All right, so we all want our posts to be noticed, right?
Our hard work needs the masses to sit up and notice us, as all great artists's ego wil attest (Michaelangelo, John Lennon, Picasso, Wagner... the list goes on and on. My ego is surely the mark of the greatness within me!)
...also, ego aside, being noticed brings likes, which brings the buzz.
The problem is, so many thousands of users are posting on civitai that even great gens are lost in the flood. So we need ways to get noticed.
I was hoping to find a good time of the day to optimize for this. Maybe there are peak times when images are noticed more consistently. So for the last few days, I ran an experiment:
I picked a few of my favorite gens, and reposted them again and again throughout the day; trying to find a pattern which times are best.
And I even added to the experiment, by using a variety of images to see which ones attract the most attention. I stuck to SFW (I know I know, big mistake), and posted an outer-space laser-fight image, a cool animal hybrid image, a cool castle architetural image, and a cute cat/duck image.
Problem is, experiment was an (almost) total failure. Not only was there no detectable pattern, most of the images got similar amount of likes.
(one small pattern did emerge: the castle pics, and the cat pics, got the most likes. then the space fight pics, then the cool animal/hybrid pics. But the difference wasn't major, or even consistent. I'll mention that in previous experiments, I noticed burning castles at night pics getting more likes than dragon attacking castles pics, and wierd steampunk air vehicle pics getting more than all the rest.)
I lost heart quickly, so didn't keep up the experiment's pattern consistently. But I doubt it'd make any difference.
The way I see it, there's no hope for this idea.
Problem 1: there's a catch-22 which times are best -- peak traffic times will get you more eyeballs in the moment, but paradoxically that moment also passes way too quickly as that same traffic generates a flood of newer images to push your's aside.
Probelm 2: there's no way to detect which type of art-enjoyer logs on and views posts at which times, and they probably don't even have consistent times themselves.
Probelm 3: civitai has too wide a reach -- the traffic is from different times zones, so even if e.g. early morning (or during boring work hours, or on weekend vacation hours, etc) would be consistently better, that target demographic is spread out too widely between East coast USA, West coast USA, Europe, Korea, and everywhere in between.
Probelm 4: my N value is way too low. IANAS (statistician), but even I can tell that in the vast flood of civitai users and pics one guy's posts aren't significant enough to trace data patterns reliably.
Maybe if we crowdsource the experiment by doing it together as a huge group?
Anyway, the next step I'm particularly interested in is getting ahold of civitai's site traffic data analytics. It'd help a lot with the crux of the issue here. If they don't share it, that's fine, but maybe they do? I can't find more than a few scattered bit, anyone have any solid sources about this?