That’s right, folks, Thingiverse is now 100% owned by MyMiniFactory, and I… don’t know what that means for its future. Unfortunately, as big of a fan as I am of 3D printing, I don’t really have my finger on the pulse of the industry, so to speak, so on a scale of “evil corporate overlords making it a capitalistic hellscape” to “new management bringing a breath of fresh air to the site,” I have 0 clue as to where this acquisition falls.
What I do have, however, is an account on Thingiverse to which I frequently upload, and quite few gripes with the platform itself. Fortunately, though, they will be having a Q&A session on the 17th, which seems like a perfect place to bring these things up.
Unfortunately, though, it’s at 2 AM on a Wednesday, Japan time, so I will NOT be in attendance. Accordingly, I’m writing this article to hopefully get my constructive criticism where it needs to be, on the off-chance that the team taking over will see this and be willing and able to make changes where they can.
But first, however, I should probably start by giving some
Background.
Back in 2018-ish when I was first learning about and considering buying a 3D printer, I remember Thingiverse seemed like the definitive place to get 3D printable models. Sure, other sites existed, but I remember all the 3D printing YouTubers talking about finding things and uploading things to Thingiverse. And when I finally got a printer, if I wanted to print something, I downloaded it from Thingiverse. Thingiverse was the only model site I owned an account on.
But when I moved to Japan and started getting serious about actually designing models, I sat down with myself and figured out which 3D model sharing sites I wanted to upload my designs to. Using a lot of different sites would ensure my models reached the widest audience possible, but uploading every single model to all those sites would be a huge pain in the butt. But if I picked only one, I would run the risk of having people ask me on separate social media or irl if they could download my models, only to find that no, they couldn’t, because they didn’t have an account on whichever site I chose.
At the end of my deliberation, I chose Maker World, Printables, and Thingiverse. Maker World because of my Bambu Lab printer, Printables because of Prusa’s reputation in the industry, and Thingiverse… just because I was used to it. And of all three of those sites, Thingiverse is the only one where I’ve seriously thought of just ditching my account and not bothering to upload to it anymore.
The reasons, in a nutshell, are 1) bugginess and general issues with the UI and layout, and 2) a lack of features that make it feel unique and appealing to me over other sites. The former issues I feel are things that absolutely should be fixed as soon as possible by the developers, and the latter are those that I personally feel would make the site better especially in comparison to its rivals, but are more subjectively based off of my own experiences on the site, and therefore are a little less obvious as to how exactly they should be implemented, or even whether they should be implemented at all.
Granted, these criticisms aren’t a comprehensive list of every problem Thingiverse has or anything, they’re just problems that I’ve come across over the years as a user that primarily just uploads things to the site, and they’re only ones that I happened to think of in the day or two I am spending/will spend/have spent writing this article. Plus, I haven’t spent much time investigating each issue to try and figure out exactly how to replicate it or work around it, so I might be a little mistaken in my description of some of the bugs. So, without further ado…
Bug Fixes and General Clunkiness
Since I started using it more frequently around 2022, I’ve run into a plethora of issues that really made the site seem like it’s drowning in spaghetti code. The ones I’m going to talk about in the next 4 paragraphs have been resolved by now, but for starters, when trying to create a new account, I ran into an interesting issue where I was told that logging in via Google was no good, because I already had an account associated with the email address, so I needed to sign into my MakerBot account to finish connecting my Google account. Couldn’t log in, so I tried changing my password, was told I couldn’t change the password because it was linked to my Google account, so I just needed to login directly via Google, but logging in via Google was no good, because I already had an account… you get the picture. Luckily, contacting support got my account reset pretty swiftly, but suffice it to say, not a great glitch to run into.
Also, somewhere around there, Thingiverse had the nasty habit of just not publishing models. Like, you’d finish a model, write the whole description, upload all the pictures, and it would just disappear into the aether, nowhere to be found on your profile. Why? I don’t know, and Support didn’t either. It’s fixed now, but then… yeesh.
