Hello my dears. Well now, I myself have been actively engaged here for five months already. In that time I have had the pleasure and privilege of learning a tremendous amount. This includes a few fundamental basics about what actually works and what does not when posting images and videos.
In the past good two weeks since âthe big transitionâ (the division into .com and .red) there have been and continue to be a multitude of system failures in every conceivable manifestation. This has had quite palpable effects on the reach of publications for practically all active users on the platform.
Right at the moment there still exists the as of now still unresolved problem that some kind of replication between servers in the backend is acting up. Many of us therefore get to observe a curious phenomenon. Our works are published one moment and then suddenly are not again. This severly hurts visibility of postings. Anyone who has rescheduled a planned post in the last two weeks must have noticed this. The same work sometimes carries a PG rating and then suddenly does not. This happens because the mirror servers have buffered different information than the master, to put it in very crude and simplified terms.
If on top of that the image feed completely fails and shows no more than twenty to thirty images, or if the indexer goes down again, as has been happening constantly, preferably on weekends, in recent weeks, then new postings remain stuck in the queue. They cannot be published at all, even though their publication time has already expired. Then things get rather ugly.
Therefore I am opening my bag of tricks for you today. I will show you a few of the techniques I have gathered from experience.
Trick 1: Consistently Use the Scheduler
It is actually quite simple. It requires three additional mouse clicks per post. And it automatically increases the visibility of your works without any further effort on your part. Instead of clicking on âpublish nowâ when uploading images or videos, you use the smaller clock symbol right beside it. The operation should be self-explanatory. But just to be on the safe side here are two images from me with the numbered click sequence:
(pssst, do not tell anyone, but one of my larger new works is hiding in the background there. Hopefully nobody has noticed đ)
Why does this work? The reasons are straightforward. First, every post has to jump through several burning hoops, so to speak. It must pass through the automatic tagging and the automatic rating system. That takes time. Time that you should give the server to do its job. If you press âPublishâ instead of scheduling, the publication timestamp is considered the moment of the click, not the moment when those tasks have completed. (A genuine usability flaw on the developersâ part, though they have apparently not cared about it for years.)
At the same time, hundreds of other publications are proceeding in parallel while your post is still languishing in the queue. So what happens? By the time your post finally becomes visible, it has already slipped far down in the image feed under ânew imagesâ or ânew postsâ. And those remain the two most important sections by far. In my early days here I sometimes had to scroll down several screen pages after only two minutes just to find my own post. Dreadful. No wonder one feels invisible.
Secondly, and here we return to the bugs, the indexer likes to fail, preferably on weekends when no developer is on duty to get the thing back on track (they are only humans like us, after all, and entitled to time off and weekends). If you publish immediately, or schedule precisely during such an outage, you end up staring into the void once more. And reason number one above applies again.
And thirdly: since the transition the autorater mercilessly assigns every image, no matter how buttoned-up, an automatic PG-13 as soon as anything resembling a human shape is discernible. It shoots weeeeell beyond the target the moment even the slightest trace of bare skin seems to appear. I once received an X for a video in which a completely clothed anime model appeared bottomless for a fraction of a second solely because of the lighting. After I forced a review and correction I was granted a PG. Believe me, you do not want that either unless you produce nothing but NSFW anyway.
By scheduling your publications, and we are talking at least a full dayâs lead time here, you can have these ratings corrected BEFORE the post goes live. At least for SFW creators like myself this is extremely important in order to be seen on .com at all. In my experience this usually happens within a few hours. Extremely rarely does it actually take a full day or more.
Trick 2: Align the Timing of Your Scheduled Publications with Your Followers and Your Subject Matter
This too is a rather simple calculation. Who will see your posts first and foremost? Your existing followers. They can filter the feeds to âfollowedâ. That already filters out the greatest part of the slop and improves your visibility. But if people who follow thousands are following you as well, then the same principle I described in Trick 1 applies once more.
To increase your visibility within your peer group, therefore, you need to have a rough idea in which time zones these people are active. Bluntly put, the easiest way to find out is simply to talk to them. So be active. Comment on others. Chat with one another. You are particularly interested in this information from those who themselves have reach in the form of popular Collections and who like to include your works in them.
It makes no logical sense to post when the majority of your followers are blissfully tucked up in bed and engaged in activities other than visiting CivitAI.
For example, I align the majority of my posts with the window between 16:00 and 20:00 Central European Time. That is when people here enter the evening. In Asia it is already late evening but many of my followers are obviously night owls like myself. And on the American continents it is roughly lunchtime, when quite a few take a glance at their feed.
And then there is the subject matter. Depending on the target audience my works sometimes appeal more to the (North or South) Americans or to the Asians among you. This is especially true of NSFW material. It actually performs best when night has already fallen for the greater part of my followers. Obviously no one wants to risk being caught by the boss or colleagues examining hardcore pornography during working hours.
Trick 3: Spread Works of Similar Style across Several Posts over a Longer Period
For me this is actually a no-brainer as well. Yet apparently I am once again the exception here. Imagine you are surfing through the image feed, not the post feed, where the effect is somewhat less pronounced. You scroll along. Suddenly there is a wall of same-old-same-old in front of you. Twenty images or more that all look almost identical. Is that not deadly boring? And above all, even if you like these twenty or more images in terms of style and quality, how do you distribute your reactions? A like for every single one? Or rather randomly for one of them before you scroll on?
