User:Atomicstar/Pigeon Post

Pigeon Post is a social media website founded by Richard L. Dong in April 2013. It features user-created communities known as topics, and a direct-messaging system.

Why it's rotten

1. Poor suggestion algorithm. It often suggests posts from topics barely related to your interests, and memes in the trending section.
   • If you search a topic that you don't usually view, it will begin suggesting many posts of that topic in your feed.
2. No way to hide certain users from appearing in your feed.
3. Lots of fake news and misinformation, despite their content policy explicitly prohibiting this.
4. Lots of offensive or otherwise controversial topics, such as COVID-19 denial, racist, holocaust-denial, pro-pedophilia, etc. that have several hundred thousand active members and have existed for years, yet have not been banned by the staff.
5. Lots of scammers and spam bots.
6. In July 2017, they limited captions to 300 characters for some reason. They increased the character limit of titles from 100 to 150, however, that does not make up for the limited caption length.
7. Non-premium users cannot post videos longer than 30 seconds. You can work around this by splitting the video into 30 second segments, however, that requires using a video editing app.
8. Their automated filters are prone to false positives. Even phrases like "x is stupid", "I hate x", etc. that aren't actually harassing someone or a group often get removed. Images are often also flagged for nudity or gore even with no similarities.
   • If you change a text post that was previously automatically removed and post it and it gets automatically filtered out, you receive a 1 day soft ban.
   • It often takes weeks for posts to be manually reviewed and approved, likely due to many false positives with its flawed automated filtering system that its staff cannot keep up with.
9. OP can view deleted comments, therefore, there is no way to prevent OP from viewing a comment you may have regretted posting.
10. Lack of ability for topics to be moderated other than by Pigeon Post staff, therefore, there is a lot of off topic content.
11. Lots of fraudulent ads to scam products, phishing sites, malware, pornography, etc. The staff are likely not removing them because they are being paid to publish them.
    • The job postings section has more scams, multi-level-marketing schemes, etc. than legit job postings.
12. On the mobile app, non-premium users get random popup advertisements.