We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change | Hacker News Reader

We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change

blog.patreon.com

1,195 pointsJoshTriplett539 comments

This is a remarkably direct and appropriate apology, along with an appropriate response, a rare thing indeed.

If not for their initial response to the first round of feedback, namely to put a "we're still doing it" at the bottom of their original blog post (with completely unreasonable and unjustified explanations for why), I'd give them full credit for responding appropriately. As it is, though, at least they fixed this. They're still going to need to deal with the giant pile of patrons they drove off; many people lost a significant fraction of their support because of this change, and that won't necessarily come back.

Between 1 and 2 years ago, I talked to some folks at Patreon about an unrelated topic (namely, trying to use Patreon for registered charities). They mentioned at that time that they had a change in the works to shift processing fees from creators to patrons, which they said at the time would be "better for creators" for various reasons, but that didn't want to talk about the details yet. (Since the issue is now public, I don't see any issue with saying that now.) That discussion naturally didn't include any information about fee structure or un-aggregation of charges with associated additional fees, e.g. the "$1 costs $1.37" problem, since that wasn't the topic; the impression they gave at the time was that the only change was to pass on the (presumably still aggregated) fees to the patrons, which wouldn't have been as serious a problem, and wouldn't have killed Patreon's suitability as a wildly successful microtransaction platform the way this change did. So, they've been thinking about this for a long time, and yet they sprung it on people without warning and without running the full details by anyone.

Update: there's now a survey from Patreon asking for feedback: https://twitter.com/Patreon/status/941010263385374720

Twitter was filled with screenshots of people removing their $1 pledges. It wouldn’t surprise me if the rollback of the new model was motivated more by economics than PR, where the forecasted revenue under the new model (accounting for loss rate of subscribers) was lower than the forecasted revenue under the old model.

Well, those things are inseperable in this day and age, especially for a company that depends on internet communities.

It's astonishing how a company with one product could misunderstand its own market so badly, but given the troubles of Twitter and to a lesser extent Etsy perhaps it's less surprising.

Especially Patreon. Patreon more or less takes people's money in exchange for warm fuzzy feelings. If they piss off their users, the users get less warm fuzzy feelings, and they'll stop buying.

“Misunderstand”? Yeah, right. They knew most donations are $1, and just wanted a bigger part of the pie.

If they were out to solve a problem, they’d just do this for transactions say $10 and above.

Nay, Patreon knew very well what they’re trying to do, and seeing it fail, decided to use the “play dumb” card.

Not so astonishing, when you understand the business of venture capital. When you raise too much venture capital and try to grow faster than the market dictates, this sort poor decision making tends to happen.

This is what I told them in the survey. I'm a newbie to the platform, and I understand the value proposition better than the owner?! That's really screwed up, and it will take quite a while before I trust them. I still kind of think creators should take their accounts elsewhere. How can a group of people just not understand their own product so thoroughly? Baffling. Is there any precedent for people so badly confused able to learn which end is up? It really makes me suspect the company and its users just have irreconcilably different ideas about what is going on.

Well, those things are inseperable in this day and age, especially for a company that depends on internet communities.

"Voting with your wallet." Or to paraphrase the way Polonius put it in Hamlet, one of the key differences between sane and insane is what people do with their money.

Vine actually died because of this.

I wonder how many creators they lost, too. At least one guy I follow, who makes rpg scenarios, said “screw it” - all future scenarios would go to drivethrurpg, and patreon backers would get discount codes appropriate to their backing level. He kept patreon as a notification platform, and drove —all- his revenue to an alternate channel.

Same with a webcomic creator I know. He basically stated "I do this as a side-job and have a steady income, please move your pledges for me to the creators you support that depend on Patreon for their income."

Wonder if he's still leaving.

Absolutely. I told anyone that would listen to cancel everything because I feared that would be the only effective method.

Nothing like voting with your wallet.

Like the new Coke recipes? Then the introduction to the original recipes.

I understand why they do it: they trying to bring down transaction costs with payment processors. These fees on small amounts is death by thousand cuts.

But, I believe, there is a way: they can introduce wallets for $1-2 patrons: put $10 in a single transaction, then charge the wallet once it is a time to pay to creator. This should aggregate small transactions into larger ones and significantly cut the costs.

You do not understand what happened.

They did aggregate up until this point, at least for most patrons and creators. If you did a regular pledge with a monthly charge, you only made one transaction a month. Similarly, each creator got paid once a month with one transaction. The exception was per-post patronages, which do indeed have more fees and are less suited to the micro-payment model. That is NOT what this was about, though.

The real motivation was to support gated content.

They want to bring creators into their subscription system, where you pay a fee to access content. They had a problem, though, in that people could pledge, access content, and then simply cancel their pledge before getting charged. To avoid this, they needed to do Charge Up Front (CUF) to ensure that any access to gated content was paid for. But that creates some confusion about when people get charged (do you pro-rate the first charge, with or without the next month, etc.) because people would pledge a certain amount and see a different amount charged. The alternative is to have people on their own billing cycles, which is much less confusing for customers, but eliminates the possibility of aggregation.

Basically, they want to abandon the goodwill/patronage model and become a subscription service, likely because the latter model is far more lucrative.

You're ignoring the fact that increasing the number of distinct fees charged to Patrons translates directly to more money for Patreon (because Patreon was charging a much higher fee to Patrons than they themselves are actually paying on the transaction). Their public explanation was that a traditional subscription model is simpler, but it's obviously worse for users and the only reason to do that instead of the alternatives (such as the wallet approach) is so Patreon can get their cut of those extra fees.

I don't see how a 'wallet' doesn't handle the CUF... Patreon should already have the money in what is basically a pre-paid account. You just have a minimum amount that can be paid into the wallet. There should also be pay in/out schedules so things are aggregated/automated on both sides. They could even make interest off of the floating money and work a bit like a bank. This should be their bread and butter, optimizing transaction cost. Plenty of other sites do this sort of thing for real businesses, I don't see why it is so complex...

> To avoid this, they needed to do Charge Up Front (CUF) to ensure that any access to gated content was paid for. But that creates some confusion

But if you actually ask people whether they want the first couple charges to have weird timing, or whether they want to pay significantly more in credit card fees that don't go to the creator...

> They did aggregate up until this point

Still an issue if most people support 1-2 creators with $1-2 pledges.

I really don't get the motivation of the change, aside from basic greed.

I mean, it seems like a dream business model, you basically channel donations to content creators taking a cut, collecting goodwill along the way.

Their service cannot be more than a (refined and well designed as you want) CRUD app with payment processing, it's hard to imagine having such high costs that is not profitable.

> I understand why they do it: they trying to bring down transaction costs with payment processors. These fees on small amounts is death by thousand cuts.

Then they should have never strayed from the original model, where they charge you once per month for all your pledges, causing only one fee paid to the payment processor.

(If they needed to accommodate people pledging small amounts to very few creators, they could have introduced some sort of quarterly, biannual, or even annual payment option instead of just monthly. I'm curious if they evaluated this option and what they concluded.)

My coffee shop has a sign: $0.50 fee for card transactions under $5. I’ve seen that sign over the years at a dozen places. The idea isn’t entirely novel.

And you’re right, in that perhaps they should send $3 every three months or. $6 every six if you’re only giving to one person.

Maybe it's just me, but, I think it's so fucking stupid that it costs money (which goes to private businesses) to spend money in the modern world.

(and no, bitcoin doesn't fix that at all)

I think if we were in an alternate universe where the government managed a free utility for digital payments no one would find it strange for a second.

It has always costed money to to spend money and there are pros and cons to each method. All that stuff isn't free even if it isn't directly measurable most of the time.

Cash costs money too--you have to count it, handle it, deposit it, protect it from theft, verify it's authenticity, make sure you have enough change, spend time counting change, etc. As a consumer, if a merchant fucks you over you have little recourse besides suing. Cash takes no time to clear so you can spend it right after getting it, it is anonymous, it is hard to trace so you can skip on taxes, etc.

Checks can bounce, you have to deposit them, they take time to clear, they take forever to write, they can be fake, etc. However, it is hard for your cashiers to skim off the top, it uses exact amounts so no change to keep, it is a single slip of paper to carry around instead of a pocket of paper currency, as a consumer you can stop payment on a check if the merchant fucks you over, etc...

Credit cards are super quick to use at the register. They don't require any change (unless handing cash back). As a consumer, if a merchant fucks you over you can issue a chargeback. It is easy to track your spending as a consumer because all transactions are recorded electronically. As a merchant you don't have to handle change or cash, your cashiers can't easily skim off the top, etc...

It's all trade offs and I'll bet if you did an NPV on all the different methods taking into consideration all their pros and cons, they'd all wind up "costing" similar amounts.

I don't think it's stupid that it costs money, but I am surprised fees are still as high as they are. I suspect it's got something to do with how opaque the processing fee is for the customer.

If I understand it right, merchants often aren't allowed to pass on the fees or (much the same thing) give discounts if you chose a cheaper payment option. No wonder there's little competition on the fees, and Visa[1], Mastercard[2] and PayPal[3] are all having record profits.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/25/visa-quarterly-profit-rises-...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mastercard-results/master...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-paypal-hldg-results/paypa...

I would, I in no way want to give that kind of power to government.

I would 100% opposes to a government run digital payment system, the government is too closing integrated to todays electronic systems as it is, I in no way want them to own and directly control it

It costs money because there are significant fixed and incremental costs to handle it: Fixed because of the labor and value of the technology, and incremental because of fraud. Much of the incremental cost is fraud insurance.

Some places have systems you'd like. For instance Denmark has the "dankort" debit payment network where small merchants only play a flat annual fee and no per-transaction costs whatsoever.

They couldn't even do it with physical mail. You're paying the government every time you send a letter for the cost of that postage stamp. And the postal service in the US is pretty much constantly under-funded.