Now that you have put yourself in the position of the viewer, it is obvious, is it not?
Not yet? Very well, further explanation. Sometimes a particular trick, a mood, a style captivates me so completely that it would be far too great a pity to use it for only one to a maximum of four works and then forget it again. So I WANT to publish several images from such a series. But not all at once. The reasons are given above. Besides, not every one of my followers has time every day. So quite a few of them will not look at the feed when I post, no matter how hard I try to produce something truly splendid. They simply are not online at that moment. A shame if all my creativity then rushes past them unseen.
By posting only one image on day one, then a few days later image two, then letting some time pass again and so on, I increase the chance that my followers will on average see more of my work. And considerably so. Often I notice that a single image is enough for them to visit my profile. After which likes and collects rain down on quite a number of works within seconds.
Trick 4: Turn the Platformâs Weaknesses into Your Advantage
Now it becomes a little more abstract. If I know that parts of the website will with high probability fail again next weekend, I can toss a coin. Do I schedule a post at the beginning of the week that is to go live precisely on Saturday or Sunday while at least parts of the website are likely to be down again? At least so far it has been the case without exception that when the indexer went on an extended cigarette break, all posts that had already been queued BEFORE the outage were published flawlessly.
But because spontaneous postings and schedules planned during the outage do not go live without the indexer, the feeds automatically become extremely quiet. What will happen then? Something rather peculiar. The users are bored. Because if the generator is also dead at the same time they cannot even be creative themselves unless they are rendering on their own machines. So they look at the feeds. But the feed is not nearly as full as usual. Therefore every one of the few works that are visible, if the feed is not completely dead, which also happens, receives far more attention. That is how I achieved my very first post with over a hundred reactions.
Strictly speaking this is a poker game that has paid off for me so far. No guarantee for the future. When the indexer was down, at least the entire website was not offline. Some basic functions always still gave a faint signal of operability. That need not always be the case. And your weekend works could disappear completely unseen somewhere. But if THAT happens, then in my view it is also legitimate simply to delete a completely unseen post and reschedule it.
Trick 5: Be More Imaginative
This trick may not be so easy for some of you to implement. It is not simply learned. Yet the message itself is simple. Do not do the same thing day in and day out. Give your followers variety.
That is the main reason why I now publish so few NSFW images. It is simply and plainly boring in the long run. Sorry, but that really is how it is. In my earliest articles I described how that was my kick-starter for the very first fan base. I continue to hold those early followers in the highest regard.
But the human body does not differ all that dramatically from one person to another anatomically. There are certain concepts one simply does not wish to create or see if one possesses a reasonably healthy understanding of sexuality. And the sheer number of positions and activities is numerically limited in the end. Even the act of generating itself becomes tedious for me. So how must my visitors feel when they keep seeing the same old routine in different yet somehow always similar variations?
The same applies, and I am truly sorry to have to say this so plainly and bluntly, even to many creators in the SFW sphere who focus almost exclusively on one genre because they master it best. For a while that is interesting. But in the long run one does not keep followers that way. Hand on heart, you anime fans do not keep only two or three manga or anime series in your cupboard that you replay endlessly. You probably have thousands. Or? My own manga collection alone comprises more than four thousand volumes.
So there must be variety in your profile. Not only anime style, but also photorealism or abstract art. Not only smut, but also SFW material. Not only one technique, but the most diverse things imaginable. Not only one checkpoint, but try as many models as possible. Especially those who prefer to use ZIT should know this. The variation in female facial forms is particularly monotonous there without additional LoRAs or explicitly differently formulated prompts.
And then, besides the technical aspects, there is imagination itself. That is why I say this is perhaps the most difficult part of the whole business. And I am only beginning to grasp this part very slowly. In my recent rant about the defective feeds quite astonishing things have happened since the notifications started working again and my peer group caught wind of the post. A great many creators have appeared who have virtually patted me on the shoulder. In particular, established figures such as @MGHerder and @Cinnadust, to name only two well-known examples, keep emphasising that I handle our favourite tool with extraordinary creativity and imagination.
That this is something special had never been clear to me before. For me it is completely normal. It must be down to my autistic brain. I simply think and feel âdifferentlyâ from the vast majority of humanity.
But even if one âticks normallyâ, one can expand oneâs spectrum at any time. I mean, you all read a book now and then, or watch a series, or a film. You talk to your families, play with your children, experience things out there in the world. Or? Simply try to depict something as an image that has particularly moved you. That has impressed you in a special way. Heck, it can even work to express some nonsense that happened at work as an image. I bet hardly any of you have come up with THAT idea yet, have you?
Conclusion
I would never lean out of the window and claim that I have fused the Holy Grail and the Philosopherâs Stone here. But I have gathered a few tricks for you that have personally and demonstrably helped me build a solid fan base in a relatively short time. Even though there are still posts that almost drown unseen in the feed even without website outages (sort my feed by most reactions, scroll down to the end), their number has already decreased noticeably. For me that is the indication that I cannot be all that far off the mark with the explanations in this article.
In any case it is surely worth trying one or the other of them. And perhaps one or two of you will even discover something that had not occurred to you at all before. You may find this article monster here genuinely helpful. Likes and tips are most gratefully accepted.
I would be delighted if you would contribute your own experiences and possible further tricks in the comments. Because somehow, despite all the shortcomings of the website, we are a wonderful large family here, are we not?