People receiving points and praise for print profiles of your designs on Makerworld is weird and disappointing.

So I've been releasing some designs for flexi toys and they've been going pretty well! However it feels inevitable now that every so often, a user will come along and supply a print profile that's slightly faster or smaller or has fuzzy skin. Totally fine, I guess. One shaved like 5 minutes off of a print, okay.

However, they can select not to contribute points for that upload to the original designer and instead collects the points themselves. When people use their profile and comment praise for the model, I've had those profile creators respond like they made the model itself.

One of them I found is an account that takes any freshly, almost trending print and prints them in fuzzy skin mode then adds a print profile - he has over 600 of these print profiles, and gets massive amounts of points for them. He produces tonnes of these every week.

Points being redeemable for gift cards really makes people do this as a full time, low effort hustle.

I understand that people gotta hustle. But it's a little bit disheartening when people take credit for the work. And it's disappointing of Makerworld that this is even a feature.

I am all for the open-source nature of 3D printing, I've been in the hobby for a long time, but it's a little sad to be working super hard on a model in blender and printing prototypes and stuff to just.. get pushed aside for a profile that's 2 minutes faster.

The only way I've really had to counter it (sometimes) is by making 4-5 profiles a model of all the variations I could think of that people might like so nobody else snipes it, but if someone does the same model and %1 less infill.. then people pick that

Edit: my thought is is that maybe they shouldn’t be able to opt in to receive points but instead once a profile is highly rated it can be considered by Bambu in a more manual system for point sharing?

Edit: looks like some people didn’t know this was a thing! If you do really enjoy a model I suggest boosting where possible - it can help your favourite creators continue their work :)

Edit 3: I’ve started to get harassed on makerworld for this post. So that’s interesting