Pinterest now lets you opt out of ‘Picked for you’ pins

Pinterest, whose app lets people pin pictures and other content to boards, today announced a few product updates. The biggest one is a way to roll back one of Pinterest’s recommendation tools — the “Picked for you” feature.

It’s Pinterest’s way of injecting pins into the home feed you see when you visit the app on the web or in Pinterest’s mobile apps. Since they were incorporated into Pinterest in October 2013, some users have expressed negative feedback about it, and some have even launched browser extensions to block these pins altogether.

Now, you can go into the app’s settings and simply turn off the “Picked for you” option, the Pinterest community team wrote in a blog post.

“If you spend time curating your home feed — following and unfollowing boards so you see exactly the Pins you want — sometimes you just don’t want to see anything else in your feed,” the team wrote.

Pinterest also offers up Related Pins when you start looking at a single pin, it suggests boards when you save pins, and it lets you find visually similar pins using a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning. And if you’re in the mood to shop, Pinterest now offers a place to find Buyable pins. Clearly the company is not going to stop recommending, suggesting, and curating. But “Picked for you” may have been just too much, particularly alongside promoted pins that companies can pay to show Pinterest users.

Also today Pinterest said it now lets users send pins, boards, and user profiles in more apps, including Line, Messenger, Twitter, WeChat, and WhatsApp. And now users can send messages and board invitations to other users even if they’re not following one another.