What makes you think we could do it digitally?

Like Europe, right?

You pay to have some handle the transaction details for you. It's a service. You are free to mail dollar bills, though you'll use a service you need to pay for there, too.

They do... It's called ACH.

It seems very likely that the change was motivated by payment processor fees. Patreon uses Stripe to process payments, which charges a flat rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge. Compare that to the proposed fee patron fee structure of 2.9% + $0.35 — where presumably the extra $0.05 per transaction is the cut Patreon takes off the top for themselves.

> the proposed fee patron fee structure of 2.9% + $0.35

The problem was that was per pledge. So if, like me, you support a couple dozen creators at $1-$3 each, you would expect to pay 24 x $.35. But all those payments are charged in one transaction. So they are only paying $.30. It isn't 5c per transaction they were planning to skim, but $8.

Patreon's docs until recently noted that they get charged 1.9% by Stripe, so there's more than $0.05 being skimmed there.

That's what they did before the announced fee changes. After the fee changes were supposed to go into effect they we're no longer aggregating pledges. Madness.

Would that put any extra requirements on them? They're not just a middleman in that situation, they actually hold the funds. That sounds close to the PayPal for a long time: we've got accounts and transactions and deal with real money but we really really are not a bank, promise, please don't regulate us as one!

> put $10 in a single transaction, then charge the wallet once it is a time to pay to creator

They already group the transaction on the 1st of the month for me. I use PayPal, is it different for other payment types?

If you keep people's money and move it around for them, you start looking like a bank, and you get regulated like a bank. I think this is why online games let you buy tokens with real money, and the tokens sit in your account. (It's probably of critical importance that there exist no way for the tokens to be converted back into currency - which is why regulators were and are far more concerned about online gold farming than the game devs themselves. It's good to be the bank.)

The problem if I understood correctly their previous strife is when you finance patrons across taxation boundaries. If they have to collect vat, they need separate transactions, even if that drived up transaction costd

Yeah, they could have avoided this altogether by checking with their user base but this is a good response, although radio silence for five days is a bit crazy.

Shocking you community's members with a sudden change - no matter the size - is almost always seen as hostile and drives members away.

I recommend the talk[1] Joe Peacock of fark.com gave about the time they deployed a redesign unannounced and made their infamous "You'll get over it." post in the thread full of confused and angry members.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI

What VC board of directors is going to support that?

Are we supposed to believe they didn't game the numbers out on this? That attrition wouldn't hold sway? I don't believe it, and any attempt by them to "I'm just a simple caveman, unfamiliar with your society" an excuse lies in high tension with "$100MM in funding."

I think the simplest explanation is that moving to focus on bigger-ticket patrons destroyed their brand.

If you ask the user base if they are OK with a price increase you are going to get a big NO every time.

I give them leeway on the 5 days. I guess they could have said something general like "We understand the new payment policies are not what our user base has expected of us. We are formulating an in-depth response and will have it out in the next few days. We appreciate your response and patience."

I'm just sharing in here b/c I've always appreciated when others "peel back the curtain" to show the thinking behind decisions.

At the end of the day, it was obvious that we fucked up from the immediate feedback, but internally there was already a strong camp who felt this change was wrong, which greatly helped our ability to move quickly and plan out how we'd call this off (all the code was already in production behind feature flags).

On the data side, our churn ticked up, but was actually lower than we predicted and quickly returned to normal levels https://imgur.com/a/inFOE -- so the reversal was largely driven by the complaints of creators and patrons alike, and our own realization of how tone-deaf the decision was to begin with.

Speaking of which -- in my mind there are some obvious solutions to alleviating fees that didn't require moving the entire burden onto the goodwill of supporters. We're going to tackle a more comprehensive roadmap in the coming days and weeks (and talk to creators much more during this process), but if anyone is curious or wants to offer feedback, here are my thoughts:

* A big problem (that we arguably created ourselves) is a patron could pledge to a creator on the 25th of a month (granting a patron 5-6 days of access), get charged, and then get charged again on the 1st of the next month (granting the patron 30-31 days of patron-access). Pro-rating didn't seem like a right solution for the first charge since becoming a patron unlocked all the content immediately. So imo we should just (like a Netflix or any other subscription) have your first pledge grant you 30 days of access, whenever it was created -- and have this forever be your "anniversary date" of charge -- if you pledge Jan 25th, you'd be charged again Feb 25th.

* The question is around how we aggregate pledges if this patron pledges to another creator. If we say the patron pledged $5 to the 1st creator on the 25th of Jan, then pledged $5 to the second creator on the 10th of February, I'd want to charge the patron $10 on Feb 25, and in the receipt call out that you're paying for the 1st creator for the period of Feb 25-March 25, and for the 2nd creator from March 10-April 10 (because you'd have already paid for Feb 10-March 10 when you pledged to the 2nd creator on Feb 10). This way you're ALWAYS getting 30 days of access for every pledge you pay.

* Now that we can aggregate payments across multiple creators, I'd want to allow for the purchasing of multiple months/year at a time for a creator or creators, which further reduces fees -- additionally it allows creators to setup rewards (we're building this system out now) for when patrons have pledged a total of X amount or pledged for some time period.

* Finally, once we can pledge across multiple time periods, I'd love for cryptocurrency to be able to pay for patronage. Currently it's trivial for us to accept bitcoin via our Stripe integration, but we wouldn't be able to do recurring payments, and the ultimate thing that kills it for me is that creators wouldn't actually get bitcoin, but rather we'd have to convert it to fiat immediately. I'd rather patrons be able to purchase multiple months of patronage and creators have the option to convert to fiat immediately or hold actual bitcoin and participate in the wild ride that is cryptocurrency speculation :)

Ok that's all -- ideas are rough above, but that's what's on my mind lately -- happy holidays.

As you say, pro-rating first charge has the content unlock problem and "anniversary date" of charge defeats aggregation.

TLDR: Aggregate on a single day, but pro-rate the second month, not the first, so there isn't a "runt" payment up-front.

I start a monthly $20/mo pledge on Feb 15th. I'm billed $20 on the Feb 15th, same day. This covers one month, Feb 15th - March 15th. Let's say the first of the month is aggregation day. Come March 1st I'm already paid up through the 15th, so I get billed for the pro-rated $10 for the second half of March. Come April 1st and all aggregation days thereafter I can now be billed on aggregation day for the full monthly charge.

> TLDR: Aggregate on a single day, but pro-rate the second month, not the first, so there isn't a "runt" payment up-front.

That was my immediate thought reading this text. Of course it'll confuse some users, but since it's the fairest way, it should be the way to go. Also, just don't charge for the prorated period if the feed is going to be as big as the contribution (e.g. for a couple days for someone contributing $2 a month)

Pro-rating is fine, just make it a month+. So you support with one week left in the billing cycle, they get charged for 5 weeks. You could make it an option that creators set.

I'd really like to see a debit system: I could load up 6 months worth of pledges at once and incur only one fee (whether it's explicitly charged or done 'hidden', I don't care). Creators could choose how often to be paid, as well, so they control what kind of fees they incur as well.

Ah, if that wasn't clear from my post, I think debit/credit is absolutely interesting. Analogous to how Twitch effectively gives you more "bits" to send to streamers as you buy more in bulk.

Creators all run vastly different businesses so pro-rating is always a thought -- one thing it seems incompatible with is in the fulfillment of goods, where the creator takes on a burden of cost. It would be difficult to consider what the patron receives in return if they only pay out a pro-rated portion of a reward tier. Curious how that would play out in your scenario --

> A big problem (that we arguably created ourselves) is a patron could pledge to a creator on the 25th of a month (granting a patron 5-6 days of access), get charged, and then get charged again on the 1st of the next month (granting the patron 30-31 days of patron-access). Pro-rating didn't seem like a right solution for the first charge since becoming a patron unlocked all the content immediately. So imo we should just (like a Netflix or any other subscription) have your first pledge grant you 30 days of access, whenever it was created -- and have this forever be your "anniversary date" of charge -- if you pledge Jan 25th, you'd be charged again Feb 25th.

You could keep your charge date on the 1st of the month, and just not charge for that first month if they are charged up front. Let creators choose the length of their grace period: 3 days, 10 days, two weeks. Creators get paid, don't feel pressured to provide refunds, and patrons get a little sign-on discount.

Creators get paid, don't feel pressured to provide refunds, and patrons get a little sign-on discount.

This seems like the key. Instead of making any decisions about payment scheduling options, design your system to allow for all of them within reason, and give the creators a menu.

If you don't offer your users enough options, you will eventually be out-competed by a patronage service that does. Hardwiring your system to a model that happens to work for you simply ensures that this will happen sooner rather than later.

This is an interesting thought -- one of the other things we see creators do is physical rewards, which means there is a cost to them in fulfilling their pledges. Although I could see compatibility to your suggestion still b/c you just wouldn't get the physical good twice, one good would cover the period of the next month + the original grace period.

This doesn't seem like a great idea. What if I just joined for the first month, grabbed all of the content, then dropped out? I mean, I love this idea for the Creators that offer premium content that I want but don't want to pay for but it seems like they'd get ripped off a lot.

One solution I’ve seen suggested: Pro-rate the SECOND transaction. The one on the first of the next month. Full charge for the first one.

You have ONE solo transaction, the rest are able to be bundled as normal, and the $1 pledges that make up half of my Patreon income (and, I’m extrapolating, a similar fraction of everyone's Patreon income) aren’t eaten up by that 35¢ fee.

A simple solution to the "patron pledges near the end of the month" problem would be to have two batching dates, one at the end of the month and the other at the middle, and chose the one farthest from the current date, so the initial charge of a pledge would always be for at least a couple of weeks. Though personally, I would find that solution a bit annoying; having everything aggregate into a single charge per month is very convenient for patrons.

