I Don’t Want to Be a Salesman

I don’t want to pitch myself.

I don’t want to build a brand. I don’t want to maintain a storefront, study conversion rates, optimize pricing, promote every release, or constantly remind people that I exist.

I don’t want to be a salesman.

Maybe that sounds cynical. Maybe I’m burnt out. Maybe I’m just tired. But I am exhausted by the way every hobby, every community, and every creative space eventually seems to turn into another marketplace.

Everything becomes a subscription. Everything becomes a service. Everything becomes another person trying to sell you something while also being told that you need to sell yourself.

I don’t want that from CivitAI.

I want to make pictures. I want to experiment. I want to see what other people create. Maybe I want to make a LoRA once in a while because I have an idea that interests me. I want to share something because it was fun to make, not because I have a monetization strategy.

That does not mean I think creators should not make money.

Creators deserve to be compensated. Training models can cost money. Creating high-quality resources takes time, knowledge, effort, and skill. I understand why CivitAI needs sustainable revenue. I understand that payment processors have made things harder for the site. I understand that the company cannot operate indefinitely without money.

I also understand why established creators might be excited about storefronts, permanent paid access, licensing fees, analytics, and the ability to set their own prices. Some creators may do very well under the new system, and I do not resent them for that.

But I am worried about what CivitAI is becoming.

The CivitAI I Found

When I first came to CivitAI in 2024, I was not trying to become a creator.

I liked looking at images. I liked seeing the strange, interesting, impressive, ridiculous, beautiful, and occasionally completely unhinged things people made.

Eventually, I started generating images myself. Then I started following creators. For a while, I checked the site every day.

There were creators I followed so closely that whenever they released a new model, I would generate something with it almost automatically. It did not matter whether the model was exactly my thing. I followed them, they had made something new, and I wanted to try it.

It felt like a form of participation.

Not an obligation exactly, but perhaps a small sense of duty. Someone had put time into creating something, so I would use it, react to it, comment on it, and see what I could make.

That was what community looked like to me.

I was never deeply connected socially. I did not build close friendships or become a major personality. I left comments. Sometimes creators responded. Occasionally, I had short conversations through chat.

And those small interactions mattered.

Getting reactions was nice, but a real comment could make my day. Someone saying that they liked an image, noticed a detail, or appreciated what I had done was energizing.

That is the kind of engagement I valued: people seeing each other’s work, responding to it, experimenting with it, and encouraging each other.

A Small Path Into Creating

My first meaningful contribution to CivitAI was probably a bounty for a Vulcan hand salute.

I saved up Buzz because I knew I needed enough to make the bounty worthwhile. I gave the winner around 1,500 Buzz, and I believe I gave the other two entrants about 500 each as consolation prizes.

It was not a major event. It did not make me important. But it made me feel involved.

I had participated in the site, accumulated Buzz, used that Buzz to ask the community for something, and rewarded the people who contributed.

Later, I created a LoRA for an original character I had been developing during the SDXL era. It never became particularly popular, nor would I expect an original character model to attract huge usage. But some people used it, and it was satisfying to see a small amount of Buzz come back from that.

The amount barely mattered.

What mattered was the signal: somebody used the thing I made.

Every once in a while, I think about trying again. Recently, I had been considering recreating that original character for Anima. I have also thought about experimenting with clothing LoRAs and seeing what else I could learn to create.

But it seems that every time that interest starts to return, another announcement arrives that makes me want to disengage again.

It feels like a punch to the gut.

People Do Not Arrive as Businesses

This is what worries me most about the new creator economy.

People do not normally arrive at CivitAI ready to operate a business.

They arrive because they saw an image. They download a model. They try generating something. They follow a few people. They post an image of their own. They leave comments. They participate in a challenge or create a bounty.

Eventually, maybe, they wonder whether they could train something themselves.

They start small.

They make an experimental LoRA. It might not be very good. It might not get much attention. But perhaps a few people use it. They earn a little Buzz. They become encouraged. They improve. They release another model. Gradually, they build an audience.

Some of today’s major creators followed some version of that path.

The new structure seems designed primarily for the people who have already reached the end of it.

If you already have followers, recognition, a strong catalog, and reliable demand, then setting prices and opening a store may be a major opportunity.

But what about the person making their first LoRA?

Are they supposed to buy a membership before they know whether anyone cares about their work? Are they supposed to price it? Market it? Create a brand? Convince people that it is worth adding another fee to their generation?

Before, if people used your model, you could passively receive something. It might have been a small amount, but it encouraged participation without requiring you to declare yourself a professional creator.

Under the new system, the message feels different.

It feels like you are expected to decide that you are running a business before you have even discovered whether you enjoy creating.

The Big Creators Will Probably Be Fine

There is always a threshold beyond which popularity protects itself.

Once a creator has enough followers, enough recognition, and enough resources being widely used, most structural changes will not erase that position. Those creators already have demand.

Some of the creators I follow will probably do very well with stores. A few seem perfectly suited to it.

More power to them.

But every big creator started somewhere.

I have followed people from their relatively early days and watched them grow into major creators. I now find myself wondering whether they would have followed the same path under this new structure.

Would they have paid for membership at the beginning?

Would enough users have tried their work if every resource carried a licensing fee?

