The Civitai Situation is Crazy

So the Civitai team have introduced a new update that, is, for lack of any better words, god fucking awful. And the reasoning behind it is flimsy at best. For those who are blissfully unaware, the way buzz works has been drastically changed, so that you may no longer create NSFW generations using blue buzz, and must instead use their premium, cash-based yellow buzz instead. For most users trying to generate NSFW on the platform, this is a massive issue, and though they've tried to mitigate it (mostly through flattery rather than actual improvements), the damage has been done.

Why?

If you ask the Civitai team, it's because of payment processors. I'm sure that's partially true, but not entirely. You see, they created civitai.green, which is meant to be a site for purely SFW, PG-rated content to be posted separately to the main site. You can use blue buzz on this site, as well as their brand new "green buzz", which is like yellow buzz, except for only being usable on the green site, and having none of the benefits of yellow buzz. It is essentially blue buzz that you can use to give tips, and can only use on the new site. This type of buzz can be purchased with a credit or debit card.

However, civitai.green is, obviously, a different site to civitai.com, and you cannot use green buzz on the latter. On civitai.com, you STILL cannot purchase any sort of buzz using any debit or credit card, or any mainstream payment service. If the reason we can no longer generate NSFW content with blue buzz was so that payment processors would allow purchases on the site, then we would, at the very least, be allowed to make purchases on the site. But we can't. The site that payment processors DO allow you to spend money on (your OWN money, may I add) is civitai.green, which solves none of the issues with payment processors on the main site whilst preventing us from generating the content that we were allowed to generate only days earlier.

So, whilst payment processors may have had a little to do with it, I think the main reason for this change was to get more of us to buy yellow buzz, which I do not have the money to do, and do not want to go through crypto or a shady processor to do.

Membership (Damage Control)

A few days after the initial change they pushed an update to allow users with a civitai.com membership to generate NSFW content using blue buzz, in an effort to save face. This doesn't help me, or most members, who do not pay for memberships, because we cannot afford them, and they, again, are only able to be purchased using shady middle-men or crypto.

I almost did purchase a membership at one point, quite a while before this. But I found that the payment processor was shady, and didn't even recognize my currency, so I decided against it, and as it turns out, I made the right choice. Because this is not something I wish to support.

What Now?

For me, unless the rules change somehow, I will probably train a LoRA or two, and use the rest of the yellow buzz that other users have graciously awarded to me, and then leave. For the site, a sharp decline in users and (hopefully) much more in lost profits than their awful "middle ground" solution can earn them.

End

"Q: Wait, I have tons of Blue Buzz and only make NSFW content. Am I screwed?
A: Honestly? Yeah, this change impacts you the most. You'll need Yellow Buzz going forward — either by purchasing it, earning tips from other users, or creating resources that others pay Yellow Buzz to use. We know this sucks for some creators. But the alternative was no Civitai at all."

Fuck you.

Sincerely,

WarTorn54