Once upon a time contests were a fun part of Makerworld to scroll through but over time they have become more and more polluted with irrelevant content uploads.
People can’t be that dumb to think a neon sign saying “Book Nook” is worthy of entry into an actual Book Nook competition? A desktop lamp or some AI slop model of Jesus riding a skateboard count as fun April Fool Pranks? Click on the Children’s Toy Design Contest and the first model listed is a beverage can cooler/holder!
I must have reported 200 listings over time and in recent months the majority of those reports just go ignored. Reporting is both time consuming and a waste of time when not acted upon by moderators, the easiest option is to not bother browsing contests anymore.
Similarly the same abuse seems to be rolling over to makerworld category listings!
There is a tonne of crap listed in both 3D Printer Parts and Upgrades and 3d printer Accessories. When it comes to browsing through categories, the only thing you can do is dislike a model or creator over and over to clear through the trash or navigate to each individual listing and fill out a report
It should be easier for the community as a whole to contribute to competition and listing accuracy via a simpler reporting system that would react after multiple reports are triggered.
Maybe use more AI tools to moderate slop and less AI tools to generate it, if I wanted to spend my time scrolling through poop, I’d be on facebook.
Definitely something we have complained about. Bambu’s creation of cherry-picked contest entries into highlighted collections also reduces exposure benefits to lesser models that aren’t abuses.
It would be so much better for Bambu to police the contest entries themselves and not lift some models out of the crowd to feature in curated collections.
But wish in one hand. I quit bothering with contests when they started the curated collections of the best models. I get wanting to feature/highlight the best models but it makes people less likely to explore the “also-ran” contest entries. Leaving the AI and other off-topic submissions in the full collections just makes exploring all the contest entries more tedious and focuses people into the curated collections because Bambu leaves the junk out of the curated sub-collections.
It again comes down to not policing or removing the off-topic and AI slop models. Bambu really needs to do something about the slop models and the people who ignore the rules to post them.
It reminds of the early days of the app stores, when you had 400 flashlight apps. Today you better know the app you are looking for because you sure can’t browse categories in a reasonable amount of time.
i wish there would be more categories and subcategories and subcategories for more subcategories…
i think this would realy help everybody whos searching for something specific on makerworld…
im austrian… and we have something own like ebay, also for used and new things… its called “willhaben” and it is realy a well made platform concept… with a lot of categories and subcategories… a lot of filters… its easy and fast searching for something on there…
clearly… when you upload something on there, you have to go down till the last subcategorie for it!
but you will find everything relativ fast and easy…!
what do you think about mor categories and subcategories for upload and finding…?
if somebody is interestet in how “willhaben” looks or work..?? here is a link to it…
Reason for problem - Not enough human moderators, and too much reliance on AI.
Solution - Allow users to volunteer their printers to run distributed AI training when it is not printing. Sure, the CPU is slow, but Bambu won’t be the ones paying for the electricity.
This will improve the quality of AI moderation, increase user engagement by active participation, be very cost effective for BBL.
Honestly, I do not like the idea of using AI training.
But I do like the idea of having users get involved with the process. Volunteer moderation could go a long way. Although you would need to be careful because the abuse could get out of hand if the moderators are not vetted properly.
You’re going to have to use AI to do the initial weeding, but the problem is most AI’s are not trained correctly, otherwise you would need an army of people. Also AI seems to suck at identifying AI.
the only thing you can do is dislike a model or creator over and over to clear through the trash or navigate to each individual listing and fill out a report
They create accounts and upload new models faster than you can keep blocking them. How do you see it? Exactly, the best solution is to stop scrolling mw.
They have them, just make reporting simpler with a minimum threshold before it’s flagged for moderator action and implement safeguards so only mature accounts can actually report to prevent sock puppet malicious abuse.
Similarly incorrectly categorised models could be fixed by democracy, member x suggests a change future visitors are prompted to vote on said change and again once a threshold is reached said action is targeted for moderator approval and/or if no change suggested after x amounts of reports the model is delisted from it’s category and the creator is notified.
The convoluted reporting system doesn’t work across the board, sure have a multistep process for IP violations but not to do some simple housekeeping!
I totally agree. I just quit looking at them. I saw so many contest entries that should not be in there. Some of them were half fake. Like a person put up a model claiming it had these electronic parts that did this and that when in reality they had a printed paper on the model acting as a fake screen. And they had no building directions. It was just silly.
Case in point, the current Dungeons and Dragons contest is for tabletop miniatures and scenery, above are the top 6 trending entries when you click on the listing. /smh