There was also another bug that would replace the cover photo of your model with one of the auto-generated renders of the STLs that you uploaded, making you have to edit it to change it back. I pretty much exclusively deal in STEP files now, so maybe that’s changed, but…
On that note, let’s talk about the stuff currently still unfixed on the site that I’ve noticed, in no particular order.
Letting the Upload Page Idle Deletes Progress
Sometimes, if you enter in information on the Upload Page and don’t publish it or save it, if you wait too long/switch tabs, everything you wrote on the page disappears as it refreshes. This is especially annoying when you’re on a weak internet connection, and you’re doing other things with your computer while the files upload. Come back, and everything’s gone! I personally write my descriptions elsewhere and copy/paste them in, so it’s just a matter of doing that again and re-choosing all my settings and stuff, but still. Annoying at best, devastating at worst if you’re foolish enough to write your main draft directly on Thingiverse.
Putting in Tags on Your Model is Tedious
On most sites I’ve worked with, if you want to put tags on your model, you type out the tag, and auto-complete suggestions pop up below to choose from if you want, or you can just press “enter” to add what you’ve already typed onto your tags for the model.
On Thingiverse, you type in the name of the tag, press enter, and… nothing happens. You have to wait for the suggestions to load, and then pressing enter adds the top suggestion (not necessarily what you typed) onto your tags. Pressing enter again will remove it, but the text box you type in won’t clear in the meantime. So if you want to add multiple tags, you have to type what you want, and if it doesn’t result in the first tag to show up after they load (which takes a second or two), find it and click on it in the list, then click on the text box/ backspace everything you typed to clear it, and repeat the process all over.
I just don’t bother putting tags on my models on Thingiverse at this point.
You Can’t Put One Model in Two Collections
So I’ve got this Poke Ball model, which is both an adapted Poke Ball design, and it’s a Thing from a Game; two different collections I have. But am I allowed to put it in both? Nope! You can only move it from one to another. I think that’s a bit silly. Let me put one model in multiple collections.
The Thumbnails are a Bit Blurry
I print a series of high-detail Pokemon Coins, and given my photography setup includes my smartphone as a camera, it’s easy to mess up the focus when taking photos of them. So when I uploaded one of them to Thingiverse, I thought I had messed up the focus… until I compared the thumbnail to the other sites I use. Here’s a screenshot of Printables on the left and Thingiverse on the right where I zoomed in on the browser until they became the same size–can you see which one is blurrier?
Thingiverse, clearly. The other issue, in general, is that Thingiverse’s thumbnails are just bigger, which means both that the blurriness is bigger, and there are fewer models that can be displayed on the screen at once. Upping the display resolution a bit and decreasing the size of the thumbnails would help with both of these issues. Also, the other sites display a few dozen models, and then if you scroll all the way down, it loads more. Thingiverse makes you click onto the next page, which makes it hard to dig back and find older models.
Here are screenshots of Thingiverse, Printables, and Maker World, respectively, of my models displaying from the second row. (Is there a Dark Mode on Thingiverse? There should be.)
Even looking at them just now, Thingiverse has that awkward white space on the margins that could be utilized more effectively, I feel.
Notifications Are Handled Poorly
…Ah! In the two hour break I took from writing this article, I have three notifications! Wow! Let’s take a look at what they are:
Two likes and someone added one of my models to their collection!!
!!!Wow!!!
…I don’t care!
…Ok, that’s a bit mean, but if you’re a creator of any substantial popularity your notification box will display a little 9+ next to it constantly. As far as I know, there’s no way to filter out what kinds of notifications I receive. So if someone comments a question on a model that I want to answer, it’s completely drowned out in a matter of hours behind people liking, adding things to collections, and following–none of which is helpful information to me. I really wish you could change your settings to choose what kind of notifications you get, or at the very least you could sort through them by the specific kind of notification they are.
