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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

If anybody at Patreon is reading this, here's some feedback.

I spend maybe $20 a month on Patreon. The main thing keeping me from spending more is the interface makes artists appear more money-grubbing than they might want to.

I don't want to scroll down someone's feed only to find half of the content is locked. This is a negative user experience and makes me want to click off the site and go do something else.

Suggested fix is a checkbox or setting that allows me to hide content that I'm not at the right patron level to see.

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I don't think they're ever likely to do that; the response to locked content that you want to see is to decide whether or not to pay for it. This is like complaining that Amazon shows you products you can't afford.

It's cool, I just won't use the Patreon website as a way to explore new creators, nor will I patronize creators that heavily tier their content. This means pretty much all of their adult content. If they knew how much time and money I've spent on that kind of thing, they wouldn't take my complaints lightly.

You also might be able to fix this with your own stylesheet / browser extension to hide the locked content.

Last time I tried something like this it was completely unreliable. Sometimes my javascripts / styles loaded, sometimes they didn't. That was when I was trying to alter HN, so it couldn't have been the site.

On the flip side, not knowing about that content means you might not increase your pledge to a level where you could access it.

The main problem is that there's a lot of content that I like on Patreon, enough to give a small amount of money towards, but I don't like it enough to want to pay $40+ a month for it. And getting constantly beaten over the head with "why aren't you paying $40-60??" just leaves me cold. I know damn well why I'm not paying more, you don't have to remind me all the time.

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