Would they have continued after their first few releases if the site made them feel like they needed to become marketers as well as creators?

Maybe they would have succeeded anyway.

But I am not convinced.

CivitAI may be helping its current major creators while weakening the path that produces the next generation of them.

What Gets Lost When Everything Becomes a Product

Commercial systems reward what is easy to sell.

They reward broad demand, recognizable styles, familiar characters, predictable output, and resources that can appeal to the largest number of people.

That is understandable. It is also how culture becomes homogenized.

One of the things I loved about CivitAI was the weirdness.

There were strange ideas, bizarre experiments, hyper-specific concepts, unusual fetishes, niche subcultures, obscure characters, personal original creations, and things that would never survive a corporate focus group.

Not everyone liked those things. That was the point.

CivitAI was one of the places where people could explore ideas that were not mainstream, commercially valuable, tasteful, fashionable, or broadly acceptable.

When every creation becomes a product, people begin asking different questions.

Will this sell?

Will enough users pay for it?

Will this build my brand?

Is this worth promoting?

Will it cover my membership?

Those questions gradually replace a simpler one:

Wouldn’t it be interesting to make this?

The weird, niche, personal, and impractical work is often the first thing pushed to the edges when a community becomes increasingly commercial.

And that work was not a meaningless side effect of CivitAI. It was part of its identity.

A Site That Makes Me Want to Return Less

My engagement with CivitAI probably peaked around the time Yellow Buzz was cut off and Blue Buzz was introduced.

Since then, nearly every major announcement has made me feel worse.

I am not saying every change objectively made the site worse. Some probably improved it in measurable ways.

But they made me feel less welcome, less excited, or less interested.

I went from visiting daily to checking every few days. Then perhaps once a week. Sometimes once every couple of weeks.

I would log in to hundreds of notifications, slowly clear them, generate a few images from models that caught my attention, and leave again.

The biggest change was not that I suddenly hated the site.

It was that I wanted to return a little less each time.

That is how I usually leave things. I rarely make a dramatic decision to quit. I lose interest gradually. I visit less often. Then one day I stop coming back.

I increasingly feel that this outcome is inevitable for me and CivitAI.

I do not know when it will happen. When it finally does, I probably will not be angry anymore. I will simply no longer care enough to return.

This Is Not a Prediction of Immediate Doom

I have already seen creators say they plan to stop making models, switch to download-only distribution, remove their resources, or leave entirely.

This was only hours after the announcement.

There are always doomsayers after a major change. Some people will calm down. Some will adapt. Some will return. Some threats to leave will never become action.

I do not want to be another person screaming that CivitAI is about to die.

I do not think it necessarily will.

CivitAI may survive for a long time. It may eventually solve its financial problems and find a sustainable structure.

I sincerely hope it does.

But survival alone is not the question.

A platform can survive while becoming something entirely different from what its community once valued.

I suspect CivitAI will continue in some form. I also suspect that the version that survives may be vastly different from the place I found in 2024.

It may become a successful marketplace.

It may become a collection of creator storefronts.

It may become a commercial model distribution platform with a social layer attached.

But will it still be the place where ordinary users browse, experiment, comment, share, accumulate a little Buzz, create a bounty, try their first LoRA, and gradually become part of something?

I do not know.

Fixing What Is Broken

Like many users, I often find myself thinking: fix the existing problems before adding more systems.

I also know that this is easier to say from the outside.

I am a software engineer. I understand that a company has multiple teams. The people building storefronts may not be the same people fixing performance issues, broken features, moderation problems, or generator reliability.

I also understand that the developers writing the code are not necessarily the people making the business decisions.

They are laying the bricks, welding the beams, installing the windows, and making the structure stand. They do not necessarily decide that the building needs another thirty floors.

The business leadership decides what will be built next.

And in business, maintaining something that already works well enough is often seen as less valuable than producing something new that might generate revenue.

I understand how that happens.

I still do not think this is the right path.

Why I Am Writing This

I am not a major creator.

I am not a major voice in the community. I do not have a huge following. I do not expect CivitAI to change direction because of anything I say.

Half the time, I hesitate to say anything at all.

I start writing, then think: Who is going to listen? Why bother?

But I know that I care about CivitAI because these announcements hurt.

When something you do not care about gets worse, you shrug and move on.

When something matters to you, disappointment feels personal.

That is where I am now.

I want CivitAI to improve. I want it to survive. I want creators to be supported and compensated. I want the people building the site to succeed.

But I do not want creativity on CivitAI to become inseparable from salesmanship.

I do not want every creator to need a brand, a storefront, a pricing strategy, and a monthly business plan.

I do not want ordinary participation to become less valuable because it does not directly generate revenue.

And I do not want CivitAI to protect the creators who are already successful while making it harder for the next generation to begin.

Maybe this new creator economy will work better than I expect.

I genuinely hope it does.

But right now, it feels less like CivitAI is creating more opportunities for creators and more like it is redefining creation as commerce.

CivitAI may survive that transformation.

I am just not sure it will remain a place I recognize—or a place I still want to visit.


For what it's worth I ranted into ChatGPT for a while and asked it to help me organize and refine my ideas. This article is the result of that. My thoughts and ideas, presented in a hopefully understandable manner by GPT.