Originally Posted by sewbizgirl

Wow... so much negativity towards Pinterest. It sounds like most of it stems from a misunderstanding of what Pinterest is. It is NOT a free pattern site. It is a bulletin board. You "Pin" images you are "Interested" in = Pinterest. If someone posts a link to what they claim is a free pattern and it turns out to be a rabbit trail, get mad at the poster, not the format.
I find Pinterest highly useful for storing ideas and inspiration. So what if the links are dead, as long as I have the original picture I can go from there. And many "pins" do have live links to other places, to recipes, or to patterns. But you can't expect all to. Lots of them are just pictures from picture hosting sites such as Flickr.

It's really no different from Google images, except you can store the images you want to keep.