How long will it be before product placement ads start flooding us?

Bambu Lab Software Bambu Studio
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As many of my posts have pointed out. I work in big tech for decades and consumer big tech is among the most evil of the industrial complexes outside of perhaps the pharma and defense industries.

That said, I couldn’t figure out why Orca has the feature on their fork of Bambu studio but it’s absence in Bambu is glaring in my view.

Cura’s and Bambu Studios preferences page side by side

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It baffled me why Bambu would force a user to continue to be taken to the home page when most of us would much rather be taken directly to the prepare page without the annoyoance of extra clicks. Cura is made by hobbyists for hobbyists so they included that quality of life enhancement back in 1.6.

Then I just noticed this little morsel in Bambu Studio’s 1.8 preferences page, it was likely there when 1.7 was released supporting Makerworld. WTF?

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So now it’s not enough that I’m forced to endure that real-estate stealing “Share me” button at the top of the studio page, you also want to open the door to spam me? When does this check mark go away and how far off are we from being forced to endure the home page with product placement ads? Note: “Staff-picked” or “curated” is a red flag word that is marketing code speak for subluminal force-fed advertising.

Mark my words, unless folks state their objections, this is that drip, drip, drip that we in tech count on that users won’t complain if changes are made slowly. The insider term is “boiling the frog” based on the fable that if you make changes too quick, the frog will jump out of boiling water, but if you put the frog in cold water and gradually change the temperature, the frog won’t notice until its too late. Big tech uses this all the time.

Isn’t that what Bambu has set itself up for?

  • Are they banking that all the Sheeple will enjoy the walled garden and just nod and go where they lead them?
  • Will they try to convert Bambu Studio into an involuntary 3D social media launch platform by forcing you to link your Bambu Studio to Makerworld?
  • Will we see a time where LAN-Mode will no longer be an option or at least one will be forced to verify their identity for the purposes of force-marketing?

Not if the community notices it and says something.

So if you’re the apathetic type, you likely wouldn’t have read past the first couple of lines. But if you made it this far, it means your attention span is at least intact. Please Speak Out while there is still time.

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“That checkmark goes away” when you click on it. It might be nice to be able to set the start page, but I don’t see this as a big deal. OrcaSlicer adds a bunch of options Bambu doesn’t, though Bambu often picks them up in a future release.

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Ok
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I think you missed the point of the post. Ask yourself this basic question. Do you like to look at ads? If the answer is yes, then my post is not relevant in your use-case and you would be right not to be bothered by it.

But also ask yourself, how many parts of the Internet (i.e. Google search, etc.) started off with a reasonable number of “informative” relative ads and then went to such the extreme that content became a minority of the pages. Again, if it does not bother you that the item you paid in full now uses your value time to make money off of your eyeballs, then this is not an issue for you.

And finally this question: What enhancement will it bring to the overall performance and experience in the 3D printing process where I am forced to execute clicks to get to what I want?

Remember, that age-old proverb; “If it’s on the Internet and it’s free, you’re the product!”

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I will freely admit that I am at the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to railing against the machine. Most of that was born out of my time in the Cyber security side of the tech industry. It should be noted that most exploits deliver their payloads to unsuspecting users on a cloaked click. If the ad isn’t there in the first place, there is less footprint for thieves to trick you. This is what security-minded browsers like Brave and Duck-duck-go promote. Note that commercial entities like Bing and Google do exactly the opposite.

My friends all say that I am too paranoid, that is until… they witness my browsing experience. They usually say something like “When did {fill in web page} clean up that web page, it’s so easy to look at now”? Then I turn off all my blockers, which are quite aggressive, and reload and ask “Is this what you’re used to?” The look on their faces is priceless.
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For me all these blocker efforts translates into fewer distractions, higher productivity, higher security, faster web page loading and most of all, its a much more enjoyable surfing experience that those of us prior to 2005 would remember.

But again, if none of that makes a difference, then I guess waiting two minutes for pages to load, having to navigate back and forth because you either clicked on the wrong link that was actually an ad, or a popup intercepted your click and you now have to navigate back? If none of that is important, then by all means… baaa follow the sheeple.:wink: For me… no thank you.

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It’s good that there is an opinion on this and that there are people tracking the similarities/differences with Orca v. Bambu Studio.

My understanding is that Orca and Bambulabs work together to an extent on some of the features with both slicing programs. Keeping tabs on what’s going on is a good thing I think, but let’s not assume that because Bambu has been successful up to this point, they are now out to get us. We need a company in the 3D printing world that is on the cutting edge for the hobbyist and the professional alike while at the same time offers affordable solutions and even advantages over the big companies like stratasys.

I think the community hope is that Bambulab might be that company. Maybe they are boiling a frog, but maybe they are just setting the frog in a pot of water while they clean its’ tank! Thanks for being opinionated, it’s certainly a value-add to the forum. Stay optimistic though at the same time that they are just busy cleaning the tank and will come back to address this!

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Bambu is selling an “ecosystem” - printers, filament, models. It is hardly surprising or criminal of them to integrate that with the slicer. It’s no big deal. The system isn’t “closed”. You have other slicer options if you want. Some, totally different (like Cura) and some very similar (like Orca).

Can’t really make BBL the bad guys for trying to maximize how much money they make. That’s the mission of pretty much every business that’s intended to make money (and some that aren’t, even). You aren’t doing that, you aren’t very good businessmen.

Remember, they’re targeting people who are first-time printers, many of whom do not have good CAD skills, but who want to print things. I’d bet that staff-pick models landing page gets a decent amount of action from the user base. Just, not from any of us who have long-time printing experience and mostly do our own stuff…

You’re not going to get them to turn this off. But you might get them to make a change that turns off the landing page if you enable “advanced settings” in the slicer. Put in a change request and see?

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Your first clue should have been you can’t purchase a printer from Bambu without creating a Makerworld account. The second clue should have been Bambu makes it VERY hard to set up the printers without using a cloud account (even if you use lan only mode, most people will have to create a cloud account to connect to wifi to even see the lan only option to turn it on).

Just switch to Orca and move on.

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They won’t change it, that’s right. Just as Microsoft has made record profits with the 365 strategy change - but printing yourself is not the growth marked. Flexible products are a the poor growth market - but printing them himself is already too time-consuming for end customers. Those who will do it will be the fews.

But in the end it doesn’t matter, efullution through selection - so it will go the anyway and there is nothing to say about it… If something is needed, it is a interface to Prestashop, Magento and Shopify - everything else are just intermediat steps and will not survive at all and the path taken is the shortest to the end.

So it takes care of itself as always.

As the saying goes: Wars are only won by those who fight the battles who brings the win of the end. And not by those how tackle and win every single battle… this business strategy today somehow comes from 2000 for Christ.