Have you ever browsed a dollar store, store going out of business, or garage sale? The senses are overwhelmed with the sheer number and variety of things you’d never ever want to take home with you. It boggles the mind to even conceive of how or why such things were created in the first place. The frustrating part of it is – there’s probably a really good deal on something very useful somewhere inside that place.
Unfortunately, this is kind of how I’m beginning to feel about Thingiverse. I love the idea of a place for sharing digital designs. Over the last month it has gotten flooded with “things.” People just uploading Sketchup, SolidWorks, or other 3d modeling files directly to Thingiverse, outright plagiarism, and stuff that could never be printable/cuttable/makeable (such as several objects with zero thickness).
I’m totally good with uploading an unfinished design, partial designs, or the outline of an idea. But, for heaven’s sake, please include a title, description, and a copy of your file for sharing. And, by sharing I mean an STL or DXF file – not a proprietary format. By all means, include your source Sketchup or SolidWorks file, but please also include a file type that’s actually meant for assisting in the production of the thing.
Next in the cranky-pants series: Hey you kids! Get off my damn lawn!
Totally agree. Perhaps they need a flagging or voting tool other than just ‘like’.
Don’t worry, those posts will go away as a soon as the makerbot contest is over. I’ve seen a few dozen that only have an unprintable sketchup file and a description of ‘I hope I win.’ or ‘My entry for the contest.’ Seriously, do people not read? The whole point of the contest is to design something that is printable.
I think it is really funny that people are using $3000 software (Solidworks) to make a design entry for a contest to win a sub-$1000 machine.
I am biased though. I figured out OpenSCAD and Qcad, and wrote a How-to for Hack a Day to make our badges for CES.
As far as I’m aware Zach is running Thingiverse on his own at the moment which is part of the problem as he has some many other things keeping him busy. I often see feature requests in the Thingiverse Google group which are met with an “added to the list” response from Zach. MakerBot Industries need to hire someone (or dedicate an existing staff member) to run Thingiverse. They would be able to moderate the content and fix things when they go wrong, the rendering computer is crashing quite frequently meaning that the front page fills with place holder images and a recent problem with JS-Kit (comment system) took 3 days to fix and even now it doesn’t work very well. Thingiverse has become the go to place for 3D printer owners which extends much further than the MakerBot community, they should really take control of it before it outgrows itself.
Here’s the thing – I love Thingiverse. I’m fine with the current features. I know it’s not a money maker for them and I have no complaints about the site. I’m just bemoaning the sudden glut of half-assesed entries. Perhaps I should stop growsing and offer to help with their site. ;)
There is a star rating system…
I feel the same way! Sure, there’s some really cool stuff being posted (MakerBot Transformer, my Mini-Mendel production files, etc.), but that stuff would have been posted anyway, contest or no contest. The entries that bother me most, though, are the ones that start off as: “my name is [person’s name] and im 13 years old and i made this to hopefully win the makerbot contest because im only 13 and dont have much money to buy a makerbot and i have to wait 3 years to get one because then ill be 16 and can get a job so i hope i win” Yes, you may be 13 years old, but that’s no excuse to not use correct spelling and grammar. I’m 15, have bought a MakerBot with my own money, and as you can see, I can write complete and fully punctuated sentences. I can understand the want to have a MakerBot, but if you’re going to enter a contest like this, at least make yourself sound intelligent. Someone who doesn’t care about little details like grammar, punctuation, and spelling should not be given a MakerBot.
Sorry about the rant, but it makes kids in my generation look bad when some kid only uses the alpanumeric keys on a keyboard.
This contest should never have happened. Or, at least, should only have been posted to personal fabrication blogs. That would get rid of most of the bad posts.
@Pat
No, people don’t read.
@Devlin
The student edition of Solidworks is only a few $100, and some of the people posting their objects are using their school’s or job’s license.
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