Hey all,

I didn't think I would be publishing an article like this, seeing as I'm out of the country (I'm in Japan currently) and I don't have access to my PC I use to generate images, but I feel like publishing this article on a whim due to both moderation decisions made on my images in the past & present as well as major site-wide policy changes that have caused an uproar on reddit as well as nuking a ton of images/videos for a lot of users here.

I'm not sure where to start, but the gist of this post is that I have been unhappy with the direction the site has been heading in as of late. I'm not usually one to criticize decisions Civitai makes for financial reasons; they have stated many times that they are in the red and the only reason they are staying afloat is due to venture capitalist funding. So I am usually supportive/indifferent to their decisions on that front.

But they have continually implemented baffling decisions without forethought. Some of their changes have caused major issues, enough that they had to roll them back since they didn't properly plan them (see the site-wide checkpoint coverage update). Some of their changes also fucked over paying members which I don't doubt caused them to permanently lose customers (please announce changes to membership before changing active subscription benefits).

I guess this unpredictability extends to their moderation decisions as well, which will be the first point of my post.

1. Issues with content moderation regarding some of my images

For quite some time now, numerous of my images have been constantly getting removed by a moderator on the civitai team. I always have to appeal my images to get them re-instated. Seb, the head moderator, is usually good about this. He realizes that the moderator who removes my images is in the wrong and restores my images.

This process would be fine and dandy, if there wasn't a time limit to get my images restored before it is permanently deleted from the database. For some reason, Civitai has images set to autodelete from their DB after ~8 days of being stuck in block limbo.

I have to pay ⚡100 Buzz to send an appeal for an image, and if the appeal times out because Seb couldn't check it in time, then that picture (and my Buzz) are gone forever.

This isn't anything negative directed at Seb, for the record. I think he is great and he has always been super helpful. But there is clearly an issue with this autodeletion procedure if I can't always get my appeals checked in time. And I know this will be an issue going forward because Seb has more responsibilities than just moderating images.

Suggestion to the civitai team: disable the autodeletion procedure if an appeal has been sent in for an image PLEASE. It is an oversight if I have to spend Buzz to appeal an image and it can go unchecked, meaning both the image and Buzz are gone without even being processed.

This constant back and forth between me and Civitai to get my images restored has taken a toll on me. This site, which once brought me so much joy, is now a huge source of stress. I don't want to have to constantly log in to this website EVERY DAY to check to see if I need to send any appeals within an 8 day time limit just because some mod thinks a depiction of an adult man is a child.

Yes, you read that right. Someone on the civitai mod team thinks depictions of adult men are children. I can demonstrate this with examples (Seb just restored these images because even he disagreed with the mod who removed them):

This is clearly an adult male with adult male proportions. Just because I used a chibi-style lora, does not make this man a child!

Civitai's obsession with East Asian art style (see Civit chan), but also them not understanding east asian art/animation tropes does not make any sense and feels inherently racist. I can't speak on North America and Europe because there are some nutjob whackos but no one in fucking East Asia looks at this and goes "Yeah, that's a child".

Related to the above, but the same reasoning led to a majority of my sample images for the Pectoral Shadow LoRA I published getting removed. You know the one from this meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2372115-boob-shadow

The majority of my gay followers are probably aware of this meme. It was created by sibi2028 and has been floating on twitter since forever. I have never, ever seen a person complain about this meme or perceive it as a child. It is clearly a chibi-fied/blob-ified depiction of a smaller person in a size difference image.

But according to Civitai, this is considered a child. This reasoning (which got my images removed), completely baffled me. It made me want to unpublish my LoRA on civitai, because if this LoRA can't be used for its main purpose, then why should it exist at all? Again, this circles back to civitai not understanding east asian art/animation tropes, because fucking no one in east asia thinks this is a child.

The biggest, and most important thing I wanted to highlight though,

is a lot of my size difference images have been getting targeted. This one bothers me the most because it affects me on a personal level: I post a lot of size difference images because I am a smaller person myself, and a lot of my real life sexual partners have been bigger than me.

When I see those images getting removed, I feel like Civitai is basically telling me people like me aren't allowed to have sex, or allowed to be depicted having sex. I'm not going to post an example image, or even bother to censor it, but the image showed a skinny adult male getting railed. He clearly had muscle tone that is not attainable by children, proportions that matched an adult, as well as facial hair. So why was it removed? Was it because he had a slight baby face?