Luckily, I have email notifs set up specifically for if someone comments, but if I ever get popular enough that I get multiple comments a day, I really don’t want all that filling up my email’s inbox and I’d much rather have that in-site.
Also, you can’t mark notifications as “read;” you can only delete them. Forever. I personally don’t have any use for saving notifs, but isn’t that kinda standard? Like if someone wants to keep a record for some reason. And when you delete them all, you get this screen:
It’s very strange for it to say there’s nothing here “yet,” when there definitely was stuff there a second ago, and even stranger still for it to suggest I click the follow button on the “great creators” here that seemingly don’t exist. Where are they? Why does that say they’re there? Beats me, but someone should probably look into these missing persons.
And along those lines, message notifications are also lacking; last I checked you only can see if you have any message notifications after you click the little text bubble in the top right, which means that when you get a message from someone, you’re never told–unless, of course, you sign up for email notifications, in which case every time someone messages or replies, you’ll get an email. Can we get a little number to pop up on the text bubble button as well?
A Couple Things For Model Descriptions
Just a few:
When you insert a link into the description, it doesn’t show as a hyperlink in the original text box; only after you publish it. It’d be nice to know that something got picked up as a link properly and didn’t have a typo in it or something
Along those lines, YouTube videos don’t auto-imbed like on Printables or MakerWorld, which I think would be a nice addition.
You also can’t put a gif as the thumbnail for a model. If you try, it won’t even just display the first frame like on Printables–it’ll just throw you an error like the one below.
Things to improve Thingiverse
I dove into my analytics for all time (if I may have one more request, could we get a button on the calendar there to just show analytics for the lifespan of the account, instead of trying to figure out when we started the account and setting it for then?) on Thingiverse, and found that despite having thousands of downloads across all my models (around 7 or 8 thousand, but there’s no way to have this counted automatically–could that get added, too?), I can count on one hand the amount of makes people have uploaded of my models.
Compare that to Printables, with over 6,000 downloads, and 48 makes. It’s hard to do a lot of concrete comparisons, since each platform reports things differently, but suffice it to say, in my experience…
People seem to rush into Thingiverse with their nose held, search for a model, download it, and get out before they gotta take a breath. And I can’t blame them! For printers and makers alike, there’s really not much to do here other than upload and download models.
So this is where we enter the opinion territory. You could argue that hey, it’s fine just as a print archive–people upload models for the love of the game and nothing else. That in and of itself is beautiful, and it doesn’t need to be another Printables or MakerWorld clone. We don’t need another social media app in our lives. And that’s a fine thought process, but I personally want to see Thingiverse become something more. Right now, I see it as an extra place to dump my models and nothing else, and I really think the site that claims (claimed?) to be the largest database of 3D printable models out there could really put that fact to good use. Plus, y’know, MyMiniFactory just snagged it, so they’re probably gonna bring in their philosophy, so I may as well put my two cents in.
Groups…?
So in my minimal research to throw this article together I stumbled across “Thingiverse Groups.” I’m going to be very blunt. I have never seen or heard of Groups in all my years using this site. It seems like an interesting idea, and I honestly think it’d be a good way for Thingiverse to help users’ models not get lost in the sea of endless uploads. I saw there was a “Legend of Zelda” Group–maybe if I posted about some of my more obscure Zelda-themed models there, they would actually get connected to people who are interested in them, and get some well-deserved appreciation.
Personally, I jump around a lot with the things that I make. My last print was from an obscure 3DS game, the one before that was from Fire Emblem, and the one before that was from Pokemon. Even if there is such a thing as a recommendation algorithm on the site, it’s going to have a hard time figuring out my niche, and a tough time recommending my stuff to the people that will appreciate them.
