Civitai: From Visionaries to Hypocrites. An Open Letter from a Creator.
To the Civitai Administration,
I am writing this not just as a user, but as a creator with a following of nearly 5,000 people. I drive traffic to your site. I create the content that you monetize. And today, I am watching you destroy the very foundation of this community.
It started with small things, but the picture is now clear. You are playing a dirty game aimed solely at personal enrichment, masked behind corporate excuses.
1. The "Midjourney" Blindness Why is it still impossible to select "Midjourney" in the resources list? I am tired of explaining to my subscribers which model I use. By refusing to add a simple text tag because you view MJ as a competitor, you are degrading the User Experience. You are forcing us to leave fields blank or lie. This is petty.
2. The Death of Meritocracy (The Buzz Issue) You have destroyed the motivation for creators. Previously, Buzz was a reward for engagement — a currency of respect. Now, you have leveled the playing field to the point where effort is meaningless. Why should I strive to create "God Tier" content if the reward is the same as for spam? You are scaring off new subscribers and demoralizing established authors. You’ve turned a meritocracy into a grey mass.
3. The "Greed" of Training You incentivize LoRA training only if it's done on your servers for Buzz. But what about those of us who use third-party services or our own hardware to create high-quality models? We bring finished, valuable products to your platform, and we get nothing. This is pure GREED. You don't reward quality; you only reward those who pay into your ecosystem.
4. The Hypocrisy We read your press releases. You cry about how hard it is to deal with payment processors, how "expensive" the infrastructure is. We understand the costs. But you use these excuses to cover up your disdain for the users. You justify your monetization, but you stay silent on how you are squeezing creators.
The Verdict: Civitai, you are acting like hypocrites. You have lost the dignity and the "hacker spirit" that true internet visionaries possess. You are trading your community's trust for short-term profit.
Remember: A platform without respected creators is just an empty server. Stop betraying the people who made you famous.
Signed, SV STUDIO (and the silent majority of creators)