This was bound to happen. No centralized VC-backed company could stay uncensored like that forever.
CivitAI already gathered all the growth it could, now it has to focus on making a profit and therefore pleasing credit card companies and advertisers.
Terms of Service Update We’ve updated Section 9.6 of our Terms of Service (ToS) to explicitly prohibit content depicting:
Incest
Self-harm, including depictions of anorexia or bulimia
Content that promotes hate, harm, or extremist ideologies
Bodily excretions and related fetishes, including;
Urine
Vomit
Menstruation
Diapers
And to;
Require all mature content (X, XXX) to include generation metadata. You’ll be prompted to add metadata when uploading new content.
Additionally, the following content depicted in any mature or suggestive context (X, XXX) is explicitly prohibited;
Firearms aimed at or pointed towards individuals.
Mind-altered states, including being drunk, drugged, under hypnosis, or mind control.
Depiction of illegal substances or regulated products (e.g. narcotics, pharmaceuticals)
From a software standpoint, I don’t think that it’s likely that technically hard to clone civitai.com.
However, the models are not small, and I assume that whoever does so is going to need to have a way to pay for bandwidth.
Maybe punt the bandwidth problem to users, just provide magnet links to models or something.
The images and video are also gonna be at least somewhat bandwidth-intensive.
The best option here is a torrent tracker with a REST API attached to allow for integrations with places like the AI Horde and ComfyUI. Each person training a new model/lora would host it themselves, and the most popular would naturally have the most seeds. The problem is that CivitAI has millions in VC-money to spend on a fancy UI for discoverability and API and some randos just doing the same on their own cannot easily compete.
I’m not sure that flashiness is essential.
I mean, the core functionality of Civitai is a tiled list of images that show up when one specifies search criteria.
Needs to parse the EXIF metadata from a few generative AI systems and display it.
There are animations and endless scrolling and stuff, but the site could function without those.
There’s a forum feature that might be helpful, but not sure that that’s necessary.
IIRC there’s a tagging feature, and that might be.
Not sure that being tied to an actual image generator is necessary. In fact, I’d imagine that if the license on models permits for it, there will be image generation services that will add support for using models hosted on such a service to generate images themselves.
Not sure that being distributed/federated is necessary. Having the models be redistributable elsewhere probably is. That’d let someone set up another site if need be, akin to open-source projects and source repositories.
IIRC there’s a Civitai feature to let users buy early access to models. That might be tough, since there network effect matters — if someone is trying to make money on a model, then the size of the userbase is important, and being smaller than civitai matters. Also introduces payment processing into the mix, and that creates leverage for content restrictions to be imposed.
Not sure that being distributed/federated is necessary. Having the models be redistributable elsewhere probably is
p2p like bittorrent is necessary unless you have a couple of thousands per month to pay for hosting
Had felt like Civit was turning to shit the last few months, this just confirms it’s dead to me.
I think it turned to shit when buzz became their currency. I sometimes scroll new content and I’ve blocked dozens of posters because they decide uploading 20 images with the exact same prompt is worthwhile.
Yeah, I stopped posting there a while ago, the culture there is no fun to deal with.
Was discussing this with a friend yesterday.
Civitai has a long history of bad moderation.
But bad moderation does not mean that you need stricter moderation.
Rather , civitai’s moderation methods has alienated normal users from engaging with the website in a positive manner.
Give users the ability to generate what they want privately , on the condition they keep it nice and tidy on the front end
and people will have incentive and capacity to restrict themselves in the public space.
Treat people fairly , they open up to you about the problems they see.
Set clear boundries on rules , and users can work the problem for you; ensuring they get what they need without posing problem for the website.
If normal users leave , or become dormant , then there will be nobody to keep the crazies in line.
Referring here to people with kinks and motivations that fall well out of scope of what one normally has to moderate on a webpage.
Once the normal users become inactive , the entire community becomes a madhouse.
Which I think is more or less is what has happened to civitai at this point.
Active users are crazy , the normal users are dormant , moderators have to work their *ss off to regulate everything 24/7 , website becomes a trash heap and nobody cares about anything anymore.
