So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
TLDR... this is a bit of a rant... feel free to unfollow me
This.... this is hard. This is a site I joined mid-June last year and absolutely fell in love with. I felt like an outsider looking in as all the top creators seemed to gen off-site, and I was "stuck" with what was available, then we got ZavyChroma, Faetastic, and shortly after Flux. Suddenly a whole new world was opened up and it was possible to produce great images ON-SITE. Somewhere shortly after that Artify noticed me and I started being featured regularly in his gallery, then Vircat and Castro started featuring me, but for several months I had imposter syndrome, feeling that I was punching so far above my weight that I didn't deserve any of the attention.
Having lurched from popular to unpopular along the way, and finding some VERY talented LoRA makers, I found a consistent niche where regardless of whether people like an image, each image posted was at least of a consistent quality. Shoutouts to angryangel81 and others who reached out to encourage me, and to @ChronoKnight for being the first LoRA creator to connect with me (initially connecting me with @Abrakzas, then @Ajuro, @ArtifyAI and @OneViolentGentleman - proper heavy hitters. At this point I'm a happy bunny, I'm making images I genuinely think are OK, I'm talking to people, everything's rosy.
Then the shit hit the fan. Featured images had always been a bugbear of just about everyone I interacted with, and it had been an option ever since I joined where it was possible to pay $10 to get a featured image, and that never sat well with me for multiple reasons. I've always been of the opinion that a site like this should be able to make money- I absolutely agree that you should get buzz for reacting to images, following people, etc. which is necessary for community engagement, but if the site is still losing money, then the cost of generation needs adjusting.
THEN the other pay-to-win initiatives emerged from the woodwork, pay to get faster gen speeds, pay to get your checkpoint featured, and at that point I realised I not only was no longer in love with this site, I was ethically opposed to what I view as morally abhorrent cash-grab schemes.
Roll forward 8 days- image tagging is still unavailable (2 month now, we keep getting "exciting" announcements about jank I've no interest in but seemingly no effort to fix base essentials), Flux with any LoRA added is unusable as it generates stripes (I think a failed fix to reduce generation times), and as of an hour ago as I write this the top 12 images are porn images- was this the brave new world CivitAI envisioned?
Right now I'm drunk, and therefore more likely to be completely honest rather than more guarded, but the site has pivoted so far from what I joined that I can't recognise it. I hope this isn't the end and CivitAI can create a way of generating money that isn't pay-to-win. As a purely on-site generator this week has been one of pure frustration, as a (now previously, I've cancelled membership, whether I rejoin we'll see in the future) gold member I've been entirely unable to generate acceptable images (without stripes) for 8 days, so yes, I'm angry on multiple levels right now