Instead, I would much rather have an algorithm that picks up keywords in my title and description, and suggests I share it in a certain appropriate group. Or, it shows me groups it thinks I might be interested in. I’m not entirely sure how Groups’ existence would be brought to users' attention, but having an entire community section on the site hidden and not mentioned seems a bit strange. It should be pulled more into the open.
Update! Tried posting my Royal Broadsword in the Groups section. Tried adding it, selected it from my models, and it… just moved me to the model page itself. Turns out you have to click the three dots and choose “Add to Group,” and then it’ll show up, which is more complicated than it need to be. Except… I refreshed the page and then it disappeared. Made a post about it, but given no one had posted in that Group in about 3 years, it probably won’t get looked at. Also, I couldn’t upload an image because the file limit was 2MB. A shame!
Overall, this has potential in making official niches in the site where people can post their models where they know they will be appreciated, but at present seems a little slapdash.
What happened to the Blog?
There used to be a Blog up in the top left corner, but poof! It’s gone. Is that a recent development? Truth be told, I didn’t really use it, but I was mildly interested in some of the contests in there. Both the other sites I use hold contests, and it’s a really good way to get people inspired and to get eyes on good models. I’ve gotten a model or two that probably would have been overlooked had it not placed in a contest over there. I have no clue what the prizes would be on Thingiverse, but honestly, I think just the spirit of competition and the chance at getting their models highlighted would be good enough for most people, so I think it’s worth doing–and worth actually advertising to users.
Before, it was limited to occasional blog posts, but I think it should be its own section of the site.
Monetization
Oohoohoo, here’s the big one. The Monay! As it is right now, MakerWorld and Printables both have rewards systems where popular models get points, which you can redeem for products from their respective shops. They also have monthly memberships that can get you access to exclusive models and other benefits, and MakerWorld even has a rewards system in which posting high quality models exclusively to MakerWorld can net you real money.
However, I don’t think Thingiverse should necessarily go the way of the points system. MyMiniFactory has their own monetization strategy which I am not familiar with and therefore will not comment on, but I think an easy way to help get creators monetary support they while still keeping the free-to-download current nature is to have a pay-what-you-want option for creators to put on their models.
Personally, I like having all my models available for free. I am not a professional, so I like not having the responsibility of making sure everything is flawless so people don’t waste their money on my stuff. I also like the idea of people using my models to learn. So I personally don’t want to put a paywall in front of any of my stuff, but… hey, I like money as much as the next guy.
As long as it’s something that makes it very clear that you don’t have to pay, I’m fine with having something pop up while you download a file that says something like “would you like to help this creator?” Each user could customize what message they want to show to people when they download it, but the option to just decline it would be clearly available. I think it would be a good trade-off to keep things free but still let people earn money.
I Need Some Stinking Badges
Ok, guilty pleasure here, but I LOVE hitting achievements and getting little badges. Printables and Maker World both have badges that you can earn by hitting download milestones, winning competitions, using the site a lot, etc, etc. Printables even uses the cumulative amount of badges you’ve gotten to dictate your level, which determines if you can do things like change your @ from a random number to a custom username. It’s a trust level, basically. If a level 1 is reaching out to you with their fresh account, be wary, but if a level 18 is, you know it’s probably legit.
In Conclusion…
I know I’ve been a bit scathing in my critiques here, but I genuinely want this platform to succeed. As someone who isn’t a fanboy of any particular company or site, I know that competition is overall healthy for the industry. Plus, as someone who would be more than happy to make this a full-time thing, any extra avenue to get my stuff out in the world is more than welcome.
Truth be told, as someone who made their first steps of their 3D printing journey on Thingiverse, I’ve got quite the soft spot for it. Despite all the issues I’ve run into, and all the frustrations I’ve encountered, I’ve never stopped using it, because I’ve hoped that one day, Thingiverse would straighten up, fly right, and be a platform to be proud of.
And you know what? With the recent news, and all the feedback they’re taking, I’m thinking that maybe–just maybe–it will.