This is pretty crazy of Patreon. I mean - they can easily bundle pledges on charge. I don't understand why they'd drop a separate charge for each one, except for "fuck it, they won't care, right?".
I’m inclined to believe they’re already doing this.
I guess I'll find out next time they run and I can count number of charges.
So instead of being charged once at the beginning/end of the month, you would instead be charged on the monthly anniversary of when you started backing someone.
I'm not sure they're (thinking about) switching over to this (yet), but I've seen mention of this in comments online, so, could be.
EDIT: They are:
> To do that, we need to move our payments system to treat your pledges like any other subscription service. In other words, we need a system that charges patrons at the time of their initial pledge, and on the anniversary of their pledge each month thereafter.
AFAICT (from my charges) they have indeed been bundling charges. Charging the %+constant fee for each patron given that there is no individual payment-processor action for each patron on the debit side is absolutely nasty.
I'm not asking them to eat payment-processing fees, I'm not asking them not to make a profit, I'm simply asking them to not charge for fees for transactions that never happened.
I hope Hatreon (or any other patreon clone) steals half of their userbase because they absolutely deserve to be punished and chastised for this manipulative nonsense (along with their banning legal-but-NSFW content producers); because nothing else but people exiting from Patreon will make them feel anything.
Sexual content can be considered NSFW and should not be conflated with a "safe haven" for hate speech.
I can definitely see a Patreon alternative that might do better by folks getting some traction--Kickstarter as a PBC is interesting, I actually didn't realize Patreon wasn't. But I know a decent few NSFW creators and I can't imagine any of them going to where the Daily Stormer and Richard Spencer gets their funding.
Conflating self-declared Nazis with pornography is exactly what those Nazis would like people to do.
As for the audience of Hatreon, I guess I was just taking their about page [0] and community guidelines [1] at face value.
"Hate speech is protected speech. Hatreon exists in reaction to politically motivated no-platforming at sites like Patreon. Always consider your local, state, and national laws, but the site stands for free speech absolutism and will protect creators’ interests against sovereign and corporate threats. Do not abuse this protection."
In other words, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - which is a sentiment I can get behind.
[0] https://hatreon.net/about/ [1] https://hatreon.net/guidelines/
But it's dishonest. Taking money for Nazis is not the same as ensuring their right to speak. It means you're doing business with them. You are providing them aid and assistance, not even merely a place to speak (which no private citizen is obligated to provide and no private citizen should be removed from judgment for so doing). That's money that doesn't go merely to "speech" at all.
In no place and at no time in history has enthusiastic, freely undertaken business with Nazis made you freedom-loving or high-minded; it has only and ever made you, in the best light of history possible, a sucker and a sap (if not a collaborator). But it might make you money, so...
Read more history. The tangent you're rambling on about both muddies the discussion and falls short of factual accuracy.
A man named Oskar Schindler enthusiastically and freely undertook business with actual Nazis and even became a member of the Nazi Party. His actions saved the lives of well over a thousand Jews and cost him all the money he had amassed prior to the war. Hatreon has nothing to do with this history and Patreon's poor terms even less so.
It is, perhaps, not exactly the hill you want to die on to go "b-b-b-but Oskar Schindler!". Stormfront wants heads on sticks and burning crosses on black folks' lawns. They don't care about Oskar Schindler and they don't care about the plausible deniability that Hatreon really wants suckers and saps to buy into. They know. They know it's there for them and only for them.
Don't use Patreon if you don't like their terms. Don't use Hatreon because they're for Nazis.
Psst. Had you grown up in that time and circumstance, you undoubtedly would have been, too. And it's unfathomably unlikely you'd have joined him as the second of only two ever to be honored with a burial on Mount Zion and visited by survivors for decades.
I see Hatereon and particularly Stormfront as grave threats and it pains me to see people such as yourself strengthening both through relentless snarking and bigoteering. You need only look in the mirror to understand why your society is where it is and why the politics has grown so rancid. And it's not just your society affected by your culture wars. American-style intolerance is threatening to boil over into the rest of the world, too. You are a wealthy and influential person, almost certainly in the 1% of the developed world, and the second order consequences of your actions matter.
Setting all of that to one side, speaking of "dying on hills" and trying to put a stutter in someone else's mouth is damned childish and more than a bit irritating.
I mentioned it not as an endorsement, but as a proof of concept. Since it exists there's no excuse for other people being unable to replicate it (without its political marketing, of course).
How to do a profitable micro transaction is still a mystery.
The question here really is - What is the distribution of backers and payment amount on Patreon?
If majority of their customers are, 1:1 ie one patron to one artist for $1. Then it is an issue which payment processor needs to look into.
But, if it is 1:50 ie one patron to 50 artists for $1 then I am sure Patreon will be creating a batch transaction.
Patreon's problem surely stems from the fact that 1:1 is more likely true.