> This is a remarkably direct and appropriate apology [...] many people lost a significant fraction of their support because of this change, and that won't necessarily come back

They could have restored all cancelled pledges and covered their costs for a few months. That would give creators money to pay the rent, and probably go a long way towards restoring relationship with patrons.

Clearly, they're not that sorry.

I don't understand why this .37 applies to every transaction. Wouldn't it make sense to charge the overhead once a month, with the actual dollar(s) being distributed as the user wishes? They should use the power of their platform (obviously nearing or having passed critical mass) to make it easier for prolific supporters while also maximising their paetron's income.

I think they had good intentions, but got greedy and lost sight of their overall goal

Successful/appropriate company apologies seem so rare these days!

Anyone have examples of ones done right?

Off topic, but is there a good solution like Patreon for registered charities?

>Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income.

I think Jack at Patreon fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the relationship between patron and creator. A lot of patrons feel like their payment is a donation instead of paying a subscription or water bill. Yes, some patrons+creators have a quid-pro-quo arrangement where payments unlocks content or extra services. However, many payments are just "appreciation" type of money. That is a fragile relationship and it was wrong to tamper with it by charging extra fees to the patron.

Jack was/is a creator himself so he should have known this dynamic and therefore predicted the bad outcome ahead of time.

Ideally, when you start a multi-sided platform, you want to get the economics correct from the very beginning so you can leave it unchanged. (E.g. Apple iTunes charges 30% since 2008 and it's stayed that way.) However, if you have to readjust the percentages, it's preferable to take it out on the sellers' side and not the buyers' side. When ebay started, the fees for sellers were ~3.25%. Over the last 10 years, it has crept up in increments to ~10%. All of those price increases were absorbed by the sellers.

If Patreon needs more than 5% to make the numbers work for a sustainable business, they need to take it from the creators and not the patrons. Patreon was riding on the "good will" of patrons making voluntary payments. It was a terrible miscalculation to destroy that good will and nickel & dime patrons with extra fees.

> Jack was/is a creator himself so he should have known this dynamic and therefore predicted the bad outcome ahead of time.

I thank that might exactly be the reason why it happened. From what I recall as a fan of their artistic work, he (& his wife) never asked for straight up donations, but either offered something in direct exchange (via Bandcamp) or the money went towards a specific project (Kickstarter).

> I think Jack at Patreon fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the relationship between patron and creator. A lot of patrons feel like their payment is a donation instead of a subscription or water bill. Yes, some patrons+creators have a quid-pro-quo arrangement where payments unlocks content or extra services. However, many payments are just "appreciation" type of money.

And at least for serials the "quid-pro-quo" arrangement is usually earlier access to content (e.g. bonus/patron chapters), there's no exclusive/sale type arrangement.

This episode is a good demonstration of how the structure of production works: prices begin with what the consumer is willing to pay and work backward to higher-order goods or factors of production.

It makes intuitive sense that if there are costs generated by the arrangement, you go to the ones benefiting from the arrangement (creators) before you go to the ones already providing the funding (patrons). Maybe Jack's being a creator himself is what blinded him to this.

Exactly - I'm thrilled to donate $30-50/mo to the YouTuber FlightChops because he does some amazing, high production value work and I want him to be able to keep doing it. Even still, I only watch 1/3-1/2 of his videos simply because it's rare that I have 25-30 minutes to sit down and watch one. I'm happy to donate the money to him because he's doing good work and I spend a lot more money on much more pointless things. I don't view myself as buying anything from him. I wouldn't be upset if he went 2 months without putting anything out just like I wouldn't be upset if he put out 10 videos in a month (I have a cap on my donation to him as I think most Patrons do).

> ebay started, the fees for sellers were ~3.25%. Over the last 10 years, it has crept up in increments to ~10%. All of those price increases were absorbed by the sellers.

Isn't this a false dichotomy? It's just a matter of how you phrase it, no?

If the increase in seller fees is reflected in real pricepoints on eBay's market, it could work out as it really being the buyers paying the difference.

It's hard to believe that Patreon didn't ask for feedback on this model initially. I'm sure they did, but my guess is that they didn't expect the blowback from people that depended on $1-2 patrons to have such a large impact on their image.

IMO, before Twitter/Facebook, this apology would've never happened. They would've continued to press on with their fee structure and it would've been yesterday's news.

The real question is - is this still a good move for them? Or should they have dealt with the blowback either way?

> It's hard to believe that Patreon didn't ask for feedback on this model initially.

From their initial blog post announcing this change:

> In preparation for this change, we ran experiments and months and months of research to understand patrons’ potential reactions and we found that many patrons were happy knowing that this change will send more money to creators.

Looks like a somewhat interesting user-testing glitch to me. Perhaps their sample of patrons wasn't representive, or when you sit people down and discuss a new feature 1-1 you can be more convincing than when broadcasting it to the whole world in a blog post.

I could also imagine that they didn't actually show the fee details, and just pitched it at a high-level.

As a patron, I'd be fine if Patreon just added transparency on fees, showing exactly how much reached the creator and how much went to fees, which is equivalent to "passing on" those fees. (They're effectively paid by the patrons either way, the only question is whether it's made clear what fraction of a pledge goes to the creator, what fraction to Patreon, and what fraction to processing fees.)

In my opinion, they made two critical mistakes here, and transparency on fees wasn't one of them. First, they un-aggregated charges, so that a $1 pledge costs $1.37, and ten $1 pledges costs $13.70. Second, they effectively increased all the pledges by individual patrons, rather than just being transparent about fees on the existing pledges. Effectively, they said "we're going to increase everyone's pledges by the amount of the fees (and hey, would you look at that, we get more money now)", rather than "we're going to show you exactly how much of your existing pledge goes where, without changing your existing pledge". Of course that led to a revolt.

I like this idea of showing transparency. They screwed up by not letting the decision remain in the hands of the funder.

> First, they un-aggregated charges, so that a $1 pledge costs $1.37, and ten $1 pledges costs $13.70

According to what I’ve heard, this was requested by credit card processors, because people would revoke the patreon charge, not understand why they’d be charged such a random amount every month.

Instead, they were supposed to charge every patron for every creator separately, and make it clear on the bill for which creator that is.

I fully expect that they will have to keep this unbundling.

> Looks like a somewhat interesting user-testing glitch to me. Perhaps their sample of patrons wasn't representive, or when you sit people down and discuss a new feature 1-1 you can be more convincing than when broadcasting it to the whole world in a blog post.

Or perhaps we're all just a raving mob waiting for the right inputs, and early sentiment by influential individuals actually shapes our thoughts and actions far more than we like to admit.

It's also possible that we only make up 5% of patreons?

But that we are very noisy, because tech people on HN/twitter/etc. really want a micro payment solution for the web, to avoid ads.

The top Patreon patron by far, Chapo Trap House, was adamantly against the change. I do question whether they really did adequate research.

Chapo Trap House has exactly one pledge level at $5+, which means this change would have probably benefited them financially. They'd be unlikely to lose many patrons upset about having to pay $5.50 a month instead of $5, and they'd be getting 3-5% more from each pledge due to no longer having to pay transaction fees on their side.

> patrons were happy knowing that this change will send more money to creators.

That could depend on how they asked patrons.

If I was asked if I were in favor of more money going to creators, I would say yes.

If I was asked if I were in favor of paying more to make this happen, I would say no. If I want to send more money to creators, I would opt for a higher patron tier.

Well, something that's gotten elided in a lot of the outrage is that moving the transaction fees from the creators to the patrons would have given creators 3-5% more money on the same amount of pledges. And while it seems "no duh" to point out that a $5 pledge is literally worth five times what a $1 pledge is, in terms of revenue, that means that many creators could have lost a surprising number of $1 pledges and still come out even (or even slightly ahead). I ran the numbers for several Patreons, big and small, based on what I could scour from Graphtreon, and the amount of money most creators lost over the last few days would have been largely offset by the money they'd get back.

I'm not saying that this makes the change a good idea, or that it was communicated well, or that there aren't some really interesting business dynamics that are likely to come up one way or the other that will piss off creators. (There are only six creators on Patreon who have more than 10,000 patrons as of now; to earn that $450M valuation, Patreon may need creators who have hundreds of thousands of patrons.) I'm just not convinced this would have been the Patreoncalypse.

If patrons on average adjusted their pledges under the new fee structure such that they were paying about as much money as they were before, creators would end up with less money on average, because the new de-aggregated fee structure results in higher fees as a percentage of the total amount paid in almost all cases.

> something that's gotten elided in a lot of the outrage is that moving the transaction fees from the creators to the patrons would have given creators 3-5% more money on the same amount of pledges

Patreon really tried to make this "point". It is not actually valid; "amount of pledges" before the change is not comparable to "amount of pledges" after the change. Measured as a percentage of "money paid by patrons", revenues to creators fell -- they rose when measured as a percentage of "pledges" because the new fees weren't part of "pledges" while the old fees were.

We also need to consider that content creators might crave an audience just as much or more than the donations.

It sounds like they explained the asynchronous collection to the patrons without also explaining the implications for fees?

Yea, could have been a botched user study. I've also seen situations where user studies were carefully crafted (and the questions worded) with a desired conclusion in mind, often in order to justify an executive's already-made decision. Not at all saying this was the case here, but that happens too.

In addition to what others have said, this is almost surely a messaging issue. How you frame the survey and outcome is critical to getting honest feedback. I bet the surveys didn't detail exactly how things would be implemented and how it would be presented to the patrons. Instead, if you frame it as potential solutions that get your favorite creators more money, the response would certainly be positive.

The email announcement also didn't make the fee increase for 1$ pledges obvious.

