Kickstarter launches Drip, a Patreon competitor
theverge.com
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It is like everything that is wrong with Facebook (the lock in from networking effects to a closed ecosystem) but made even worse by making peoples livelihoods depend on it. If there has ever been anything more deserving of if not full decentralization some protection from the controlling interest destroying people on a whim it is Patreon.
The PBC nature of Kickstarter doesn't wholly solve this, not even close, but it implies they at least cannot do unethical things to try to increase revenue on the platform by exploiting its dependent creators. Thats a small step in the right direction.
https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-now-a-benefi...
A PBC just means they have some value that they will not sacrifice for profit. It doesn't mean they aren't for profit, and it doesn't mean they are democratic or anything. It's still a good thing. Not being a PBC is basically unethical always (there's NO ethical excuse for ANY for-profit to NOT be a PBC). But it's a low standard, not comparable to being a co-op or non-profit.
Also, even with Patreon being not a PBC, it's horrendous to compare them to Facebook. Facebook is an evil corporation that spends tons of resources promoting surveillance, advertising, and manipulation (and gaining power to dramatically influence politics etc). Facebook is exploitive and actively malicious. For all the real complaints about Patreon, they are doing stuff that is largely positive at least and is in direct opposition to the surveillance-capitalism of Facebook. There is NO COMPARISON. Facebook is plainly awful. Patreon is a good concept run by good people with some real problems that make it worth looking at the competition.
In general you simply don't get ethical corporations. They have no reason to be, and ethics hurts profits and produces vectors for competition to capture your market through predatory behavior. That is why I said I only like this because of the PBC - it is barely better than Patreon, but it is better than Patreon, and we don't have a viable freedom respecting alternative yet and going forward its going to just get harder and harder if Patreon is allowed to amass network effects the way it has in the last few years.
This evaluation is very shallow. Facebook has been a manipulative and unethical corporation for years, maybe forever. It's true that lots of companies start out fine and then start abusing their power once they get big. But Facebook is that and is unethical in other ways also.
By design, Facebook is about collecting deep personal info, capturing attention and then selling your attention to the highest bidder. The very design of Patreon is in opposition to this. Even if Patreon were the most unethical abuser of their power, they would then be the worst in the basically ethical market of funding creative work directly. And Patreon isn't abusing their power dramatically right now and may never get there.
Facebook is already being the worst in a fundamentally unethical market based on getting attention and selling it to advertisers.
Your points about corporations and ethics are broadly true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't better and worse. We should be skeptical of all for-profit entities, especially VC-backed and stock-based ones. But they aren't all equal. Some are worse than others and some are by-design worse.
It's basically impossible for Patreon to turn into something as horrendous as Facebook. Patreon could get pretty bad and that would still be true.
Patreon isn't about collecting personal info, but people are giving them personal info by the boatload and Patreon remains a private corporation at the end of the day. If they get big enough they will be presented with an opportunity to exert Facebook class influence, especially if (this is my fear) content creators start using patreon as their only platform, where they don't release their creative endeavors on other sites and services, the same way a lot of people only interact with others online via Facebook. The difference is good content creators are making legitimately valuable information unlike what the vast majority of Facebook is.
The crowding out effects of Facebook just limit access to insular echo chambers. The crowding out effects of Patreon, taken to the scale of Facebook, crowd out the market for artists, musicians, animators, game developers, software creators, almost any creative profession that gets so centralized on Patreon that operating in that industry de facto requires using Patreon. We are not nearly there yet, but given Patreons growth curve (and with knowledge of the growth rates of other abusive centralized services like Facebook) it is not something to just ignore the potential of.
There is always the possibility Patreon can be using its data already for nefarious purposes. We have no idea, the data is private, and if they are violating their own data collection TOS thats only a problem if users find out about it. Bulk collection by dozens of web properties has been going on for decades without consequences despite bogus terms of service and data privacy agreements, the fundamental problem with all those services is how little people care or are aware of the dangers of giving information freely.
