Pinterest, filed by category and subcategory, with real pin dates

Pinterest was a pile. Hundreds of thousands of pins with no way to ask for "just the recipes" or "just the tattoos". It is organized now: 22 top-level categories, Pinterest's own (Food and drink, Home decor, Beauty, Tattoos, Quotes, Travel, Fitness, Wedding and so on), and under each one the subcategories people actually search for, about 120 of them, from "air fryer recipes" to "small tattoos" to "stoic quotes".

• The Pinterest page has two new selects, category and subcategory. Pick a category and you get every pin under all of its subcategories.
• Every subcategory is a board that refreshes daily, so the top of each one is what is spreading on Pinterest this week, not what we happened to save once.
• Owners and admins get a Categories page where you add your own keywords under any category. A keyword you add starts filling on the next daily pass, and the pins we already hold that match it move under it right away.

The backlog gets filed too

The pins saved before today are being filed in the background by what Pinterest itself says about each image, its own tags, the title and the board it came from. A pin is only filed when it clearly belongs somewhere; a pin the system is not sure about stays out rather than landing in the wrong place. Roughly half of the backlog files on the first pass, and the share rises as keywords are added on the Categories page.

Real dates

Pinterest stopped exposing a pin's creation date through the calls we used, so for a while every pin was stamped with the day we found it. That made month-old pins look brand new. We now read the real date off the pin's own page for every new pin, and a background pass is giving the older ones theirs. A pin whose date we do not know yet shows "saved" with our date, never a fake one.