On my first read I thought the fee was per transaction and that they would keep aggreting pledges...

It would have take the degenerate example to show that... And only a super honest business would show the edge cases.

They ran a poor test and / or the internal politics were always going to prove out a certain result. There is value to qualitative research and I doubt the answer was to do a better job of A/B testing.

It was the disggregation that seemed to piss people off the worst - which I doubt they pitched to people in their test groups.

before twitter/fb patreon would've never happened

> Aggregation is highly-valued, and we underestimated that.

To me, at least, this is the core issue. Patreon is supposed to be the way to support creators in the internet age.

If they're going to make a strong many-to-many funding model impractical, then why should anyone put money into them as opposed to conventional charities? An NPR pledge drive will sign me up for a credit card monthly auto-payment, but that just doesn't really get me excited. Sure, it's a good cause, but good causes have always been around.

This is critical because of the fact that so many of the creators are actually doing bleeding-edge things. The tiny sub-categories of creators I fund didn't exist 3 years ago. A $1 donation isn't just a signal from the supporter to the creator. It's a signal to the media, it's a signal for potential book deals, all kinds of things. Those numbers have value. By making those contributions radically financially inefficient, they are risking a tipping point that undermines their core value proposition. Even worse, it hurts the frontiers of creation that we cared about in the first place.

Well at least LiberaPay got their minute of fame from this fiasco. Their stats shot through the roof. https://liberapay.com/about/stats

MakerSupport also gained from Patreon's mistake:

Their rank improved 8,324,736 positions vs Liberapay's 824,569 positions. MS is now rank 578,982 and Liberapay is 586,177 vs Patreon's 461

Data from alexa.com:

https://archive.is/y3CJ9

https://archive.is/txACk

https://archive.is/lkMkp

Hopefully folks continue to migrate to them. It's pretty clear Patreon is only looking out for themselves at this point, and the "sudden" change in direction is because their bank account started to bleed.

Every enterprise has to earn a decent amount of money to survive, let alone succeed in a financial way. They'd just start out as a NGO otherwise.

WRT dumping Patreon and the like, I'd rather see community-efforts and enterprise compete. That has lead to some very high quality products from both (e.g. clang vs. gcc, chrome vs. firefox).

I doubt it was the feedback that they heard. I think it was the money.

I’m willing to bet that this rollback is because Patreon leadership and Sr. Managers woke up Monday morning, took a look at their metrics and KPIs and nearly had a heart attack. It probably looks like a nice upward trend for a long time then a massive spike down after the announcement.

Always follow the money.

Not sure it was graphs. I think #4 creator Amanda Palmer posting in open revolt asking her patrons to sign up for email so they could follow her somewhere else might have helped:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/15819420

It turns out the whales remember when they were minnows.

This isn't the Enterprise. Did you take a look at the people who run Patreon? I'm sure they are more shattered that people lost patrons than the fact that Patreon themselves lost money. They had good intentions - to get the creators paid 95% but they executed it poorly.

Maybe, but if you poke around Graphtreon for a while and just look at the dropoffs in terms of patron counts and revenue from the time of the announcement until today, they're noticeable but they're not "OMG our world is on fire." (It's useful to click "Start on Zero" when that option is there, so you have a better visual representation of the actual drop.) Patreon could certainly have afforded to wait and see what happened after the change rolled out.

This is certainly a business decision, but image is part of their business, and part of their image is, ostensibly, listening to creators.

While I like that they are walking these back, I have a feeling that people who lost a lot of supporters won't see a 100% recovery.

I only lost a few, but it already has me poking around at different options for the future.

> I have a feeling that people who lost a lot of supporters won't see a 100% recovery.

That's probably not a bad thing overall. I'm sure people that stopped pledging money during this period will get an email, and have a chance to undo the action. That said, there's quite a few people getting a couple bucks a month from me that I don't really have any reason to support anymore, but haven't taken the time to clean out. That's not an efficient market. If I had stopped pledging to some of them because of this (I didn't as I didn't see a problem with this move), I wouldn't feel compelled to pledge again, and that's a good thing, as right now they are only getting money from me because of my laziness.

I'm not talking about people that I still want to support on principle or because I think they do cool stuff even if I'm not consuming it. Those people by definition are worth my money, so I would likely sign back up.

> I only lost a few, but it already has me poking around at different options for the future.

Same here. Nobody is going to trust Patreon not to do something equally damaging again. It's nice they've reversed this, but I really can't think of anything that will bring back the trust they just trashed.

From the contributor end, I no longer trust Patreon. Their announcement email was way too much obfuscation and didn't include the bottom line up front: that my $X/mo pledges would cost me an additional service fee starting January 1, and that I would automatically be levied these fees.

That is entirely my issue with it too. They said that creators would start getting almost all of the pledged money instead of just a share of it; what they "forgot" to mention is that this is purely because they redefined what a pledge means. They silently redefined it from "the amount of money I pay per month" to "the amount of money I pay per month minus fees".

Creators would get more money of course, but purely because all patreons would start paying more money. They didn't mention that either.

I ended up canceling all my $1 donations except for a random one which I gave all the money to, but I know that a lot of people just canceled them.

I was able to find a PayPal for all but one of mine, and sent three months worth of pledges to them.

This is an admirable response, but I feel like Patreon is just one of the first approaches towards getting rid of the advertising revenue models so prevalent on the internet today, which should definitely be our goal. We can't allow greedy advertisers to hijack online services, as is the current case for YouTube.

I hope that in the future content creators won't have to depend on a single company which takes decisions purely based on their own profit. The marketing team can spin this anyway they want, but ultimately as a company that is their goal.

For lack of a better term, microtransactions and some form of digital currency should solve this problem.

I'm not a fan of the Brave browser, but they introduced a micropayment system last year[0]. It seems to have been launched with Bitcoin support, but maybe this has expanded (as it should) towards other currencies.

Can someone share their experience with Brave Payments, or with similar systems?

This seems like the only logical way to go, from a technology standpoint, and we're not that far off from reaching it.

Creators have their digital wallets, payments are made in the background (with very limited user interaction, or none whatsoever) after a certain smart contract is fulfilled between creator and consumer, and the funds are transferred with very little latency.

The content creation service that launches with this will be huge in the near future. Bonus points for open sourcing it and making an open system that all content creation sites can reuse.

[0]: https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/

I really liked the idea of websites mining some cpu-mineable cryptocurrency in place of having ads there. I suspect that might be a more widespread solution in the future. Maybe even in the long term, the mining will be done through webGL or some other API so that the browser can take advantage of the host's GPU/GPU equivalent.

So instead of paying cash, I'm paying through my electricity bill and my children's future (since all power where I live is fossil)? No thanks. I'd rather just give them money

Your children's future? Besides that we're continually moving towards cleaner methods of producing electricity, that's blowing it out of proportion. I highly doubt the additional energy consumption would be much more or even more at all than the difference between using a brand new or 5-year-old device that was less energy efficient.

What value does this generate?

Ads generate sales that does translate to real world value.

Mining generates distributed consensus on transactions. But why should all computers in the world participate in that? (Obviously, this is best done by specialized hardware)

Also, do you the imagine a future where people make content for the internet inorder to be miners??? Why not just invest in hardware, rather than content for the web.

Also power requirements would be crazy, most devices are battery powered today.. mining is crazy.

Value for the user: no ads and the site gets supported for "free" (the user is very unlikely to care about or even be aware of the electric use and device wear)

Value for the webmaster: the value of the mined coins, obviously.

Is there a certain definition of value you're using that these don't fall under? Why should all people in the world participate in the distributed process of counting out the correct amount of cash in person to each other?

Why doesn't every company just invest directly in finance instead of doing what they do? I don't really have an answer to that, but if user-end mining generated more revenue than ads then website hosts would just switch over to it. Imagining a future where people make content in order to be miners, or indirectly they make content to make money, seems fine, I already support some creators on patreon.

I think the power/cpu requirements for lower end devices could be worked out in time.

I'm a believer in this approach as well. in-browser proofs of work can serve as anti-bot/scraper/spam filters as well

Coinhive has already been successfully deployed to mine $XMR in browsers. I haven't used it yet, but they claim to get pretty close to native CPU performance also which is pretty incredible.

https://coinhive.com/

Not a bad "spitball"/brainstorm idea, but what about slower clients? Mobile, screen readers, etc?

And what about abuse via advertisers, injection, cross-site, etc?

Slower clients can likely just be subsidized by faster clients since I imagine the return would be higher and more consistent than traditional ads. It's already been done on a few sites, so you could look into what they did, but I forget where.

I feel like the potential for abuse would still be a better tradeoff than the current situation of ads that try to download malware or redirect you to phishing sites.

It seems you haven't thought about the consequences for such an approach.

All current consequences are simply because the system hasn't been fleshed out and perfected enough.

It's way too early to judge the approach based on current implementations, because of flaws in those implementations.

But consider a system where the user is always in control of how much resources the web miner is consuming, via say, specific quotas based on domain, content creator, etc., and that there could be little risk for the miner to hijack those resources.

This is a technical problem that can be easily solved in future revisions.

That said, I'm not sure if mining is the right approach, simply because the proof of work is completely arbitrary for some currencies (e.g. Bitcoin) and has no real value.

With content creators it's clear: they provide the value, the content consumers want, and set the cost accordingly, and the consumer simply decides to pay for it. It's simple, and no client side mining would be required.

Mining is only necessary to lower the barrier of entry for the consumer, since they wouldn't need to have a digital wallet with existing funds. But in the near future owning a digital wallet will be just as common, if not more, as having a social media account, so this wouldn't be necessary for the long term.

If you see major issues then you should say what they are. I think trading some battery/mains power and a bit of wear on the device for using an otherwise ad-based service sounds fine.

