Pinterest’s relatively new CEO Bill Ready has plans for the social-media platform to stand out from its competitors as a place of positivity.
Key Details
- Ready took over as Pinterest CEO last year and plans to make the social-media platform the leading digital-window shopping venue.
- While Ready has ambitions to bring more attention to the social-media site, he has grander aspirations of making it a different place than the rest of social media, Fortune reports.
- On other social-media platforms, Ready says, algorithms control the user experience, driving them to remain on the site for longer periods of time by highlighting what he calls “the darkest aspects of human nature.”
- Instead, Ready wants Pinterest to be a place that highlights and emphasizes content that makes consumers happier.
Why it’s news
Discussion surrounding the negativity of social media has become more prominent in recent years, especially as many question social media’s effects on teenagers. Algorithms, Ready says, are tuned to emphasize content that brings up feelings of anger or greed because it elicits intense reactions from users.
Ready wants Pinterest to be different from its competitors in that way. He wants to highlight the positives.
“Hopefully, many years from now, at the end and looking back on my life, what I will be able to say we did, and what I will be most proud of, is to prove a different business model for social media,” he told Fortune.
When evaluating the Pinterest algorithm, Ready says he has asked his employees to “tune for content that makes people feel better.” He thinks that just one social-media company making this change could have a broader effect on the rest of the industry.
“Pinterest is different. I want to prove there is a business model in social media around tuning for positivity. We are going to build a business model around not just keeping you glued to a screen, but helping you do something in real life that makes your real life better,” he says.
Users will have to wait a little while to see if Ready’s plans can succeed. Pinterest would not be the first social-media company to attempt this method. Facebook began as a place to share positivity but is now regarded by many as a site full of negative content and polarizing views.
