With the auction system still in its temporary reduced state, CivitAI has created an incredibly hostile situation where certain users can dominate huge portions of the website's available resources.
It cost a minimum of 28k buzz to be featured this week. That is an enormous amount of buzz, which is made even more difficult to reach for new creators now that compensation will be split between yellow and garbage buzz that can't be used to bid on checkpoints.
CivitAI seems fine with those concerns though, citing how the auction is democratic and fair because it's a level playing field.
But it's not.
Here's a list of special checkpoints that are featured despite not receiving (or not receiving enough) bids:
WAI-illustrious-SDXL v15 - No Bid
WAI-illustrious-SDXL v14 - Only received a 301 buzz bid
WAI-illustrious-SDXL v12 - No bid
WAI-illustrious-SDXL v11 - No bid
Nova Anime XL v12 - No bid
Nova Furry XL Illustrious v11 - No bid
AutismMix SDXL - No bid
CyberRealistic Pony v13 - No bid
Prefect Illustrious v3 - Only received a 10,000 buzz bid
Yiff in Hell - YiH v3 - Only received a 8,100 buzz bid
There may be more that I missed, but these were the ones I found.
You can check my work. Go to https://civitai.com/auctions/featured-checkpoints
and set the date to 10/16. You won't find the checkpoints listed above in the 100 checkpoints.
If CivitAI has space to keep those 10 special checkpoints featured, they should be enabling the 101-110th models, not their special favorite models. Because these models actually participated in the auction and received bids.
I'm not talking about the base models. They don't get bids but it's understandable they are kept enabled for on site generation. So not these:
Pony Diffusion V6 XL
DreamShaper
NoobAI-XL (NAI-XL)
SD XL
Illustrious-XL
Flux Dev
Flux Schnell
Flux Pro 1.1
Flux Pro 1.1 Ultra
Flux Krea Dev
OpenAI's GPT-image-1
HiDream
Google Imagen 4
Even though their inclusion is not democratic.