Number Go Up?

As I steadily toil away, whipping my 3060 into putting out images, dealing with the jank of moving 20 images at a time over and over again in scheduling posts for a month I keep a rough track on a few things to see what people like, what bot's scrape likes on or off of, and how to tell the difference between automated engagement and actual people.

Not all metrics are created equal. It's true. Consider a moment why would someone bot likes? What is the net value of the engagement metric here? Nominally it's a public count for engagement, it gets you a cap rate on blue buzz, and all that comes with it.

The real value as far as I can tell, is collections. Collections do not reward the collector save to have the image on hand. It is also capped much harder, and no one gets a algo boost or anything like that as far as I know from it.

What that means is Collections>Reactions to know if your engagement is 'real' on a relatively niche territory like static images. Video, even mediocre ones, get at least three times that in reactive engagement on a standard by newest feed comparison.

I think it is important to know when, what, and why a particular piece sticks out. What gives it something other than just a lingering feed blip that makes it special?

The core question some might ask someone like me, is why do I post so much?

I started on civitai with a basic question: Given the same prompt, how much seed to seed variation is there per model? Is there actually a much smaller, finite number of images actually possible?

This is why metrics are important to me. I can see when something feels 'more of the same', the Slop hose occasionally can put out untold wonders, but you will print slop all the same.

Inpainting came later for me, so what was slop, can also become more if you have the patience and time with bad UI's or can take the time to relearn shit all over with comfyui+krita etc.

The point I'm getting at is it has become worryingly clearer, Civit has dropped in numbers substantially. We had a little bit of recovery with the last boosted return push, but I know exactly how much I post, when I posted, and the difference spanning more than a few years. I'd call it almost a 60% drop in engagement rates. Even accounting for fresh account as it was still much higher even a few months ago.

Which leads me to a question: Where did they go?