SUGGESTION: Printables.Com Search Improvement
PROBLEM (Please rethink this if intentional): Free and paid models in search results do not come up and sort together. Paid models are less prominent by being in a separate list below other search results.
SUGGESTION: Sort all model search results together, continuing to display the price on the thumbnail. Potentially add a "Free" indicator to the thumbnail for free models, or just let the absence of a price indicate that.
RATIONALE: I love that Printables is not pulling marketing BS like Amazon, where more profitable items are floated to the top. But it is crazy that you are doing the opposite... You are literally de-prioritizing paid models that might be exactly what the end user needs. Selling one's value added inventions is neither bad nor unethical. And having paid options next to free ones (sorted accurately according to the user's preference) is the best and easiest way for end users to get all of their options. You and creators will get more sales, and it's a better experience for all that will help grow the platform.
Thanks for considering it.
RE: SUGGESTION: Printables.Com Search Improvement
You are literally de-prioritizing paid models that might be exactly what the end user needs.
That might be exactly what YOU need.
I am totally opposed to this idea, unless there is a setting next to the search button that allows you to completely hide paid models. This is one of the main features that makes me LOVE printables over the competition.
RE: SUGGESTION: Printables.Com Search Improvement
go to printables.com
type in the keyword in the search box, press enter, you will be redirected to search view
on the left select `Store & Club` and I believe it should be only the paid models /subscription.
See my GitHub and printables.com for some 3d stuff that you may like.
RE:
You are literally de-prioritizing paid models that might be exactly what the end user needs.
That might be exactly what YOU need.
I am totally opposed to this idea, unless there is a setting next to the search button that allows you to completely hide paid models. This is one of the main features that makes me LOVE printables over the competition.
How does it harm you to have all of the options in front of you? Are you just philosophically opposed to people earning money for creative work? Either way, the current design violates best practices of search implementation, which is that by default a user should get what they ask for.
If I search for "Shelf Bracket" and I get results that do not include all of the shelf brackets, that's a bad thing. On the contrary, it is totally reasonable to have user preferences that allow a person to customize their results in whatever way makes sense. "Hide Paid Models" might be a good preference. But that should be a thing the user chooses. The computer shouldn't be deciding that in advance for all users.
go to printables.com
type in the keyword in the search box, press enter, you will be redirected to search view
on the left select `Store & Club` and I believe it should be only the paid models /subscription.
That's the problem I am suggesting needs a correction. I've been using Printables for 2 years and I hadn't noticed that. (I hadn't noticed because it is totally non-standard, so I wasn't thinking to look for how to turn off a filter that I never turned on.) There are probably 50 times over the past two years where there might have been a model that solved my problem for a few dollars and I never knew it. It's both a non-standard and empirically bad design that probably cost me good fixes and cost some designer income. A lose-lose situation that should have been win-win.
They do it right under categories, which is to say that the default is inclusive but the user can easily filter to specific categories. But the results hide and exclude good matches by default when it is related to free vs. paid models.
As a creator, I've posted many useful designs for free and will continue to do that. But I also have a camera case for example that competes with $100+ options for high end mirrorless cameras. It took more than 100 hours to make and maybe $60 in filament prototyping and testing. I'll delete all of the files on principle before I will give them to people who scoff at sending me $5 for them. And I'm not going to post them here when they don't show up in search. So this is costing the community growth and options, and is costing Prusa some income on their percentage of any sales that would come from that sort of thing.