As reported on by Make Magazine, MakerBot has decided to change the logo on the Thingiverse page from “Thingiverse” to “MakerBot Thingiverse” and apparently some people feel this is a problem.
Anyway, if we’re all being honest with each other in the community trust-tree…I feel like Make Magazine is trying to stir up a controversy. This post on their blog was the first I’d heard of anyone being upset because of the logo at the top of the page…as opposed to all of the new features that don’t work correctly. As for the question about whether or not the community thinks it’s time for a new 3D thing sharing site not run by a 3D printing company, well, to me it just sounds like they’re floating the idea of a Make Magazine 3D thing sharing site. You know, because the community wants it.
Some highlights from their blog comments are after the jump.
- The community always seems to get upset anytime changes occur on Thingiverse, which probably stems from the fact that the community thinks it owns the site. Yes, Thingiverse was started by Zach Smith in 2008, but it was created as a companion website to Makerbot.com. MakerBot and its employee have operated, maintained, and paid for the website ever since.
- I can hardly fault Makerbot for wanting to reap some rewards with newcomers by flashing their name on a site that provides access to so many printables. If that was their goal, they could have accomplished the same thing by putting a ‘brought to you by’ or ‘powered by’ slogan featured prominently on the site instead of changing the whole name.
- Phillip Torrone – this post makes it hard for makerbot to participate, when you say “there seems to be a lot of uproar” but not linking to any examples…out of all the 3d printing companies, i pick makerbot. do we want 3d systems who is suing formlabs *and* kickstarter to run one instead?
- davidcdean – it’s just tacky behavior when people are already a little testy about MakerBot.
- Gareth Branwyn – This is Michael’s first post and some of this confusion might be coming from the fact that I edited it to try and interject a more editorial tone and balance the two sides…The rough piece was originally slanted, I felt, too far towards the MakerBot side and I wanted to open it up
- Michael Overstreet – Maybe I am over reacting to all of the negative posts I have seen on the 3d printing forums that I follow? I still think I have two very valid questions. One, why do some many people get upset ever time there is a change to Thingiverse? Two, maybe it is time for a 3rd party who does not sell printers to create a website similar to Thingiverse?
- David Randolph – The most controversial thing I’ve seen about it so far is this post. I’m very active on the makerbot user group on google and the complaints have been about bugs or usability.
- kongorilla – I don’t think there’s an “uproar” over Makerbot making their logo more prominent. Most people “in the 3D printing community” always new it was a Makerbot site. Yes, I’ve seen forum posts by people who never noticed the subtle grey logo that was there before, but hardly an uproar…no matter how much good work Makerbot puts into Thingiverse, the community has put in hundreds of times more. It’s important for Makerbot to hear and respond to the concerns of the 3D community, because without them there’ll only be a few Makerbot sponsored items on the site.
- Bill Baumgarner – The uproar from many of us is not because of “MakerBot Thingiverse” — annoying as that is — but because the “cosmetic changes” make the site nearly unusable…The real problem is that MakerBot’s update to Thingiverse is awful. It is a step backwards in usability and greatly undermines the sites usefulness.
- Bre Pettis – For those that criticize us for adding MakerBot to the heading, we did that because we are proud of the work we do with Thingiverse and even though I think most Make: readers know it’s a MakerBot website, we kept getting surprised reactions from folks who have been using it and didn’t know it was us working on it…We’re going to keep pushing the site forward, making it more usable, and doing our best to make it better.