Upd: Added 2 new tips for generators
Hello, it's time to talk!
Civitai has been growing at fast pace leading to a lot of new people and difficulties, whether technical or design. Civitai has great potential as tool for exploring AI images of all themes, but as of now this potential is hidden behind hurdles, lack of clarity and massive technical difficulties.
All this stuff can deter people from using Civitai for browsing or creating, so I hope this article can help you ease into it.
It's generally stuff ranging from obvious to basic for people who are more or less new to it. For some people it's just a website to mess around with training Loras and some private generations, but in this article I'm focusing how to improve viewing experience for yourself and your followers, if you are a generator.
For viewers:
1. Browse content of followed users with POSTS 💡
Most obvious way to browse content seems like Images tab, but if you want to check up specifically on users you follow, I highly recommend using Posts tab.
Post - is just a pack of images ranging from 1 to 20, it's not like a twitter post or article. Every image and video is a part of a post, so you won't miss any images this way. But using only Images tabs causes many and many videos to go unnoticed.
In images tab you would get quite long feed and if someone posted 40 images you aren't interested in today, it will take some time scrolling and you may miss someone else's image accidentally, but in Posts they all are grouped and use first images of post as cover, and if preview gets you interested, you can open post to view all of its images, without cut-ins from random images that could be in images feed.
How to setup Posts tab as followed feed:
Open Posts tab
In the top right dropdown choose Followed instead of Everyone
In the dopdown right next to it choose Newest
Done! Unless you relog every time or use private browsing, settings will save.
This way you can keep up with content of users you follow without visual clutter even if there is a lot of them.
Also!
You can often find in post description some message from poster or links to relevant collections. Don't let their heartful messages go to waste!
But leaving comments on posts don't give notification to poster (crazy), so be aware of that.
Also 2!
Generally posts index faster than images, so Posts tab can have content that is yet to be shown in Images tab, so usually content there is more up-to-date. That is unless in that time of day posts indexing is more broken that indexing for images, ugh.
2. Make use of collections 📂
Certain users can have collections with their content, grouped by theme or character and I strongly recommend checking them out and following collections you enjoy.
Why? Well, if you follow a collection, you will get a notification if collection is updated with new content. 
A pretty easy way to keep track of content you enjoy. Sadly you can't explicitely ask Civitai to send you notifications when user you follow makes an images post. I implemented a hack, creating a separate collection with my every post, but that's not something many people do.
If you get several notifications for same collections before your visit, high chance that your notifications counter will stuck on red after your check collection out. You can clear it my pressing Mark all as read.
Main downside is that collections indexing is trash. Most obvious way to check on collections is open Collections tab in profile of user, number on tab should tell you how many public collections they have. But there is a high chance that tab will have less collections than stated (or even none!). In this case all you can do is check if user has some direct links to collections in announcement or posts descriptions.
I have an article with link to my every collections and some other users do that as well, look around their profiles and you may find something of that extent.
2.1. Make use of home page (if you're making use of collections)
Default home page is an arrangement of feeds of featured images, models, articles etc. It is nice if you are deeply engaged with community or just looking for some SFW exploration, but if your intentions are more focused on certain types of content or users, it will provide no value to you.
But!
You can add any Collection to your home page! Downside - it will be stripped down to SFW, but you can use it as a shortcut, for example. Or perhaps you are here for SFW content only, then there is no downside for you at all
3. Supporting your favorite users 👍
Supporting people is great! But if you can't or don't want to throw around tips, you still can do it:
Reactions 👍❤😂😢
Quite obvious way and on many profiles you can find announcement that it helps. One reaction per image/article gives a bit of buzz. Multiple reactions to same image will not give more buzz, but perhaps will boost a mood of author. Buzz from reactions has daily cap and you need to react to stuff that was posted in last 30 days. But be honest, don't just spam all reactions on every image.
Collection 🔖
Actually user also gets same amount of extra buzz if you save their images to your own collection. So you can create your own private or public collection, save your favorite images there and you'll get a nice arrangement of images you like, and support people who generated them. It also has daily cap for rewards when your images are collected.
For generators:
1. Cook your posts 🍲
Desire to slam that "Publish" button can be pretty high, but you should not trust civitai's stability. Quite often it is riddled with indexing errors, leading to your content staying hidden for some time (or forever!), and then when index pipe gets unclogged, your images are hidden beneath those, that were posted later. So, always schedule your post, at least 15 minutes, but go for longer if you can.
15 minutes is generally enough time to notice that your images are not being indexed and reschedule post for later. For that you need to check images tab on your profile to see if images are there. Usually around 10 minutes is enough for them to pop-up there as scheduled.
But also sometimes images can randomly get marked for manual review and will stay hidden untill revied. That is certainly something to reschedule for at least few hours away, or even to the next day.
As NSFW oriented generator, I had quite a few of such instances, generally for least explicit images. I don't know how it works. I can have post filled with quite opressive close-ups featuring excessive fluids, but that one PG-13 image in the start of the post will get marked for review.
If image is marked for review it will have a corresponding mark on it. It looks almost like (Hidden) mark, but different in shape. One is square, another is circle, I forgor which is which.
But that is only if you care about publicity and discoverability of your images on Civitai itself. If you just need them to be available online, nothing to worry about.
2. Keep track of technical difficulties 🚨
It's quite simple. If civitai is coughing blood, just take a break. Reschedule your posts for later if you have any and come back later. Civitai can have wide arrangement of problems:
General slowness and bugginess
Broken image indexing
Broken post indexing
Maintenance
Stupid annoying shit
In such times generating images is difficult, viewing content is difficult, posting something new is almost impossible. Fixes can take quite some time, whole day even (or more), just let the guys deal with it, pushing more stuff into swollen gullet of website certainly won't accelerate the process.