This brave payments system seems like an awesome idea! Though I'd really like to have it as an extension for Firefox than have to use a whole new browser.

The cynical view:

"We took a calculated risk, announcing the set of changes, and seeing what the fallout would be. The fallout exceeded the threshold we set, so we're now going to issue the apology we had prepared in case that situation was reached."

A company having foresight of a potential explosion and a contingency rollback plan in place before embarking on a major product initiative? That wouldn't be the cynical case, it'd be a goddamn miracle.

I'm not sure why that requires cynacism. It is a business, after all. I would rather them do this than blunder along blindly with policies that might cause them to fail entirely, and adversely affect all those that rely on they far more than this did.

Huh? How is that cynicism. That is precisely what decision making is, at all levels.

No decision can or will please every stakeholder. You always need to make compromises.

Middleman takes their users for fools two times in a row after bottom line threatening shocker. Is it time to cut back on the greed? Proceed to find out whether they sobered up after the outrage

That's not cynicism. let me tell you a secret. Businesses are there to make money. It's surprising, I know.

Another secret while we're at it: adults run businesses, and have strategies that they hope are rational. Again, incredible, I know; I though companies were run by impulsive 14 yo with black and white minds.

I'm scratching my head wondering why they didn't just take the obvious route of offering an optional 'also pay the processing fees' option like paypal does. Phrased in a way that lets the patron know that their supported creators are getting a larger cut as a result. They might have been pleasantly surprised by how many people will go for that as long as it's voluntary and the fees are reasonable.

At least Liberapay had a good week: https://liberapay.com/about/stats - 50% increase in active users, 8x increase in money deposited.

It's still a rounding error compared to Patreon's size, but I'm happy to see open-source non-profit grow.

And I really like their model. You sent a fixed amount of money to your account once and then distribute it over time as you like. For a 100€ load this is 60¢ in fees. Withdrawing euros to a SEPA bank account is free. Totally awesome!

I don't understand why they had to make the change global. Why didn't they just do this for e.g. patrons paying more than $10 (or whichever amount makes sense)? I support a lot of projects but only the minimum of $1-2 per month/project and suddenly they were all $2-3 (multiplied by 10 projects is a huge tax).

I like the model of having the patron pay the (variable) cc fee, and having either the patron or creator pay the patreon fee.

$patron_charge = $pledges_to_creators + $cc_fee + ($patreon_fee?)

$creator_payout = $pledges_from_patrons - ($patreon_fee?)

My beef is with aboloshing payment batching, which is the only wholesome value proposition of patreon (i.e. strictly creates or spreads wealth). Without that it's just another locked-down social graph.

The goal for this change seemed to be at-cost fee payments with no loss or profit, and to prevent chargebacks from customers who didn't remember/expect a payment total or payment date.

The first goal is acomplished with the patron-pays-cc-fee model, and the second one might be solveable enough with UX tweaks.

Showing how the total is calculated in a big, ledgible table, perhaps after every new pledge, seems like a useful start. Maybe even showing a calendar, granting the ablility to change the monthly charge date, and sending/offering reminders or adding an export-to-calendar button.

Of course those may be overwhelming to users, so maybe KISS and find out what can be improved later.

I mean, how many ways can you say "To make this viable, we need more money. That can come from you, or it can come indirectly via fees to your patrons. Which would you prefer?"

I don't think any of the blog posts Patreon made said that?

What they said was: "We're changing our business model to make every subscription a separate credit card charge, instead of bundling all subscriptions into one monthly charge. The credit card processing fees will be radically higher, so we're passing them on to you, but we won't make any extra money from this ourselves"

Personally I found their decision pretty baffling, as in my book the monthly aggregation was the main thing differentiating their product from Paypal, Stripe and suchlike.

Agreed. I can easily afford the fees they were adding, I'd be totally fine bumping my single monthly payment by 3% + $0.35, that's pocket change to me. What bugs me is the clutter/volume (mental, email confirmation, and credit card transaction) associated with splitting my convenient single monthly payment into more than a half-dozen separate charges throughout the month, depending on whether each creator's campaign is on a monthly or per creation basis on top of increasing each of those sub payments by that same fee.

Bundling things together is usually frowned upon by credit card companies. Especially when that money is going to end up in a bunch of different places.

It makes anti-money-laundering practically impossible, because all the payments might contain some legitimate component together with some fraud component.

Also, from the user perspective, if a user is unhappy with any one of the things they are patrons of, they might ask the bank to do a chargeback. That would make their chargeback rate much higher, which is also bad for business.

Yeah, the charges need to accumulate throughout the month and then fire off on the first of the following month. That will cover both monthly and per-creation payments, and it minimizes the number of transactions that Patreon has to pay to process and the number of transfers they have to make to creator accounts.

I understand that people want their money right away, but if they're allowing payments as low as $1, then they need to limit the number of transactions somehow.

So Patreon doesn't want to be in the money aggregation business where they have to front a little bit of money and do some time matching finance? Then what is their business that's possibly worth 5%? A marketing platform?

Does anyone have any idea what advantage charging each subscription separately was supposed to have?

This is discussed in the original announcement [0]

Essentially, some creators were having a problem where their donations dissapeared at the end of the month because the donator canceled before making the payment. To rectify this, Patreon introduced a pay up front system, where the first payment happens when you pledge, and all future payments happen at the beggining of the month.

This introduces a problem when you pledge at the end of the month. In this case you could pay on the 29th when you sign up, and again on the 1st when the monthly pledge ticks.

Charging seperatly would enable them to charge you when you first pledge, and monthly, starting with your pledge. So in the above example, they would charge you on the 29th of each month.

[0] https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/

There is a subset of creators who are trying to use Patreon as a paywall for their content. This change was entirely about trying to make sure that nobody could ever sign up to support a creator, get access, scrape all their paid content, then stop supporting that person without ever being charged.

Unfortunately changing the payment model for EVERY creator site-wide completely breaks aggregating multiple payments into one charge. Which, as a creator, is the entire reason I'm on Patreon in the first place - I could just set up a Paypal widget and try to get my fans to subscribe to that for about the same fees, minus the 5% to Patreon.

Or at least that was the argument they gave, there are multiple theories about why they were doing this (those new VC loans they were crowing about last month wanna see some profit, maybe aggregating micropayments is brushing perilously close to laws designed to fight money laundering, they're trying to look more profitable before selling themselves, they just want more money baths) that are rather less charitable than "they got obsessed with solving this one problem caused by people trying to use Patreon in ways it was never designed for and threw the baby out with the bathwater".

Apparently, increased service-fee flow.

I'm fine paying a transaction fee.

I'm not fine paying seventeen of them for my swarm of little $1-3 pledges that get billed as one monthly transaction.

According to the expanded initial blog post, it would not have been all at once, but over the course of a month, corresponding to when you created a pledge.

Not a good model imo, but at least it wasn’t totally insane.

No, that "not all at once" is precisely what made it insane.

All at once is good. Their credit card fees have a percentage component (1.9% for Stripe) and a fixed, per-transaction component ($0.30 for Stripe).

All at once means that fixed component gets charged once per month. Moving to a one-transaction-per-pledge model means that fixed component is multiplied by the number of pledges, which dramatically increased costs for users like me with a bunch of small ones.

I'm glad they're reversing these changes. But these developments scream loud and clear that no creator should ever rely too heavily on any single platform. If I was a creator I would certainly still be on the lookout for alternatives.

Patreon took off because it was the alternative, as traditional YouTube/website ad revenue has high variance and has been decreasing over time.

I would urge everyone to open up a Liberapay account on the side. In the long run Patreon only has one direction to go to, thanks to moral policing and other shenanigans.

This is probably too late for a lot of creators, so hopefully Patreon feels the pain of this boneheaded decision for a long time to come.

Several of the people and projects I sponsor have moved to alternative services, and I followed them. In the future, if a competing service is offered I will favor it over Patreon.

What alternatives are there?

One went to LiberaPay, another set up something called SendOwl, and a third just put their product on itch.io.

There are actually a lot of different ways to setup this kind of funding stream, depending on what you're looking for. If you're looking for "Patreon, but not Patreon" then it gets a little more complicated.

One alternative is Podia. We've been getting a lot of signups from Patreon users over the past few days. We don't play games with fees (no transaction fees at all, actually, only what Stripe/Paypal charges). Here's more on the differences: https://www.podia.com/patreon-alternative If anyone wants to give it a shot, feel free to reach out to me (Spencer, the founder) directly in the live chat widget :)

You mean they didn't look at the stats and see how low the average pledge is, and the many, many users who pledge $1-2?

Whilst it's a nicely worded apology, they F'd up being greedy, and are now trying to recover by maintaining that closeness with the users. I'm not buying it.

I understand why they need to do something different. It's no mistake that the rule was $0.35 plus a percentage. All the credit card companies that people use to pay with Patreon charge the retailer per transaction regardless of the size, and it's usually $0.20 to $0.35 plus a percentage; debit cards can be as high as $0.50 plus a percentage. That has to be the motivation for this. So the first $1 you give is only like $0.65, and that's just the payment processing fee. It also costs money to transfer the funds to the creator's account , and then Patreon gets 5% of what's left (https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606125-How-...). Almost all the money has gone to fees.

Even if you run the charges once a month, this is a fee for each Patron and another fee for each creator. If you're a patron and you're giving just $1 to just one creator, you're probably giving them like $0.10 and Patreon a big fat penny.

This is why so many stores have a minimum transaction amount for credit cards. If they don't do that, they can lose money on fees because the profit margin on what they're selling doesn't even cover the service charge.

Patreon originally aggregated all payments into a monthly lump transaction to Patreon. The new fee structure is consistent with them desegregating the payments but it is not clear why they would do that.

