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
Pinterest personalizes online window shopping with new tools
pinterest personalized shopping pinterestnewshoppingtools

Pinterest wants to be your personal shopper. On Monday, March 4, the platform rolled out several updates for buyable Pins, including personalized recommendations. The update also allows users to shop items only from a specific brand, while brands can now upload their entire catalog.

Users can now find ideas similar to the Product Pins they have already saved with a new shopping recommendation tool. When viewing a shoppable Pin, users can find the feature by tapping on “more ideas.” The tool collects in-stock products related to your past Pins to create a more personalized experience. From the recommendations, users can tap to shop the online store or to save the Pin to a board.

Read more
Pinterest makeup searches can soon be customized by skin tone
pinterest make up skin tone search tool pinterestskintonesmobile

More than half of Pinterest’s biggest searches for skin-related topics like makeup include a descriptor for skin color -- so Pinterest is rolling out a tool to help users fine-tune their results. After testing the tool last year, on Thur January 24, Pinterest announced what it calls inclusive beauty searches on the mobile app, designed to refine results for makeup and hair.

Prompted by the users using terms like "dark skin," "pale skin," and "olive skin" to narrow down results for specific makeup looks, Pinterest launched testing of the tool on the desktop version of the platform in April. The tool only pops up for certain beauty searches related to hair and makeup, displaying a dropdown menu of different "palettes." Picking a palette allows users to choose a range of skin tones to narrow down the search results.

Read more
X seems to have deleted years of old Twitter images
The new X sign replacing the Twitter logo on the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter and recently rebranded as X appears to be having trouble showing images posted on the site between 2011 and 2014.

The issue came to widespread attention on Saturday when X user Tom Coates noted how the famous selfie posted by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars in 2014, which quickly broke the “most retweets” record, was no longer displaying. Later reports suggested the image had been restored, though, at the time of writing, we’re not seeing it.

Read more