Thingiverse's REAL rabbit hole.....

Being taken over by Makerbot........who needs 1000's of frigging I(diot)Phone cases??

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/10/2013 10:21AM by Dirty Steve.

Wow, crazy.

So much for open source.

GPL lovers need an alternative and we need it now.

Dirty Steve Wrote:
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> Being taken over by Makerbot........who needs
> 1000's of frigging I(diot)Phone cases??


Being taken over? It was always theirs...
They're trying to assert a brand image, which is fair enough. As long as they don't FUBAR their terms and conditions again then I don't see how this branding change makes a difference.

The real strength of thingiverse is all the designs for other printers, it goes as free advertisement for RepRap printers, something that it deserves seeing as MakerBot rarely acknowledge its existence and influence.

If we all move from thingiverse, then how are MakerBot owners going to know there is better out there?

After reading [makingsociety.com] about other platforms, I'm now considering to move from thingiverse to [cubehero.com]

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about // liberapay // flickr // wiki // thingiverse - github

Really liking cubehero...must investigate further...

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- akhlut

Just remember - Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

[myhomelessmind.blogspot.com]

The fundamental problem with Thingiverse is the same problem with every other user content website, once you get a significant influx of content you need a way to identify the high quality content and sort it from the cruft.
The recent IPhone case influx was a function of Customizer making it easy for people to dump crap into it, but it's really just an indication of what would happen if the user base were very much larger.
In the 1990's Yahoo (when it was still hosted by the University) had a page listing all the new content they had crawled and indexed that day, sometimes it would have as many as 20 items on it, thingiverse is still at the level of you can look at everything posted every day, but once that is impractical, there needs to be better mechanisms to filter content and that isn't an easy problem to solve well.

cubehero.com is looking interesting.

Cubehero looks awesome, versioning via github seems like a great idea. The visual differencing feature is unique too.

It would be good to have a site to host designs for printers, electronics as well.

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Being taken over by Makerbot

LOL

Thingiverse was created by Makerbot and has ALWAYS been owned by them. I'm astonished how many people seem to not know this. For a long time the words "A MakerBot Industries Site" or something to that effect were in their logo as a very light gray. All they have done is made the Makerbot name more prominent in the Thingiverse logo.

Then maybe thingiverse was a mistake for any reprappers to be using in the first place.
Versioning via github you say? ... May be a winner.

Thanks for the Cubehero link, Ill be all over that. GrabCad is another one that caught my eye last week with a friendly TOS.

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Richmond, New Zealand
Thingiverse ~ YouTube

physibleexchange.com is another alternative.(though it seems to be moving really slowly at the moment) The voting system might even have had a better shot at dealing with influxes like that.

Tbh the title "Thingiverse's REAL rabbit hole....." is totally let down by the content of the post. Much more important is if it can be trusted, there is a lot of network effect here, so a website might get really entrenched. Policies could really screw over OSHW movements. I have thought about that more, but i think it might not be best to post those thoughts incomplete.

Makerboxiverse is evil but luckily we do have a few alternatives being worked on as I type this. Two, as I was told on irc, and viewed, are shortly to be in beta for everyone.

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I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.