When I am browsing Pinterest for whatever latest piece of woodworking jig or furniture design idea I am inundated with utterly useless “Promoted By” spam ads. Not once have I ever been interested in any of these promoted ads. And the number of them, sometimes five or six on a page is ridiculous.
I know there are various plug-ins for Chrome and Firefox that let you block the Promoted By ads on Pinterest. But they always seem to generate a bad user experience, and really, that’s not taking care of the problem, merely hiding it with CSS.
On Sunday I built a little plug-in for Chrome that removes the Promoted By ad by promptly selecting it, flagging it as inappropriate, e.g. gore, intellectual property violation, nudity or pornography, and then hitting that “Block this user” button right afterwards. So far it seems to be working reasonably well.