This is the first article in a small series. Read the second and third if you'd like.
Is it just my impression, or do CivitAI posts really live in a weird limbo state? One post ties many images together; in essence one might think they are kind of like small albums. I have tried my hand at creating a post as a gallery, something which aims to keep a certain coherence, but most or all people reach the site and browse through the images link, I suppose, so they never actually see that bit of structure. To make things a bit more confusing, collections can be a collection of models, articles, posts, images or 3D models. So, when one creates a collection of images, these are kind of living in the same "layer" as post, except that these can contain images from different users, I guess. I found out recently that a posts route actually exists! But there's no such link in the header, making it pretty much invisible to most users. I have tried writing messages in a post, to give people a bit more context on what the images mean, when publishing images from a small experiment I made, for instance, but I'm pretty sure that most people never even knew, because when you open an image, you only get to see the data related to that specific image, not the whole post it belongs to. I see that the folks at CivitAI are trying to make the platform better, and their main focus right now seems to be allowing creators to make money; that's fine, as far as I'm concerned, though it seems like there's been quite some resistance to these efforts... meanwhile, it feels like the comics section is incomplete and in dire need of some attention. And challenges are mostly SD models, and I'm not really interested in these... monetizing is well and good, but I would argue that the basic structure might still need some polishing, especially as one of the greatest gripes seems to be about platform instability... that being said, I would also like to thank you for the platform. Even with the issues it has, it can still be pretty entertaining, so thank you!
Cheers.
Edit 1: To make things even weirder, it sometimes takes a very long time for an image to appear in the images category, but it will appear as a post. Go figure...
Edit 2: KerKarraje has correctly pointed out that it's possible to enable a "posts" button on the interface. It does exist, but the fact that it's hidden by default kind of proves my point...
Edit 3: To make things clear, I'm not against the existence of posts itself, I just think that things are fitting awkwardly because posts don't seem to be very easy to "see", from the regular user's perspective.
Edit 4: To further elaborate on edit 2, there's no way to add a "Posts overview" section in "page sections" when customizing the profile.
Edit 5: I wasn't sure if this warranted a new article, so I'm editing this one. One of the things that would make sense, if the platform had more of a "posts first" paradigm, would be expanding old posts, to include new images and/or videos. I tried this the other day, and I noticed that it doesn't trigger the reward for creating a new post, which kind of makes sense, but it does ultimately thwart the idea of using posts as something akin to a gallery, disincentivizing the expansion of posts.