14 DAY TRIAL // It happens with any web service that becomes popular, spammers flock to it. It makes sense, a popular service means a big audience and, especially for newer ones, poor spam anti-measures.
Pinterest is a prime example, the site exploded during the past year, but its popularity brought in the bad with the good.
Now though, Pinterest is taking a stand and is deleting a huge amount of spam accounts in one fell swoop.
In fact, it warns users that the move may result in them losing some followers, many of them in some cases.
Pinterest's spam reporting tools have gotten better in time, but the site wanted to wait until they were refined enough before doing a clean sweep. It believes that's the case now, which is why it's going ahead with the clean-up.
"Over the past few months, our team found a number of suspicious, fake or spammy accounts. Starting today, we’re removing these accounts for good," Pinterest explained.
"Removing these accounts helps protect the integrity of Pinterest and helps ensure that followers are real people who are interested in what you share," it said.
For most people, the effects will be minor. Pinterest says 99 percent of users will lose less than 10 followers. Given that those followers weren't real, it isn't much of a loss. Popular users or those that paid for followers will be more affected, but, again, these are all worthless followers.
"Like all online services, getting rid of spam on Pinterest is an ongoing process. In this case, we’ve used everything we’ve learned from these spam accounts to implement new measures that will help keep bad accounts from being created in the first place," Pinterest added.
That's not to say spam is gone from Pinterest, no one has been able to achieve this yet. But it does mean that spammers will have to get more cunning and determined.