It has come to my attention that the leaderboards show "hits" and "misses" for reports you've made. I consider myself a careful person at reporting, only reporting when I'm highly confident that moderator action is needed. And yet, it seems I have more misses than hits.
Seeing these stats has led to the realization that the bots I've been reporting are still there. They post same images, 100% identical, day by day. I've also reported users that have similar usernames and post identical images to each account, but I guess those have been misses as well.
The conclusion: CivitAI does not have a policy for dealing with bots that farm buzz. This likely also means they aren't tracking who the bots are tipping the buzz to, so the botmasters are facing no consequences. Hell, there could be a complete black market of buzz sales since the bots can operate in the open like that, or maybe the botters are stashing buzz in case they'll be allowed to cash it out later for real money. CivitAI simply don't seem to recognize the issue at all, or doesn't consider it worth dealing with. The only thing you get out from reporting this sort of behavior is having your counter of "misses" increase.
There's also no point in reporting spammers. You know, the people who write things like "please undo the buzz changes" into the prompt and then post the resulting noise. They're staging a disruptive protest against the service while also farming buzz while doing so, and looking at the timings of these posts it seems there's someone running multiple accounts doing it. Reporting such behavior is futile, you'll just get publicly humiliated, as everyone can see your counter of "misses" increase.
Above is a small sample from gallery of an user that only generates with the prompt "Lava". See the duplicate images? You can just keep reusing the images you generated before to make new posts, gaining daily buzz without spending any. There are many users like this, generating with e.g. "Frost", suggesting it's likely the same person running the accounts, most likely with a bot. The reports I've made against such accounts haven't been actioned on, it seems. I've ended up reporting some of these accounts multiple times, every day after they post their daily churn of low quality shit they already posted before. These reports are all "misses". CivitAI doesn't care about buzz farming spammers like this. Is it really not against the rules? SHOULD I BE DOING IT TOO FOR THE EXTRA BUZZ?
There doesn't seem to be any point in reporting multi-accounting. There are people who generate the exact same prompt on multiple accounts and then each of them posts a slightly different variation of the same image, and of course the prompts are stolen from someone popular to make sure the resulting images are good, but ultimately very little value is brought into the site through these generations. The account names do not necessarily even try to hide the fact that they're the same person, being blatantly open variations of the same thing. Who knows what they'll get with the daily buzz they farm that way, but CivitAI certainly doesn't seem to care.
The reporting system with its buzz rewards is broken by design anyway. If you report a user that only posts violating content you'll get rewarded once, but if you report every image individually you'll get rewarded for every single one of them. There appears to be some hidden daily limit, I don't think I've ever gotten more than 350 buzz per day for reports even though more reports have been handled. This leads to gamifying the reporting system, only reporting 7 images and leaving the rest be. After all, moderators don't seem to go through accounts even if 7 violating images get reported and handled. It can be full of content violations but moderators do not appear to ever take a proactive approach to moderation, only reactive, so you can safely keep farming your buzz by reporting a few images every day from accounts posting cub porn or fart porn etc until you hit the monthly cap.
The "monthly cap" for reporting rewards is not actually a monthly cap though. The month rolled over long ago already and I'm still not getting buzz rewards even for the reports that do get actioned on. Does it roll over on some specific day in middle of the month instead? Does it look at rewards given in past 30 days instead of resetting on a schedule? Do the misses affect the rewards given? How does it work? Who knows. What I know is that I've stopped reporting most content violations until I see the buzz rewards coming in again.
I'm not working for free only to be publicly slapped in the face for having done a bad job.
For the past few days, I've mostly reported things that are legitimately disruptive to the platform, but that seems to have been a mistake as well. I waste my time, nothing happens, and I get publicly humiliated via the leaderboard.
Geez. Thanks a lot.
I suppose every rant should have at least some constructive criticism included as well...
How about only displaying the total reporting score in the leaderboard and not the individual hit&miss stats for other people?
How about providing feedback to each user about the hits and misses, e.g. have a dedicated page for the reports one has made and a list of moderator decisions. Since your users are PUBLICLY punished for your inaction, you have no moral ground to lean onto your Terms of Service saying you have no obligations. You either explain your inaction or stop punishing your users for it!
Maybe give the community more tools to manage itself beyond the reporting system? It's so frustrating to see all these disruptive accounts and be unable to do anything about them. I could just block them, but they'll still harm my ability to get attention to the images I post. The new images feed is the only place where new people can find me, so blocking the spammers from MY feed doesn't remove the harm they cause for me!
Since bad behavior disrupts the new images feed, maybe improve that in other ways to limit the impact? Social networks commonly have users split between creators, aggregators, and consumers. CivitAI is missing the category of middlemen that curate and share the good stuff. Sorting by most reactions is a very bad approximation, it only creates an artificial treshold for the number of reactions you have to immediately reach to gain a full day of heightened visibility. Since visibility provides reactions, it's one messed up feedback loop to mainly give visibility based on reactions. A better activity feed mechanism is eventually needed anyway as the site grows.
And maybe clarify if multi-account buzz farming is against the rules in the first place? I'll spin up hundreds of multis posting kittens and completely flood the new images feed as soon as you tell me It's okay; I could really use that buzz for flux, you know!