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The original was posted on /r/stablediffusion by /u/Lishtenbird on 2024-08-30 20:35:42+00:00.
Some rule updates have just been published, and in short, they appear to focus on making this a more productive place, with a stronger focus on open-source technology.
Personally, I believe that there is still a category of posts that already were of debatable value in this community, and would fit even less under the new rules: the "No Workflow" posts - often also hiding behind the indiscriminate "Animation" flair. (I raised this in the comments to the announcement, but was advised to make it a separate post instead.)
Yes - a "workflow" can have a very definite technical meaning (as in, a reusable ComfyUI workflow file), but I'd rather treat this term in a more broad sense. The idea of communicating "how to get this" itself is more important in the context.
So, let's broadly categorize (applicable - not news, not discussion...) posts by the amount of "workflow" they have, how useful they are to the community, and how much it asks from the poster.
A post with a complete, downloadable ComfyUI workflow.
- Having this is great; it's immediately actionable for others...
- But it's also very restrictive and cumbersome. What if it wasn't Comfy? What if it was a multi-step process? What if it included manual work in other applications? What if it's an older work, and exact details were lost? This does sound excessive.
A post mentioning the general steps and prompts and models/LoRAs/special processing used.
- This is still very useful to anyone who would like to build upon this - so, in the collaborative spirit of open source.
- This is permissive enough to not be a hassle: a single sentence can be enough to describe what's being done, and it can be useful even without an exact prompt ("Using this model with this LoRA for this character in this setting"). Edge cases shouldn't be much of a problem as long as the post is made in good faith ("I'm still training this LoRA for this model, any feedback?"). A requirement like this is not uncommon in hardware communities: everyone knows people will ask for specs anyway, so why not save everyone time and require sharing them in the first place? And as a side effect, that displays a minimum level of dedication from the side of the poster.
A post with no details whatsoever - just pictures (or a single picture) with an artistic title.
- This is content that the poster decided was worth sharing here instead of Civit, or Discord, or any other generative art community around. What is the value of having such a post specifically here, instead of all those other places, where it can be found in hundreds or thousands? So, an average post like that has very low usefulness - often even lower than one posted under a specific model or LoRA elsewhere.
- A good post like that still wastes time for everyone going on a wild goose chase trying to guess the information that the poster already had, but didn't provide. Often these posts will never get communication from the poster anyway because it's considered an artistic secret (or was cross-posted to Midjourney), or because it's only shared here because it'll get more attention (eventually - to their linked Instagram, or their online service, or Patreon...) than in other places. Often these posts are also made by users with little activity, they may be really skirting the rules, and are heavily mislabeled - which suggests that those posters are not very interested in the subreddit in the first place. Is that really collaborative, and contributing back to the community that made creating that content possible in the first place?
I think there is a happy middle ground between demanding everyone to share everything (a complete "workflow"), and allowing absolutely anything that formally fits a description. And I think since the rules are being updated and the community, seemingly, refocused - maybe it's time to shift that needle, too, towards a more useful-for-everyone level.
TL;DR: I believe that all "work" posts should be required to provide a baseline minimum of information about how it was created, otherwise it doesn't belong to this community, and should be shared elsewhere.