Is there any way to ban all accounts that don't have at least a single actual printout photo proof ?
I'm just a beginner in the 3D world, but it's simply amazing and disappointing how many accounts there are without a single print. Such accounts unfortunately have thousands of likes and downloads, but in fact they only sell designs that are obviously not their own, but were collected from all over the internet and planted as their own work. It's terribly humiliating and pathetic to see such guys who upload 10/20/30 models at the same time and obviously don't even have a 3D printer because none of the uploads have an actual photo of the printed model. I simply loses the will to create something on my own when guys like that, who don't have a single print or printer, get thousands of likes and downloads, and their job is just to wander the internet and download ready-made designs.
Makers World has introduced a mandatory real picture of the printed model and in this way will reduce fakes at least a little
Is there any way that Printables do something like that or to ban all accounts which do not have at least one photo proof that they really have 3D printer and that they really do some printing ?
RE: Is there any way to ban all accounts that don't have at least a single actual printout photo proof ?
Thanks for the report. Sadly no easy options from the user side to avoid this style of accounts at the moment, but we are looking into it. As the platform grows, along with the rewards, there are always users that will try to exploit it for monetary gain. This is a bit of a cat-and-mouse situation, and there will be some phases where it's worse than usual, but we are catching and banning fake accounts like these, but sometimes it can take a couple of days. If you spot any of these, please make sure to use the report function too so that we can get some extra awareness for our team and sorry about the experience.
Tommy
Community Manager
Printables ceased to be a reliable source of designs in late 2021 when the site was gamified. The incentive to upload quantity rather than quality - there are no quality metrics other than likes - mean that from that date the proportion of usable to garbage files dwindled close to zero. As a result many skilled designers no longer bother to upload.
Sorting by likes doesn't help as it automatically prioritises well liked files over newer ones that might be better but are thirty pages down the list where they won't be seen and so won't gather likes.
The search function isn't much help as the tags contain too few details for useful discrimination and are often spammed in any case.
Some relatively simple options that might improve matters are:
Add a long-term quality check: An email saying "You downloaded *design* one year ago today. Did you print it? Was it as described? Did you print more than one? Do you still have it? Does it still work? - then score the answers and make them filterable.
Double delimit the search-by-date filter so that a user can search for something they remember seeing some time ago without having to wade through everything since.
Add a filter to exclude all competition entries, including the winners, which by definition, are hasty, untested designs.
More complex to code: Add a wiki style function allowing users to refine the search tags and descriptions of files that the original uploader has poorly described - writing good documentation is a different skill that many otherwise excellent designers lack. Oh, and include tools to constrain unhelpful editors.
And as for deleting accounts:
We see huge collections of 2D clip-art rendered as nominally 3D lithophanes, hueforges, coasters and cookie cutters when one 'How to do it' post would suffice for the entire genre and an inkjet would still do better then any 3D printer. We see collections and multipart designs that belong together split into multiple parts to score Prusameters, we find hordes of fanciful figurines that are completely unprintable and now we get AI generated versions of all these that require no work from the uploader but careful discrimination from the downloader to avoid wasting filament on futile printing attempts.
I would be happy to see all these deleted, especially those without a pictured print but perhaps it would be fairer to flag them with a warning 'This file will be deleted in fourteen days if no picture of a completed print is uploaded.' Allow makes so that grateful users can rescue files if necessary; you will need an AI to identify and disqualify AI renderings.
Printables contains tens of thousands of excellent files - buried under a million worthless ones; let's make it possible to find the good stuff and worthwhile to upload even better.
Cheerio,