All he did was express his opinion in a thread discussing why people may have lost interest. He didn’t “gatekeep” as you seem to be accusing him of. If anything, it’s you gatekeeping by criticizing him for expressing his own opinion in a very well-written way. In fact he was saying he doesn’t gatekeep. He just moves on. You are accusing him of doing something he explicitly said he didn’t do.
Ikraus is far from alone in that regard. You are also far from alone and that can be a factor in why others lose interest. To an extent we get the forum we manifest. Make it hostile and that’s how the forum will move and people who try to help will just move on. Make it pleasant, cooperative, and a place to share information (as it is intended) and there won’t be a dearth of users.
My Bambu printers are working well. No new problems have popped up since I was getting used to them when I bought them last year. As a result I rarely visit this forum. I never visit forums run by the makers of my microwave oven and table fans either.
Yes, some of these have many posts about models, but they are also filled with helpful information and answers to user questions. I do not find these particular communities to be filled with many bad actors, and they are genuinely helpful.
To each his own. The number of model posts is not of any concern to me and is easy to scroll past. Meanwhile, in the last week, I saw a thread about known issues in the P2S G-Code, with instructions on how to fix them. Made my P2S quieter, solved my first lawyer problems, and improved my print quality. Well worth skipping 1 or 2 model posts for every 30 info posts.
I just looked, R/BambuLab, of the first 10 post 6 are self promoting and 4 are problems solving type. R/makerworld first posts 18 folks pushing their stuff.
It’s just a filtering problem. If the self-promoting stuff bothers you, task an AI with redacting it and showing you only what you want to see. Easy, right? It’s unproductive only if there’s literally nothing you want to see. People in radio call it SNR. Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Grab the signal and ignore the noise.
Thats the funny thing. If you google an issue, a reddit thread is going to be in the top few results anyways. (And the google AI search loves pulling info from reddit, true or not)
There are multiple sorting options for every subreddit, which can be configured individually, and an algorithm is also at play. My view does not look like yours.
Regardless, you don’t need to agree with me, but the answer to the question of “where is everybody” remains Reddit. If the community here is dying and the original poster is looking for an active community, it’s on Reddit.
I’m sure there’s useless information posted here, just like there’s useless information posted on Reddit, but so far I’ve found a whole lot of very useful information on Reddit.
More than 5 percent. I would say somewhere around 60, I just keep it on “hot” and see whatever comes up.
There is a lot of cool stuff, for example the X2D delivered at microcenter this morning. Or there was a “fucƙing amazing” h2d setup last month with underglow and all.
The difference is that it is rare that anyone on reddit is deep diving into the technical side of troubleshooting. There is little to no follow up. Posts come and go with vague answers like “clean your plate”. The last real troubleshooting that I saw was people trying to guide a guy through trying to get a mangled p1s working again after it fell down some stairs.
Thats just the nature of that platform. Discussion is surface level because posts fade so quickly. Unlike here where we have topics that have been active for 2 years.
It is more than fine for me. There are more threads than I can ever read on this forum. I can only scan and read the ones shown up on the first screnn, unless someone replied to me in an earlier post.
That’s about the time I want to spend on social media anyway. I have never followed anyone on social media. But I may make an exception if someone takes on this challenge and shares their progress.
Sorry, but I feel I must speak up now that Reddit is receiving so much praise here. Of course you’re entitled to your opinion - I just have a different one.
As someone who was in the top 3% of posters for years, meaning I was among the 3% most active users and helped shape the community, here’s my take on it. Reddit is the worst place to go for help, and smart people have already left it long ago. Me too, of course. Why?
Unfortunately, this subreddit is constantly flooded with fake information and advice because there are so many people on Reddit who want to see the world go up in flames. That’s not an exception; it happens every day.
You might get some helpful advice, but more often than not, you’ll also receive instructions disguised as genuine help that are actually meant to harm you / your printer. These can include incorrect settings or faulty G-code. On top of that, bots push the comments to the top. You might not notice it at first and think it’s a great community, until you realize that this happens every day and you’re being bombarded with misinformation.
Unfortunately, the top 3% couldn’t do anything about it, because only the admins have the authority to remove such content, which they have never done and never will. This is different from what happens on the forum, where incorrect or harmful information is usually deleted immediately.
This can also be backed up by facts: For example, when the motherboard of the A1 broke and it started to overheat, quite a few fake photos were posted. Users who hate Bambu but pretend to be experts have taken hundreds of photos of the same printers from different angles, making it seem like a widespread problem rather than isolated incidents. Newcomers, in particular, then come to this forum from Reddit, completely confused and frightened, panicking that their whole house is going to burn down.
Another example: When the firmware was rewritten and the subscribers tried to force Bambu to make it open source, a huge amount of misinformation was circulated. Subs such as s/f…bambu (censored) were created with the sole purpose of launching targeted misinformation campaigns that continue to this day.
Newcomers have no way of knowing whether the advice they receive is genuine. More often than not, they end up coming to the forum with a printer that has been completely broken by bad advice. Unfortunately, misinformation like this is still being posted in the subforums today, and there’s more and more of it because, as I mentioned, it isn’t deleted like it is here.
Sure, from the outside or as a newcomer, Reddit might seem great, but once you’ve been around for a while and see how many users come here from Reddit in despair and panic because they’ve been given false information, you start to think differently about Reddit.
Like I said, smart people left Reddit a long time ago; you’ve got a better chance of running into them here or on Discord. Smart people avoid Reddit like the plague these days. You won’t find that there as a DIY enthusiast. It makes sense, really: Smart people are interested in like-minded folks, not in sites that are just full of self-promotion and fake information. You’ll actually find them on GitHub before you find them on Reddit. For example, it’s impossible to have a discussion on Reddit about how to program for Bambu Software or about G-code.
Don’t get me wrong - everyone is entitled to their opinion - but I have to strongly disagree that the smart people are on Reddit; quite the opposite. We - myself included, as well as most regular users - rightly warn people against turning to Reddit for help, because we know how often newcomers have received bad advice and ended up in despair.
Bear in mind that posting false information here can have real-world consequences, as users may run their own companies or small businesses. This could indirectly result in them losing their MakerWorld account. They can’t afford to post misinformation.In contrast, on Reddit, no one checks users’ histories, and there are no real consequences.
In short: If you want people to get fake information and break their printers because of it, send them to Reddit. It’s the “best place” to find incorrect repair instructions and faulty G-code.
Normally, I wouldn’t even respond to this, since we’ve been warning people about Reddit for years now. It’s not as if this is some new insight. But I think it’s irresponsible to send newbies to Reddit and let them walk into a trap.
