So, MyMiniFactory bought Thingiverse. What work awaits them?
Last week’s big news was the acquisition of Thingiverse, the longest-serving printable 3D model website, by MyMiniFactory, a London-based operation that is rapidly growing due to its focus on creators.
Thingiverse Background
Thingiverse was the first true 3D printable model site, originally built by MakerBot to support sales of their new consumer 3D printer, the CupCake. Buyers needed something to print, after all.
But back then the rules of the road for printable 3D model sites were basically unknown. Thingiverse, in its original form, was extremely primitive: users uploaded models and hopefully added a good description and some tags.
They didn’t.
As a result, Thingiverse grew rapidly in terms of the number of models, but there were no governing mechanisms for quality aside from the “number of makes”. I even recall seeing one entry saying “this is a cool design, but I have no idea if it could be printed”. That type of questionable 3D model could be frequently found on Thingiverse.
That is, if the search function worked properly. A lot of the time, it didn’t.
MakerBot was resource-constrained and could not do much to fix the site, and then the company was purchased by Stratasys. Stratasys shifted the strategy to a more business focus, leaving Thingiverse as a very low priority. This led to Thingiverse’s “dead years”, where literally nothing changed except for people uploading more — and often lousy — 3D models.
Finally, Stratasys parted with Thingiverse by merging MakerBot and Ultimaker into “UltiMaker”. Stratasys still owns a huge chunk of UltiMaker, but apparently isn’t involved much. The new operators of Thingiverse then made a number of basic changes to bring the site up to a somewhat better operational level.
However, Thingiverse really doesn’t fit well into UltiMaker’s business strategy either, so there was little hope of it competing with other printable 3D models sites.
In the meantime, sites like Printables, Creality Cloud, and MakerWorld had full support from their owners and have developed highly sophisticated interfaces with all manner of advanced features. Thingiverse has fallen far, far behind those sites.
MyMiniFactory Challenges
Now we have MyMiniFactory taking over Thingiverse, and they have an enormous amount of work to fix the site and bring it up to a competitive level.
What must they do? I took a look at the site and have some ideas that give a hint at the magnitude of effort facing MyMiniFactory.
The big item would certainly be the AI content, which MyMiniFactory has pledged to remove. They will be building mechanisms to prevent uploads of AI-generated content. That in itself is a lot of work, as AI content is a moving target. It is now possible to quickly create “pipelines” where 3D content is generated continuously and simply uploaded. How will they sift through all the millions of older models to find this stuff? What happens to incorrectly flagged models? So many things to be concerned with here.
Another item is the interface on the website itself. A quick perusal today shows me a number of things that need fixing:
- There are very annoying advertisements cluttering the interface everywhere.
- Visual clues are often absent, instead relying on plain text titles.
- Blank sections on the home page.
- Sign-up hints frequently appearing.
- Visual style that doesn’t properly separate unique sections of the pages.
- Dull graphic design that is mostly functional but without character or feeling.
And then there was this:
What the heck is this for? Is this a filler for an empty database retrieval? There is no link to the “thing”. Is this a section title? Is the thing of random quality, or are we selecting a random “quality thing”?
Aside from the interface, another huge challenge will be the search function. Searching became effectively impossible on Thingiverse as the number of models increased. For example, if you search for “vase”, you will find many tens of thousands of results. The search seems to be based on the description and tags, which are provided by submitters and can be missing or incorrect. I have no idea how this can be repaired, other than somehow autogenerating proper search metadata.
While Thingiverse does have counts for makes and remixes, they are far behind the community points systems developed by competitors. MyMiniFactory will have to come up with their own scheme for Thingiverse. More than likely, it will be rooted in their successful experience on their other company sites. Because of that, this change might be the easiest for the new team to tackle.
Clearly, it’s going to take some time for MyMiniFactory to get Thingiverse up to a good state, but I am certain they knew that going in and are committed to getting it all done.
Via Thingiverse