One theory going around is that having individual payments reduces their chargeback rate because the number in the credit card bill matches the individual contributions instead of the lump sum. Another theory going around is that separate payments would allow payments to be immediately sent to the creator instead of waiting until the end of the month. But Patreon hasn't been clear if one of these is the reason or if it was something else.

> The new fee structure is consistent with them desegregating the payments but it is not clear why they would do that.

From what I've read, the credit card companies are complaining about partial refunds, which apparently occur much more often with Patreon. If I've got 10 creators I'm supporting for $1 each, and I decide I need a refund for one of them, well, Patreon only ran one $10 transaction. Now it's kind of a pain in the ass for the credit card company because I'm telling my credit card company it should be 10 transactions @ $1 and I want to refund $1, but what they see is one $10 transaction.

Debit cards are subject to the durbin amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment) so the fee for these micropayments is $0.21, or $0.22 rounded up. Debit cards have percentage fees formed on the basis of points, or ten thousands of a percentage.

Ah, that's new since I was involved with it. I stopped working with transactions directly in 2008. Thanks for the info!

What is missing from the blog post and from comments here as well is something I saw on Twitter: if they unbundle and charge on the "anniversary" of the join date of everyone then anyone shipping physical is utter screwed. They used to have a single day (say, the 6th) when they shipped out to everyone who paid and that was it. Shipping every day for small creators doesn't work -- they need time to create :)

They should put the executive payroll on patreon. That would prevent any future mishaps. :)

I wonder how long companies will be able to do stuff like this.

I know Hanlon’s razor but lately I get the feeling that most of the companies try to push shitty stuff on their customers and in case of getting caught with the hand still in the cookie jar they apologize profusely and move on to another one.

I refuse to believe that it was innocent accident. As other commenter pointed out this was discussed for a long time and most likely WAS an educated decision. The only thing that was underestimated here is amount of outrage that followed.

You had one job, Patreon: aggregate payments to eliminate fixed transaction fees for the people exchanging money through your platform, replacing them with a percentage fee. You set the percentage too low and then, instead of simply raising it, you tried to stop doing the one thing that made you useful: eliminating fixed transaction fees. It's a pretty good corporate apology, but it demonstrates a surprising lack of understanding of their business.

One thing that bugs me about these types of 'we hear you loud and clear' statements is the stylistic use of the 'corporate first person plural'. I feel the "we" in this contexts sounds a lot less authentic than a first person singular statement from the founder / CEO.

While companies certainly do have a specific and sometimes even unique culture, do we really think that _they_ have "core beliefs"?

A patronage/donation model has no reason to worry about pledges being cancelled early since there no purchase or expectation of goods. Sure some people might have done that but it's already a community willing paying money to support people they liked so it seems that behavior filters itself.

Unless they were trying to become a real commerce and subscription business, it seems rather disingenuous to claim that as a reason, and it looks like that was the core foundation because taking that away leaves little more than saying that the existing system was "confusing", which could've be solved differently. Also I'm not sure how individual payments with even more fees could be less confusing than a single payment and fee per month but this is a rather unfortunate incident for all the patrons who have to suffer from the loss.

I wonder whether this rollback was caused by them actually listening to their users or the huge dip in revenue as people stopped donating.

Well. Either way. This looks like a good thing. Until the VCs start again to pressure for more revenue. Let's see what happens then. Probably higher fees for the creators.

Is Patreon making a profit right now?

No, they’re making significant losses, and according to rumors, credit card companies are seeing too high refund rates with Patreon, and are asking them to either fund that, or unbundle the payments.

Do you have a source for these rumors. This is the second comment I've seen on this post suggesting this but I can't find any supporting evidence.

According to Patreon's blog posts the unbundling was entirely related to the "date of first subscription" problem.

How does unbundling help refund rates?

Look how good it is to be customers and not the product? You get to have apologies.

I wonder if this came out of the SF/Bay Area style growth after taking on investment? I haven't heard if they've been hiring a ton lately but I saw this happen with SurveyMonkey when we went from 100 employees to 1500.

The first 100 understood EVERYTHING about our customers and the product. Something got lost in translation when we grew to 1500 in a few years.

I wonder if they have scaled out to the point where they are hiring people who don't quite understand the product but are just a butt in a seat?

I think a major issue that many commentators here don't touch is the idea that Patreon plainly lied to its users. They said "more money will go to creators" when the real action was "we're charging more money to users with barely any more benefit to creators". Everyone understands that $1 going to $1.37 is "more money going to Patreon" and the stated benefit was spin. It didn't make me change my pledges but I was shocked by the dishonesty.

Good sports. I have about $50/mo going to creators on the site. I would follow wherever they went. Hopefully they managed to keep this stuff from disrupting too many people.

A blog post as an apology? I can picture the CEO in a meeting, "Hey if this doesn't work out, we can just draft a really sincere sounding letter to our creators."

You should suggest the alternative response for the less imaginative of us, because what else could they do in response? It just comes across as snarky for people to hate the changes and dismiss them again when they rollback the policy everyone hated.

This is an unprofitable startup here, so I don't think they can start giving out money to everyone who lost support.

Businesses make mistakes, and I'd think it would be a positive when they listen to their users.

Granted, that is the normal strategy for startups in 2017. (except that the post was made on an official blog and not Medium)

Not surprised. There's no way this made sense, and they already freaked out tons of people who cared only partly about the fee and partly about the feeling of helplessness when you rely on a for-profit platform that can change at a seeming whim and pull the rug out from under you.

Pulling back addresses the fee concerns directly and gives some feeling that the users can have some influence, although they'll stay wary.

None of this changes what drove the fee issue in the first place: Patreon tries to present itself as a donation platform but is primarily a paywall service. Since most "creators" use it to easily manage restricted access to shareable perks (i.e. perks that are non-rivalrous in nature and could be shared with the world), they will continue to have to serve that freemium business model.

As everyone on the internet eagerly pointed out the moment this was announced, you can get a best-of-both-worlds solution by simply prorating the second month.

Nothing actually eliminates piracy issues; it's easy to discreetly mirror an RSS feed, for example. You're ultimately relying on the honesty of the vast majority of your patrons, a strategy which has worked out for Patreon creators very well thus far.

Totally. The point is that the Patreon folks made the stupid decisions about the new fee because they were blindly thinking about effective paywalls. If they had been thinking holistically about things, they wouldn't have been so dumb. Of course, there are better ways to handle even the paywall issue.

The stupidity was clear when they wrote “if you’re a creator on the monthly plan without the benefit of charge up front, you are constantly worried that your patrons are going to delete their pledges before they’ve paid”. From that, we can see how they were just hearing irrational paywall worries from people and responding irrationally around just trying to please those requests / address those worries.

Those worries should have been recognized as irrational. Patreon ought to be saying that this is about honesty and people who want to support you and that they aren't in the business to try to stop all possible freeriding, they are working to help everyone who actually wants to support the creators etc.

The For-Profit thing has continued to irk me about Patreon and Kickstarter. Why haven't we seen a 503(c) come out with these services so I can make my contributions to the arts as a tax-deduction?

If I donate to the local theatre, art-in-the-park, PBS, etc. then there is a non-profit organization accepting and then distributing the funds.

The reason YOU haven't seen them is because VC money funds marketing and thus network effects. It's like so much else in our economy. The winner is the best marketer, not the most deserving.

Some of the platforms are non-profit, though not necessarily 501(c)(3) (and some outside U.S.) see https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi...

All of the creators I support use Patreon as a donation platform.

They paywall some stuff, but not nearly enough to justify the price.

This might just be selection bias though, as I mostly come to them through youtube; which means that the ones I see tend to release their work publically anyway.

Sure. But Patreon as a platform encourages extra paywalling, and in this fee fiasco they had blinders on, looking at those who were most concerned about effective paywalls.

I happen to think that paywalls are fundamentally bad and that we should reject them on principle even when they are used modestly. Certainly the worst of that approach is not the folks you support.

I encourage people to donate to the people who don't hold anything at ransom behind a paywall, the ones who release everything non-rivalrous. There's still other perks like thanks or custom stuff that's inherently scarce and can be limited to patrons without using paywalls.

The thing everyone is missing is that you CANNOT do $1 credit card payment at scale. Patreon has been taking a hit for every single dollar pledge made. They dont want your $1, it costs them too much!

Patreon decided that they were SICK of supplementing all the $1 pledges, and added a new fee schedule. The internet, was too short sighted to care about this economic reality, and so they were forced to burn with fees once more.

And that's why the older model worked better: a donor would pledge $1 to twenty creators, and would get charged one $20 transaction fee at the beginning of each month.

The creators ate the Paypal fee (usually 4-5%), and then Patreon collected an additional 5% for simply coordinating these exchanges with their service.

I doubt there were many people who only pledged $1 to one creator and that was it. But if that was truly a problem, then sure, one 35-cent charge per month would be reasonable.

Thank you for explaining. I never understood the aggregation of donations process. Maybe a majority of their customers are paying $1 to 1 person? Are there really people that give away x $1/month to multiple random internet folks? I don't get it.

Are you serious? The Internet shouldn't have to know the financials of a private company to comprehend a significant change to their fee structure. If they did need to know it, Patreon should provide explanation (they did not). This is 100% Patreon's fault.

Patreon have built a kind micropayments platform, but suddenly they decided they weren't happy with being a micropayments platform anymore, charging PayPal-level fees on transactions, and many more artifically inflated transactions at that. We already have PayPal, we don't need Patreon as a second one which isn't competitive.

Server being internet-hugged. Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IFhxAy...

In 2017 it ought to be basically impossible to flatten a typical server dishing up static content. I suspect all that is getting hugged is the ads and tracking...

Quickly browsing the meta tags, it's a Wordpress site, likely running on a tiny bit of hardware (possibly not even multiple servers). Those are easy to flatten.

Works fine for me.