Get this straight: I'm not AT ALL defending Patreon. But to compare them to Facebook is to fail to realize how deeply horrible Facebook is. I'm not saying Patreon is better than you say they are. I'm saying Facebook is far WORSE than you suggest.
And considering that Kickstarter is a fund raising platform it puts its defined purpose in quite a murky zone to begin with.
EDIT: And, as u/aronarduino pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the name is already taken (and the TLD drip.com) by a well established tech product.
> This is the ideal model, there is no greedy studio stealing most of the money
They don't steal most of the money. They are paid according to whatever agreement they have between themselves and the artist. Typically for services rendered, like providing recording, mastering and marketing services.
Given that, the logo they chose is also somewhat... unfortunate.
For one, the new domain name extension (.rip) is not really killing it. Not sure what they were thinking, but hey, that's branding.
And as I pointed out, drip.com was originally registered by this service. They moved off that domain a few years ago and it was eventually taken up by the current occupants.
It's still pretty small, but looks cool, and I'd love to see it succeed.
Snowdrift.coop functions in a similar no-strings-attached style to Liberapay, but uses a unique donation model, called Crowdmatching, where the amount of the monthly donation is based on the number of patrons. The platform itself will be funded as a project on its own site (rather than taking a cut of donations), and will be run as a non-profit cooperative (getting governance set up is one of our top priorities right now, alongside a public launch; if anyone has experience/expertise and would like to help with this, please reach out).
The best introduction, although visually outdated, is probably the intro page on our wiki: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/intro/
I wish I had time to stick around and chat, but it's a busy time in my semester right now; there's a wealth of adfitional information on the wiki and there's usually people around in irc/matrix (#snowdrift on freenode / matrix.org; the rooms are bridged).
Happstack 7.4.6.1
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The error was "NotFound"
Anyway, it would be better to get a not so bad not-found page. Also, better intro stuff for Snowdrift.coop is planned to be published soon.
I typed it from memory and forgot it should not have a trailing /, unfortunately it's too late to edit the post.
Imagine that I create and maintain a public transport map for each city in the world and I want to let locals to pledge to their local city map. Something like that. Ideally with a donation counter that I could embed into each individual map. Of course, there are thousands of cities so I will need an automated way (API) to create individual wallets. Does such service exist?
Here's a summary of the whole market: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi...
Some interesting thoughts from Perry Chen (Kickstarter Co-founder and Chairman): “If you look at a lot of companies, it’s COO, CMO, blah, blah, blah,” Chen said. “But look at a museum. You might have a CEO or director, but then you might have a curator. There is a very specific articulation of roles and lanes, and I think that’s really necessary for Kickstarter, trying to be a different kind of company over a long period of time. If you have operators coming with the classic business playbook, I don’t think we’ll be able to sustain our focus on our mission.”
As for comments regarding the name, you get an idea of why they might have leaned towards drip. On one of the artist's page [1], you see there are different tiers for supporting his project:
1. Dripper [$3/month]
2. Drizzler [$7/month]
3. Sprayer [$15/month]
5. Squirter [$63/month]
6. Gusher [$127/month]
How does one circumvent this hostility? Obviously it's possible, since Patreon and Drip exist, but I didn't know where to start. I still think my idea is worth a try, but I'm stuck.
We're in the process of integrating connect and when we started, it is was not a full-blown product yet.
Otherwise, it's a pretty complicated negotiation and certification process as in addition to the processor twitchiness there are a bunch of state wire transmission/money laundering laws that you are getting rather adjacent to that can be a mess to navigate.
That may make you a "money transmitter". I did a lot of reserch on whether every marketplace (Uber, TaskRabbit etc.) needs to get a money transmitter license.
It seems this is a grey area, and the answer is probably: no, you don't have to register, because you aren't just sending money but paying people for services.
