Why I would like to visit Printables more often, but don't do  

Why I would like to visit Printables more often, but don't do

Hi printables team, hi all,

some time ago I had decided to leave thingiverse for Prusaprinters. Annoyed with the constant deterioration and neglect of thingiverse by its previous owners, the awesome new name Printables gave me the final push. I moved over all of my designs, which worked flawlessly, and started to publish new designs and both platforms for a, what I then thought, transitional period.

After two and a half years I find that I am still publishing on both sites in parallel, and visit only thingiverse regularly, but not printables. Two reasons. One is that after the ownership change, they installed a capable new team for thingiverse which, despite some questionable design choices, managed to solve most of the stability and usability issues over time. So less push away from thingiverse. However, with a little pull from printables, I would still gladly give them up.

Unfortunately, I have no added value from coming here on a daily basis, as the single thing that let's me check thingiverse daily, is sorely being missed from printables: being notified about new likes and collects. See, my content is mostly special interest stuff, so even if, in my humble opinion, I produce some high quality stuff, people seldom make or rate my designs, but it is only from those that I can get notifications.

So I virtually never receive notifications from printables. And don't get me wrong, this is not my vanity speaking. Getting notified on thingiverse about likes and collects gives me the unique opportunity to find others interested in similar stuff. I often find new and interesting profiles by looking at the likes and collections of users who liked or collected my stuff. This is not possible on printables. I cannot even find out who liked or collected my designs retrospectively. So printables for me is a sterile and anonymous space without meaningful user interaction. I understand that you created some social media functionality a while ago, maybe to address this, but I feel this only works for topics of wider interest.

I had already addressed these questions in 2022, maybe it was in the wrong place, at least I never heard about what the Prusa team thinks about this, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

tl:dr: I understand that you don't want to copy thingiverse, but the lack of a dashboard feature and the ability to find out who liked and collected my designs, keep me from using printables as often as I would like to.

Jan