2 Problems: philosophical underlying problems and (near)surface issues…
Philosophical wall of text
Ever get the feeling where a person (or a company or a government) has string of problems and deals with them in the wrong way?
Hanlon’s razor would ascribe that to incompetence. However this looks like people following incentives in a complex system. In addition to that, we see different philosophies in play, which in this case created a response that should seem “alien” for people with different core values and philosophies.
The system before change had IMHO just one fatal flaw: Point farmers. This was acknowledged by Bambu themselves initially and was repeated in the blog post as one of 2 reasons for the change. This would be easy to combat if Bambu had listened to people pointing out accounts playing the game of “boost-for-boost” or using other methods to gather boosts that fell outside of guidelines. The introduction of “Community” tab allowed Bambu to have such accounts handed on a plater with all the reporting (just check one of the threads regarding it: Makerworld "community" tab was a big mistake) Even without boosts in picture, people report point farmers that use different way to gather points in less-than-honest ways: Point fraud, with fake profiles and repeated photos - that too will be ignored and later on there will be a change to point system quoting the issues pointed out by people, but again - taking wrong approach to combat the issues rather than listen to good suggestions by users.
What additionally grinds my gears here is the evil “nudge” to boost models that are “complex”:
The models you choose to boost will now directly impact how many Boost Tokens you receive.
An honest person should have no fear of boosting “simple” models and should have full control over the boost tokens they receive.
This is the issue of the different underlying philosophy: instead of combating actual malicious use, “the system” punishes valid uses that are not “aligned with our original mission”.
However, skipping philosophical “woo-woo” the surface issues are still bad:
This is quite simple: the definition of “complex model” that’s worthy of boosting aligns with exclusive model definition. This has 2 pronged results: people boosting exclusive models will get more boosts and creators having exclusive models will be encouraged to do more exclusive models.
(this also may boost filament, consumable spare parts and maker’s supply sales )
Also, to repeat what I said in “philosophical wall of text” simply: for “us” it would be better and make more sense to police cheating/point farming. For “them” their way makes more sense, but is alien to “us”.