Where it gets tricky is when services are "broadcast" to many people. Then you get into Online Courses territory. People can purchase subscriptions to your courses etc.
The short answer is, you can circumvent gateways by using permissionless currency networks like bitcoin and litecoin.
But what I want to know from the HN crowd is, what kind of hostility can Stripe have when they power marketplaces all the time??
Here's my experience so far:
Adyen.
Overwhelmingly hostile to startups. All telephone numbers get routed to support. So if you call sales, someone in support answers. The individual who answers the phone also has very basic knowledge of their product line.
Each office that I contacted (US, Europe/London and Europe/Amsterdam. All gave differing reasons why I was not suited. Where it last ended, because I wasn't doing $1m a month. I was not a suitable candidate for their services. Even though someone in the London office did mention I could email my business plan in, although there was no chain of custody and who knows who would be looking at it or when they would come back to me. I think they were really saying that to make me feel better.
So really. How can I get to $1m/month, if I cannot start?
Braintree.
Had good response with braintree, was about to pull the trigger. But then their marketplace solution has been superseded by paypal's new offering of marketplaces.
Paypal.
Called their business team and been forwarded to partnerships. Can't get a hold of their partnership team as they don't have an email or telephone number. 14 days has passed by and all I'm looking for is a simple yes or no. I have filled in their contact form (3 weeks ago) here: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/partner-program/contac... But never hear anything back.
Stripe.
Even though this was my initial provider to go with. It's currently a non-starter and I am leery to approach them. With no actual phone number to contact them on and previous email exchanges being less than steller and not having someone who actually could understand the business model. Note: Shopify is doing the same for heavens sake (yes I am frustrated lol).
Additionally, I am not in the US, so there is also the extra hurdle of having to go through stripe atlas. But again, not really wanting to forward my business plan into the void.
If Stripe had a phone number that I can call, I would investigate that possibility. Can't really understand when I can call lots of other finance companies. I can't get hold of Stripe directly.
Worldpay.
Didn't understand my business model. Even though they promote themselves as being able to deliver complex solutions. It was determined that they could not support my marketplace.
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Finally, if anyone is reading this and is from an acquirer in the US or perhaps from the companies mentioned above. Or perhaps a partner of stripe-atlas so I don't have to wait two weeks/direct contact. Please let me know. My forecast is that there will be a tipping point in the first year where I will be doing $5m a month.
The sad part here. The development of the platform/marketplace. This was the easy part. The difficult part, is finding someone high-up enough the ladder to see that they will be on-boarding a company who their closest competitor is now doing $100m a year. Where that competitor is tiny in the overall competitive space.
I'd like to dig into the previous emails you mentioned. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
Phone support is great. Phone SALES, that would be even better.
Honestly, don't worry about the previous emails. They were in the latter part of 2016 and times have moved on. There is connect and Atlas that have answered part of the conversion back then.
After contacting 25 companies in the finance space both in the US and UK. I find better luck with discussing my business with someone not in support. With someone who can actually make a decision or has a direct route to a decision maker. I hope you can understand where I am coming from.
The whole area is a minefield of not just corporate support but also regulation, especially internationally.
I have seen that no limit coin can be purchased by Visa and there are stores in the US that take that for physical products.
So as Mike Tyson says: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
Believe me, I've been punched quite often on this journey of mine. I'll happily investigate every path available.
While we generally work with many high-growth startups, our solution for marketplaces is designed for enterprise merchants. We are currently streamlining our processes in order to support startups on our marketplace solution.
-Lucas
Obviously many details to work out, but I could see a company willing to pay $500 per month if it was easy to donate to all the tools and projects they use.
It was a crummy MVP. I gave out $1 to 100 different open source authors. Not one of them passed it along and made a donation to someone else. That was disappointing, really.
This analogy isn't getting any better.
This service pre-dates the sites that now occupy drip.com and drip.fm.
How?
That may or may not make impeccable business sense but he’s structured the business so he can follow that ‘mission’.