Remix In 3d Printing: What Your Sources Say About You

Concurrently with the recent, rapid adoption of 3D printing technologies, online sharing of 3D-printable designs is growing equally rapidly, even though it has received far less attention. We study remix relationships on Thingiverse, the dominant online repository and social network for 3D printing. We collected data of designs published over five years, and we find that remix ties exhibit both homophily and inverse-homophily across numerous key metrics, which is stronger compared to other kinds of social and content links. This may have implications on graph prediction tasks, as well as on the design of 3D-printable content repositories.