Users who were upset with the change need to reckon with the fact that Patreon isn't profitable and that it's likely that it's impossible for them to ever become profitable with their 5% business model (Patreon is based in San Francisco and has over 100 employees, do the math).

Maybe they should move somewhere less elitist. SF is overrated and overpriced.

Patreon is based in San Francisco and has over 100 employees

Neither of which are immutable laws of physics. I feel for those employees, but between giving money to them or to the creators - I'm giving to the creators.

I have to wonder what the hell those employees are all doing. Kickstarter's in equally-pricey NYC and just has around 50.

I keep getting this vision of Jack Conte just being a really nice guy who's giving sinecure positions to his friends...

They can just take a larger share of creators’ aggregate earnings if they need more money. Obviously the creators won’t be happy, but it wouldn’t destroy the “many individual $1-2 donations” segment, as this change would’ve done.

Hmm. I wonder if they could be profitable if they didn't live in SF. It's tough because a lot of the best engineers, minds and talents are on the west coast, either in the Bay Area or Seattle. Having moved to the other side of the country, I've noticed the difference in where companies are at architecturally. It's a tough trade-off for sure.

Perhaps then they should find a business model that doesnt rip off their customers.

As usual. If you want a company to change, you have to affect their bottom dollar. Otherwise, you'll only get a "we have learned through this experience and will take it forward with us to prevent [our messed up thing we did] from [ever being noticed by you again]."

I waited a few days before canceling my $1-2 pledges, and completed my cancellations yesterday. So now today I had to spend some time going back through and re-pledging the stupid $1-2 pledges to lessen the screw to my beloved creators. What a clusterfuck!

It was my impression that patreon needs to find a profitable footing to continue existing. Generally I would see increased revenues as a good thing (it helps to ensure that a service people appreciate continues to exist).

Given that - why has there been such a push back against this?

A lot of people viewed Patreon as a microtransaction service. They give $1 to a bunch of creators. Creators liked this because it meant they could get a bunch of low value supportors instead of a relatively few high value ones.

Previously, Patreaon worked fine for this use-case. You support 10 creators at $1 each. Patreon charges you $10 each month, and credits $1 to each of your pledgies accounts. Patreon then eats $FEES from the pledgie's account and gives them the remaining money. Patreon would aggragate transfers so they only pay transaction fees on the single $10 charge to me, and on the final payment to the creator. As a result of this (and maybe other things), the fees were unpredictable to the creators, because they did not know how many other creators were splitting the transaction fees. In this example, a single creator would only see a ~$0.03 fee on my $1 donation; however, if I only had a single creator, he would see the full $0.30 on my dontation. (There are other fees at play, but this is the important one).

Under the new system, every donation pays the $0.35 transaction fee. This means that even if I support 10 creators, they all pay the full $0.35 on my $1 donation.

In contrast, if I instead had a single creator at $10, he would only see $0.38 in fees, or about $0.04 per dollar.

This means that the new system disproportional effects people making small donations.

It is also not clear that this was a pure money grab. This change coincided with a change to their payment system where they would stop aggregating charges. If they do not aggragate charges, it makes sense that they would charge smaller donations more, because those now have more overhead. The problem is that this breaks the service for small donation use cases.

You missed that the fee was going to be paid by the patrons, not the creators. Instead of being charged 1$, you would be charged $1.37ish for EACH pledge, meaning distributing your (for example) 35$ budget out to a bunch of different creators would screw you over.

"Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income."

Because lost income is as bad as increased revenues are good, and people lost income. Patreon aren't in a field where they get to experiment like that without affecting people's income, and that's always going to lead to pushback.

It seems to me that patreon thinks that its customers are the creators, and so it has been focusing its effort on pleasing them. In fact it is quite clear by asking "who pays the money" that their customers are in fact the patrons.

This seems straightforward, if only from a cash flow perspective-- customers are the people who give you money; vendors are the people you give money to.

Are there really that many patrons who feel the value they get from whatever they are supporting is a single dollar? Leave the transaction fees as they were going to be, and make the minimum amount of patronage $5 or $10.

I love the $1 price point.

One of my pledges is to a favorite author. $1/month means $12/year. She puts out about a book a year, at about $12 in Kindle format, so my pledge means I'm at least doubling the amount of revenue she gets from me annually (and I'd suspect significant portions of that $12 go to Amazon, agents, publishers, etc.).

I can do this casually, for a bunch of creators I like - comic artists, activists, authors, indie game devs - and it's not just me doing it, either.

50% of my Patreon money comes from $1 pledges. Many (if not all) of those pledges are from people who are giving $1 to multiple creators.

I post most of the stuff I make online for free, with no ads. All those $1s add together to make a sustainable wage for me.

It's the Long Tail in action. It's pretty nice.

Some people don't have the disposable income to support more than one or two creators at $5, let alone $10.

For me, there are creators I like, but aren't very active, aren't that valuable to me, or are supported by me in other ways that I pledge $1 to.

I've made a number of $1-$5 pledges not to get a concrete amount of value in return, but as a way to vote with my wallet and say "I want more of this in the world".

Or, they could have grandfathered existing users. You know, that's usually how you appease and change at the same time.

Patreon lost my support when they banned Lauren Southern. They have every right to do so but I don’t want to support a company that refuses to work with people based on their political leanings.

Platforms aren't neutral parties and have to make calls like this. "Political leanings" is misdirection.

Participating in attempts to block NGO (affiliated with Doctors without Borders) ships performing maritime search and rescue missions for migrants is particularly heinous. If it must be spelled out, this is acting to prevent the rescue of drowning refugees.

Are you really supporting freedom of expression by allowing your platform to support people who don't support others right to exist?

I think the argument is to do with political leanings. Some believe that NGO boats incentivize human trafficking. If this is true more people will die via human trafficking than would if these NGO were interrupted.

While that argument is not super solid it is a political one and to Ban her based on her intention to report on this seems political to me.

Saying you're sorry and not doing it is good enough for me.

They said they're sorry and they're going to do something toward whatever the hell it was they thought they were doing in the coming year.

What's odd to me is that they don't seem to have understood that spreading this charge (basically the credit card fee) across several people the patron is sponsoring, is more or less their purpose. If a given patron is not (typically) sponsoring more than one artist (or whatever), then yes they would/will have a problem, but they also wouldn't have a reason to exist. It's not like there aren't other ways to accept a credit card online, on a repeating basis even. Enabling a "tip jar on a monthly basis" was their whole reason for existence. They may not have known this.

I cancelled my account, glad to see they got the message. It will take a while until I rejoin, if I do ever join. I might donate directly now.

I think I read it somewhere else too, but why does a company setup for community contributions need to raise money through venture capital?

It creeps me out to no end when corporations mimic human social behavior using community relations teams. It's made worse by people thinking that anything about the content of the apology matters. It was literally crafted by an expert actor. The only thing we should care about is the reversal and whatever concrete action Patreon takes to prevent a new fiasco (which I see no mention of). The company executed a business decision with bumbling incompetence, then was forced to back it out because of their customers. That later bit is interesting, the fact that it was accompanied by something written by a trained parrot is not.

I'd still be looking for alternatives, the original decision was a gross breach of trust and revealed that Patreon's business 1decisions are not coming from the authentic place we may once have hoped for.

edit: to clarify, the content I'm looking for in a real apology is a plan of action so that this isn't repeated. Patreon needs to restore trust. Apology language doesn't do that. Rolling back the act of searing incompetence was step one. Making sure it doesn't happen again is the real apology.

People complain when you're a robot, people complain when you're a human.

> It's made worse by people thinking that anything about the content of the apology matters. It was literally crafted by an expert actor.

Yes they are a money making organization...that's why they were able to build such a useful service in the first place and yes they paid people to write this letter... who happen to be people that are good at communicating. Does that mean we should question every action they make as insincere because they are self-interested?

Most free/open-source projects are so over-burdened with work/bug reports that they neglect PR pieces like this as they simply don't have the time. It's a good thing it was written by an expert writer IMO, even if it does contain a bit of spin people typically have enough common-sense to know the difference where it matters.

The whole reason they rolled back this change is because they were ultimately self-interested... the customers were very unhappy about it and protested, which may hurt their business, so they rolled it back. It's win-win for everyone. They aren't forcing anyone to use the service, people use it because it's useful and the company gets rewarded for not pissing them off.

Not to mention there is a real action/behaviour behind this letter... it's not just PR-speak sidestepping an issue, as we've seen in the past. It's an announcement that they made a mistake and listened to consumer feedback and are reversing a bad decision.

I find many of these types of complaints (see: every FB group made after changes made to FB) are just people looking for something to whine about, or to feel superior to a company, and they typically aren't representing the average consumer. Most messaging like this is considering the interests of the average/majority customer. Not the cynical/high iq minority who is touchy about copywriting in press releases.

>Yes they are a money making organization...that's why they were able to build such a useful service in the first place and yes they paid people to write this letter... who happen to be people that are good at communicating. Does that mean we should question every action they make as insincere because they are self-interested?

Yes! As customers in a cold, realist world, we're doomed to have an adversarial relationship with the organizations trying to profit from us. The question is who wins: Joe Six-pack like you and me, or the suits with the lawyers and PR teams?

I disagree. The company needs to restore trust. An incorrect way to restore trust is to babble word-salad about feelings that don't exist in whatever business unit made this decision. A correct way to restore trust is to 1. rollback the decision (check) and 2. articulate and implement a plan of action so that it doesn't happen again (missing, and more important).

Trust is immensely valuable. They lost a trust fortune over night. No amount of posturing or PR babble can fix that, and accepting PR babble as trust currency is deeply misguided when dealing with a corporation. A good-faith plan of action is something we can put some stock in.

Was there really any kind of apology you would have accepted? I'm not sure how they could have been more mea culpa than this.