Very often generation can be marked as done, but it has less images than you requested. For example green 3, when you asked 4. Refreshing page helps to display lost images.
3. Don't spam with 1-image posts 📧
It's really that simple. If you have 10 images you want to publish - make a single 10-images post, not 10 posts with single image. To see 10 images in a row in images tab is expected, but to see 10 posts of single image in a row is very annoying and not user-friendly, since if all 10 images were grouped in 1 post it would've been much easire to explore them in confines of that post.
Of course, if all you really want to post is a single image, then it doesn't apply.
4. Large posts should have certain level of variety 🎨
What I'm referring to is you probably should avoid making post with 20 images of same character in same pose from the same angle with same face expression etc. I know, I know, in generation heat sometimes it's hard to determine which takes are more worthy than others and simply abandoning rest to oblivion is not something you'd like to do, but from viewer standpoint that's not much easier! Having few variations is totally okay, viewer can choose which they like better or them all, but if there is too much of same right next to each other, it all becomes a blur.
And I don't mean you should make other images totally different, it still can be same character, same vibe, location etc, I'm talking about variety in composition in confines of 1 post. You are free to post exactly same idea next day, but in this one post you should provide at least minimal level of variety.
Don't worry, it can be easily cheated, if you don't know where to start. Add any of those tags or combination of them and it will add composition variety almost for free:
dutch angle, from below, from above, from side, from behind, cowboy shot, full body shot
Also you experiment with tag strength, from below and (from below:1.4), will give different results. These will only adjust angle, but that on it's own will help you increase variety. But it's just a quick tip, study prompts of other generators or danbooru tags system if you want to have more control.
5. Make use of collections 📂
That's quite simple. If you want viewer to be able to make use of collections, you need to have collections.
If you goal is user experience, then group posts/images in collections by theme/character/source/archetype. Viewers can follow collections and get notifications when you add something to them, pretty neat, right?
!DON'T ADD HIDDEN STUFF TO PUBLIC COLLECTIONS!
It will trigger a notification for followers of that collection the moment you add, not when post/images becomes public, so if you have a post scheduled for later, you need to add it to collection when it becomes public and not before. I know, it's a pain, but getting notifications for hidden content is also pain.
!!IMPORTANT!!
Collections indexing is trash and almost nonexistent, so you can't trust your Collections tab.
You need to deliver direct links to collections to your followers:
Leave links to relevant collections in posts descriptions
Leave links in your announcement message on profile
Make an article filled with links (and perhaps previews) to your collections, and then spread link to that article.
You can also make a collection you update with your every new post, to notify those interested of your every new post.
Collections is a great way to help your followers to filter content and track what people enjoy more, by counting followers. For now, not many people engage in following collections, so any number change is a noticeable sign. My most popular collection has 40 people following it. On a grand scale it seems like a small number, but actually that's 40 living humans who are actually interested in newer content for that collection. Not bots, not buzz farmers or people just pressing random buttons, and it feels considerably more real that >1.5k followers on profile.
So, make collections, keep them up to date, spread links.
6. Reset seed to random when you remix 🎲
Let's say you start by remixing an existing published image - yours or anybody elses.. When you hit that Remix button, with a high chance (unless it's a highres fix etc.) generation tool will copy even seed of that image, and unless you hit that Random button, you'll be getting more or less same image. If you don't even change original prompt at all, you may even get exactly same image that you try to remix from. Now that would've been hella awkward, to "remix" somebody else's image into exactly same image and post it.
Remix button on generation result will always set seed to Random
7. Fast and easy post composing using favorites❤
While generating images, most likely you are not going to need every image and it is useful to keep track of which images you want to be in your final post. Putting checkmarks on those images seems like obvious and straightforward idea, but if you refresh page or come back later, checkmarks certainly would not save.
A better way is to press little heart icons on images you plan to post and then later you can filter generation queue to favorited images only.
As you can see, it would also work with Liking and Disliking generations, but these are buttons for feedback, so heart icon is a more private non-commital way to prepare images.
By the way, giving thumbs up or down on generation in generator will give a bit of buzz on a daily cap.
If you are making your post from computer, switching from queue to feed is most convenient when you gather favorited images into a post. It will just give you a compact list of images without any breaks or metadata.
If you ever use mobile for generations, I recommend to check Larger images in Generator in settings for your own convenience.
🚨 8. Keep track of missing images 🚨
This one is very important and directly connected to Civitai hiccups. When making posts, always check that post has same amount of images as you marked for the post!
The slower Civitai works, the more chance of more images being lost! It's rare to lose more than 1 image,
Fastest way is to count in Rearrange menu, especially since it's always in rows of 3, and you can quickly find that something is amiss if the last row has unexpected amount of images (like for 20-image post it's always shoudl be 2 images in last row), but you can get tricked, if whopping 3 images are missing.
Good news is that you don't have to make new post and roll dice until all of images get hooked. You can download jpeg of generation from generator and add it to the post, all metadata will be there (prompt, model, loras etc) and won't need to manually add it.
BONUS. Don't be obnoxious⚡
Please, don't build your public civitai personality on buzz. Notifying followers that it helps you and you are grateful is perfectly fine, but don't overstretch it to extent of panhandling and beggary. You can get a 1000⚡ buzz for a buck, don't put such a low price on your public image.
Considering that Civitai grows fast, gets littered more and more and is not profitable, sooner or later it will die, so make most of it while you can!