Good resources! Thanks for sharing. I'm also making my first macropad, but already ordered the PCBs.. anyways the tips from those articles will be useful for the next one.

The category it's supposed to be used for 3d printer upgrades, mods, tools, calibration tests and stuff FOR 3d printing.

I'd really like to make the comparison too, also against Cults 3d, Creality Cloud and Thangs. But there's no API for Printables for now, and I didn't feel like doing web scraping for the whole site.

I totally get your point and agree that the site has been almost unusable for some time now. But from that to total abandonment from users I think it's difficult to tell. For instance, if you asked ten new people who are just getting into 3d printing, I think most of them would tell you they first looked for files on Thingiverse. Maybe they don't stick with it, but the site is so huge it's really difficult not to find it when looking for things online, especially if you are new. The fact that the number of new published models may include a large number of remixes/customized parts means that there's people using those features, and the rate of increase is almost the same, so people seem to be using the site indeed, even if only for that.

I personally stopped uploading models to it two years ago, and switched to Printables. But I wanted to see with numbers whether this general opinion of Thingiverse being abandoned was backed up by data or just a sentiment among people who are involved in the 3d printing, enough to go online in forums, and comment (I think the average user doesn't do that)

Thingiverse.com is the largest online platform for sharing models for 3d printing, and it continues to grow. Glad to see that the majority of models published are not simply toys :)

Out of curiosity, and as a learning exercise, I pulled the data from Thingiverse's REST API using Python. The code I used for doing this is available , if you want to check it out. I'm a total noob, and just downloaded everything locally on CSV files (would love to hear about better approaches, like creating a database or something more refined).

The image is from a post I wrote about the statistics of Thingiverse..

It shows the cumulative number of published models ("Things") on Thingiverse.com over time. On the left side, the growth of the total number of models. On the right, the same analysis for each of the 10 main categories.