Most of my size difference images get restored and re-instated, but when Seb told me that this one wouldn't get restored (because he discussed it with the moderator who convinced him it shouldn't be reinstated), I decided in my heart that I wouldn't be continuing forward with civitai, and also decided I would be preparing this post. Because there's no way I could accept the reasoning: "this looks like a child". It does not look like a child, at all. Especially when far more egregious/sus pictures are uploaded by others to Civit and don't get removed.

I don't want to be told by some weirdo on the Civitai moderator team that skinny adult men are children. End of story.

2. Fate of my published LoRA's and future LoRA creation

For now, I decided I will keep my LoRA's up. As mentioned previously, I was seriously considering deleting my Pectoral Shadow LoRA, but seeing a ton of people use it made me have a change of heart and made me happy. If some people can find some use for it, then I will keep it up.

But, I'm not sure if I will keep my LoRA's up indefinitely. Quite frankly, I don't want to continue contributing to the financial well-being of a site with an unknown moderator that keeps spiting me with image removals. I don't want to contribute to his salary and don't want him to have a position on the moderator team.

If there are any LoRA's of mine you want to continue using, I recommend you back them up now, because there's no guarantee that my account won't just vanish, either of my own volition OR Civitai retroactively nuking all accounts who post NSFW (which is a possibility due to the recent changes which Civitai was pressured into making by their payment processors).

In regards to any future LoRA's, I will cease to make them. I have become worn down fighting moderation decisions made on my images and honestly, I no longer have the motivation to contribute to a site that doesn't want my content uploaded. That's not even mentioning I will be busy for the foreseeable future (I am starting a new internship this year), but I don't even find joy in providing civitai content anymore: I really, really don't appreciate the fact that they continuously make revenue off my labour which contributes to that one unnamed moderator.

3. Changing platforms? Please let me know your thoughts.

Me not wanting to upload content to Civitai doesn't mean that I don't want to upload images anymore. I still want to upload images. I've made a lot of friends and great connections on this platform, and I'd still like to keep in touch if possible.

I've seen my images get re-uploaded to other sites, I've seen the comments on them, and I always get messages asking how I make my images. I do really appreciate the support and interest in the stuff I make, genuinely, and it has motivated me to keep going despite all crap I have to take from that one unknown moderator who doesn't like my images.

I'm still deciding what is the best course forward. I'm considering Bluesky as the main platform to post content on. I have decided against Twitter for personal reasons, as I have already abandoned my personal account on that platform due to the political climate in the US, the proliferation of bot accounts, manipulated feed algorithm, and general toxicity.

I have been asked to create a Patreon before, but I personally don't agree with that on an ethical level (we are creating models trained on images that artists did not consent to having commercialized/monetized) and I want to create images freely.

I'll also consider making a Discord, if there is any interest for that.

What I want to know is, what do you think is the best platform going forward? Please leave comments for what you want to see and any suggestions. I would like to upload a lot of my past works as well, for archival purposes.

4. Final thoughts on Civitai and preview of what I'm working on

I'm not usually one to doompost but I personally don't see a myself having a future on this platform anymore. If it's not me not posting on this site anymore, it will be some weird retroactive change that's going to nuke all NSFW accounts like people are predicting will happen.

Actually, there currently an issue with this site that nuked a ton of images and videos: any NSFW image/video without metadata has been removed from the public feed and is awaiting manual edits. I've already looked at some profiles and a bunch of images and videos have straight up vanished.

This is only one of the changes payment processors have forced Civitai to make. With changing regulations in regards to AI imagery, it's very, very likely Civitai's payment processors force their hand and make them blanket ban NSFW AI images.

And then this site is dead. And all the images and models we've uploaded will have gone down the drain.

Seeing so much power exerted upon the stuff we upload makes me think that we shouldn't be so reliant on one site:

Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Besides that, I don't want to constantly deal with the headache of having my content deleted and then fighting to have said content re-instated. I will be busy with other things in the future and I don't need more to stress about. It would be nice if I could just take a break from this site and not having to worry about logging in, but I am not even afforded that.

One thing I definitely regret is ever giving Civitai money. It's money I can't get back.

To end on a less sad note, I have been working on something different for a change. I wanted to keep it a secret and drop it when it's done, but because I won't be able to work on it this month (or maybe even next month), I thought I'd preview it now just to show that I have plans to post it eventually:

It's a comic! Of Gran, Lyria, Vyrn and Vane. I thought I'd do something different for a change. It's been a pain to make since I tried to keep the clothing details consistent between pages, meaning it required inpainting as well as manual editing. This comic will be wholesome but I want to explore NSFW comics in the future. When this one is done, I will post it as an article on Civitai, but I am also looking at other platforms to post it on.