OK, while the simplest would be to delete everything uploaded since mid December 2021, scrapping the whole rewards system and dropping Prusameters it might help a bit to silently delete anything with no pictures of an actual print and anything with 0 second party downloads after a week and insist on a comprehensive, editable wiki-style, search declaration. We also need some sensible quality control - perhaps an automatic email offering a meaningful chance to rate long term such as: "You downloaded X one year ago - did you print it? did it work? have you reprinted it? were the print and build instructions adequate? do you still use it?"
Cheerio,
RE: Prusa Badges and Rewards... What you want to know!
Zero second party downloads after a week would eliminate some really useful prints.
For instance: ten downloads per year for four years does not mean that someone has not found this model useful. (By the way, I printed and uploaded the original after designing it despite your insistence that models should be tested for a year...) Four years later I can confirm I've used it again to replace the second OEM one which broke.
A user rating after a time would be cool, and I agree that if it hasn't been printed it shouldn't be there.
Have you made these suggestions to the Printables team, or do you just roll them out here from time to time?
Cheers,
P
RE:
Zero second party downloads after a week would eliminate some really useful prints.
For instance: ten downloads per year for four years does not mean that someone has not found this model useful. (By the way, I printed and uploaded the original after designing it despite your insistence that models should be tested for a year...) Four years later I can confirm I've used it again to replace the second OEM one which broke.
A user rating after a time would be cool, and I agree that if it hasn't been printed it shouldn't be there.
Have you made these suggestions to the Printables team, or do you just roll them out here from time to time?
Cheers,
P
What he said, and not only would it eliminate a lot of useful prints, it would discourage people from posting many others. Case in point:
https://www.printables.com/model/1042362-gridfinity-holder-for-criterion-tenth-setting-bori
I fully expected to see zero downloads of this Gridfinity holder which I made for a fairly rare machining accessory that I own. If they had a system in place that punishes zero downloads with removal of the model, I would never have bothered posting it. And yet, much to my surprise, so far 7 people have downloaded it in a relatively short period of time. Nearly all of my catalog is similar niche models that I made entirely for my own use, and posted in case others might find them useful. I don't see where removing any of them from the site would serve a useful purpose.
RE: Prusa Badges and Rewards... What you want to know!
Remixes shouldn't count as a "model upload." Maybe make a new badge called "mix master" for that?
I disagree with this; there is already a category called "reupload" for models with insignificant changes, which accrues the uploader zero Prusameters. I have one model in this category that I made a very minor cosmetic change to, and so far it's been downloaded 40 times, so at least some people have found it to be beneficial. And anything that discourages legitimate remixes is going to be bad for the community as a whole, since remixes and modification are at the heart of the open source reprap movement. Another example.... The Voron group releases the Voron 2.4 printer and all of the associated CAD as open source. Sumdood comes along, and decides that it would be a really great idea to put a hinged door in the skirts, for storage of Revo nozzles. He uploads it including the CAD files. Later on, I build a Voron 2.4, find Sumdood's mod, and think it is a great idea, but... I identified and solved several problems with the design, and published my version along with the CAD files. Shortly thereafter, Sumotherdood makes a suggestion for an improvement, which I make, and then he builds upon my version by modifying it to match another user's cosmetic modifications of the stock V2.4 skirts. Everybody is happy with how this turned out (including the original designer of the mod, who had good things to say about my fixes), everybody involved has gotten what they want, and given credit to those who came before them. Open source wins again.
RE:
I’m thinking at least 1 download per year would be a good compromise.
All models should need a picture of the model printed. Sorry, if you’re too lazy to take a picture, I’m too lazy to download your model.
RE:
I disagree with this; there is already a category called "reupload" for models with insignificant changes, which accrues the uploader zero Prusameters
I find it interesting that you disagree with me while providing my use case. I didn’t say remixes shouldn’t count towards Prusa meters. I said they shouldn’t count as model uploads, because they’re not. They should be recognized as what they are. This wouldn’t discourage anything. If anything, it would reward people that are good at remixing with specific recognition for what they’ve done.
Open source would still win, people would still get credit…
By seeing that something is a remix I can know to look for the original model if I need to. I may need to make edits that would be easier on the original than on the remix.
RE:
I disagree with this; there is already a category called "reupload" for models with insignificant changes, which accrues the uploader zero Prusameters
I find it interesting that you disagree with me while providing my use case. I didn’t say remixes shouldn’t count towards Prusa meters. I said they shouldn’t count as model uploads, because they’re not. They should be recognized as what they are. This wouldn’t discourage anything. If anything, it would reward people that are good at remixing with specific recognition for what they’ve done.
Open source would still win, people would still get credit…
By seeing that something is a remix I can know to look for the original model if I need to. I may need to make edits that would be easier on the original than on the remix.
You're trying to solve a problem which doesn't exist, and all it would accomplish is to discourage uploaders from classifying their models as remixes, so less credit would be given to original authors. And first you would have to get everybody to agree on what constitutes a remix, and probably no two uploaders will have quite the same definition. Does it have to start with an original model's CAD file to be a remix? Or is copying a feature from another model enough to make it a remix? How about a clean-sheet model that is designed to fit or work with an existing model? Or a printable replacement part for something originally manufactured by some other technology? It would annoy me for my upload of a gearbox vent plug for my MGA to be disqualified as an original model, because it was modeled after an original produced out of metal in Abingdon, Oxfordshire 67 years ago.
In the example I gave in my previous post, NONE of the Printables users who have uploaded their own versions would get credit for the mod (including the originator), because the source was the Voron project CAD. Even though it was heavily modified to add features, and fulfill a function which doesn't even exist in the original.
And then, what about things like Gridfinity? Some are obvious remixes, but many others are clearly original ideas that just happen to have been made compatible with that system. All of my own Gridfinity stuff started with a blank screen, and while I uploaded the models as remixes to give credit to Zach Friedman, most of it is completely original other than being designed to work within his storage system. Take away model credit for such models that are uploaded as remixes, and all you will accomplish is to drive users to upload them as the original works that they really are, and discourage giving credit to those who may have only contributed ideas, which IS damaging to open source.
And what's the end goal, anyway? Who is going to enforce it? If it will be enforced by a bot/algorithm, who is going to handle appeals when the bot inevitably screws it up? Is Printables supposed to then employ people to search for models that were actually remixes, where the uploaders successfully evaded the bot? Can't we find some other problem that's actually a problem, to solve?
Yeah, there are a lot of BS models on the site, and probably you'll find other users who think that they are useful, and not BS models. Yeah, in principle I agree that if an uploader can't be bothered to actually print and post a picture of the physical unit, then it probably shouldn't have been uploaded in the first place. Yet enforcement of even that could discourage uploading of useful stuff. I have a couple of models where I have uploaded versions to use alternate hardware, because I thought that not everyone would want to use the same hardware that I did. I didn't print those versions, because I have no use for them and it would have wasted my material and print time. But, somebody may have found them useful. I can't know one way or the other, because the website doesn't make that level of detail available in terms of download data because I lumped all the versions into the same model. If I had to worry about those versions being auto-deleted then I wouldn't have bothered, so the end user loses. And again, who is going to enforce it, and to what standard? I think most of us probably overestimate the resources that Prusa can devote to operating Printables in the first place.