I think his point is that any words used in an apology are meaningless, because we have no way to differentiate between a genuine apology and a PR apology based on the words.

Instead, only pay attention to the actions that follow, because those cannot be faked.

I care about the actions, not the words. Was substantial action taken to prevent this from happening again? That's what I actually care about.

The fact that this was a dramatic mea culpa does not matter. I have every reason to not pay attention to how contrite they sound.

It's like being apologized to by a drug addict, for stealing. The apology has no content.

You're complaining that a company is framing a certain situation in a given way and yet that's exactly what you're doing here, framing it in a different way trying to convince us of your point. I don't see the difference.

I am saying that substantive action is the criterion upon which to base your judgment of their contrition, not their words.

All words have framing. Don't make me link Zizek.

More seriously. My takeaway is not "I wish Patreon hadn't issued an apology", but to beware promises without binding contracts or strong signals of fidelity.

The same strategy works with people. Intentions matter because they let you reason about a person's likely future actions, but often the only way to ascertain another's intentions is to scrutinize their actions as opposed to their words.

>It creeps me out when organizations of individuals employ someone to communicate their organization's intentions and policy updates in a clear manner.

> We messed up.

If they are acting in a clear manner they would explain how they undo the damage. This is a business after all and they can be sued for things they "mess up"

Clear communication means cutting the fluff and getting to the point. The point I'm looking for isn't there. Did the PR unit responsible for writing this even have access to the information that would allow them to communicate a real point? I doubt it.

Sure, it's creepy, but unfortunately many people are still predominantly looking for tone and little else. It's hard to ask companies to stop doing it when people keep rewarding it.

Aren't most advertisements also creepy and manipulative? Do you expect companies to start having informative ads? Maybe when people stop rewarding bad behavior. If you don't do it, people will say you are tone deaf!

You are spot on. They only provide excuses, no explanations as to how something like this could pass (ie. pure greed from a business standpoint).

This sort of thing should have been preceded by trying to get creators and patreons on board long before actually implementing it.

My trust in Patreon has expired, and I look forward to creators shifting to another platform.

> It's made worse by people thinking that anything about the content of the apology matters.

Is it inaccurate to think that they will not be enacting the fee structure change they had announced before? What are you even talking about? They said "sorry", and "we won't do the thing that made us have to apologize", what more are they supposed to do?

What about their message indicates that they won't repeat the same mistake in one year's time?

Thanks and I agree. We've got a lot of very naive people in the comments section here, it seems.

Corporations are composed of people. That is part of the reason they act like people.

People are comprised of neurons. That is part of the reason they act like neurons.

...wait, that isn't quite the whole picture is it? It's almost like a group of entities, considered as a whole, has different properties than the individuals that comprise it.

Where the people in charge of this decision replaced, retrained, or otherwise required to alter their behavior?

Thanks for saying that. I find this behaviour slimey and disgusting tbh. A honest business should act like professionals

people will down vote you because anything counter corporate/capital is blasphemy and this kind of messaging has been so noticed that almost no one even considers it for a second but you're completely correct and I agree with you.

It's probably not so black and white. Companies are ultimately comprised of people, who may or may not be trying to manipulate you. With all the hostile corporate nonsense out there, it seems strange to categorize every supposed act in good faith towards the customer as a manipulative lie.

The way to prevent such future issues is to move to a decentralized platform, perhaps using a blockchain.

Too late, the damage is done.

I already deleted all my subscriptions. I'm too lazy to put it back.

Cancelled a subscription that I had also, will have to return now. yipes

Excellent apology. They are in a tough position.

I am in the States and I am charged VAT. I emailed them, tweeted to them - no response! I can't believe this company is run so poorly!

I don't understand why that would have impacted more $1 donors than others. Someone please explain!

Because there is a 0.35c flat fee per donation along with the 2.9% (ignored in the sample).

So giving ten euros to 1 creator actually costs 10.35 to the patron. Giving 1 euros to 10 creators costs 13.50

Thank you.

I ask a question and get a downvote.

No apology is enough to atone for Pomplamoose.

Hah.

Wait, what happened?

They are a young company dealing with money and playing in a very controversial space (they will be attacked and targeted for providing a service to people like Sam Harris - who is seen as a bigot by large swaths of the left). They are going to get things wrong as they mature. It will take time.

I really liked that people voted with their wallets. I funded $10/month to a couple of people and pulled everything out. I'm glad they reversed the fee. Will start funding again.

I wish we could all do the same with our taxes to make a point to GOP.

All: please try to avoid going into partisan rabbitholes.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15916464 and marked it off-topic.

You could organize a taxpayer's strike. Obviously not paying your taxes is illegal, so it's a risky move. If you get enough people to join your strike, you'll probably have a lot of leverage. But good luck getting enough strikers.

Companies do that all the time, that's why Apple is "striking a deal with Ireland" rather than having execs and accountants go to jail.

How does the proverb go again? If you owe the bank fifty thousand dollars you have a problem, if you owe the bank fifty million dollars the bank has a problem?

This actually worked in the UK with the "poll tax": a widespread boycott rendered it unworkable and eventually caused reform.

Also in Finland: a new additional tax on motorcycles was canceled after citizens removed so many motorcycles from the registry that the new tax with fewer motorcycles was going to bring in less revenue than the status quo before the law proposal.

I had cancelled my pledges and re-added them all today (and added one even). I know unfortunately a lot of creators will never get back a good chunk of their pledges, but I feel it's important for us to both revoke our money when a company makes a bad decision... and resume it when they make a good one.

Companies recognizing that good decisions make them money is the key. If they figure they're going to lose money no matter what they do, they're less likely to take our feedback into account.

Cancelled a subscription I had myself, looks like I'll have to renew. yipes

I like it. You need a good slogan for the media. How about something like ... err ... "No taxation without representation" ?

Nah, it'll never work.

Congress and Senate voting on a tax scheme is exactly not "taxation without representation"...

You mean the party pushing for tax cuts?

They're raising them for Californians

>You mean the party pushing for tax cuts for the very rich?

ftfy

> You mean the party pushing for tax cuts

..." for the rich and the corporations and on the costs of the public services."

The fact you didn't engage with the community initially or ask for feedback speaks far more about your arrogance, incompetence and mendacity that the nature of the change itself. If I was using Patreon I would be looking for alternatives anyway...how long until the next "surprise"?

Rageposts are not cool here, regardless of how badly someone or their company messed up. If you keep posting like this, which we've asked you repeatedly not to do, we're going to ban you.

Any good faith view is possible to express thoughtfully if you want to, so if you want to comment on HN, please do it that way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The issue is that there is no current alternative to Patreon’s ease of use for gathering funds from a large number of fans, and a Patreon competitor can’t be built overnight. (Kickstarter’s Drip is not public yet)

Of course, being a pseudo-monopoly allows you to test the limits of monetization.

I've definitely seen numerous people looking for alternatives and trying to reduce their dependence on a single platform, and they won't get all of that trust back.

That said, this could be an opportunity for them. Patreon should have some test audiences (from both types of Patreon users) for potential changes like this, to evaluate what they look like. Creating some kind of advisory council (and ensuring that it does not just include high-profile creators the way YouTube's equivalent does) would help address this.

That's pretty harsh. They made a mistake and then apologize. While they didn't "initially" they did "eventually" - don't they deserve some credit for that?

No. Allowing companies to continuously treat its customers poorly as they test out pricing structures to maximise profits is how gambling become common in computer games and makes up 50% of EAs profits. It shows their intent, to work out how to maximise their earnings and keep everyone grumbling but still using their service. Look for an exit if you are funded this way, this company is going to keep trying until it sticks.

I'm sure the deserve some credit, but that doesn't wipe away the fact that they behaved in a way that reeks of 'arrogance, incompetence and mendacity'. Bad decisions are bad, and walking them back doesn't undo the initial decision.

They made a mistake that indicated they had a faulty understanding of their entire value proposition. And they made a mistake that had a profound negative effect on their user base (there are almost certainly many creators who were forced to scramble to be able to make rent or pay their bills during the holidays). Sweeping that under the rug of "a mistake" is silly. They hurt people, and it didn't have to be that way. They could have announced their plans with a longer timeline (6 months or a year, perhaps) with the expectation that things might change depending on feedback. Instead they rode roughshod over their user base. For a service that is supposed to be about changing people's lives for the better they did not take those lives as seriously or treat them with the gentleness they deserved.

Acting like a jerk then engaging in a self-serving and grovelling apology only when your customers start walking away deserves scorn and rejection.

Most things, if not everything, comes down to economics and not goodwill.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They are extremely repetitive and so don't count as interesting here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15916381 and marked it off-topic.

One of the greatest victories of Human Rights in the past few hundred years came down to philosophy and goodwill, not economics. The abolition of slavery cost the British government and Navy a considerable amount in their enforcement effort. The US paid a terrible price for it.

http://imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2016/06/thomas-sowell-br...

Economics is one of the biggest factors deciding what people do. (I'd put it at #2 or #3) However, there are even mightier factors than money and livelihood. Otherwise, we'd be Ferengi, not humans, and the Ferengi characters in Star Trek which are written to be different would be the main characters. That economics reigns supreme is one of the false cornerstones of the original Marxian economics which experts in the field now know to be false, but which persists in zombie form in the popular consciousness.

That's a comforting fiction, however the truth has more to do with the industrial revolution, and the fact that a joule from coal is significantly cheaper than a joule from a slave.

Future high primary energy cost economies will almost certainly be based on slave labour, like they have in the past.

Citation Needed

Great move by YouTube!

Edit: oops, sorry, it's Patreon. That damn dog whistle again...

The sad part is that Patreon has to backtrack and apologize so aggressively. I read the email the other day while sitting on the toilet and thought nothing of it. Was there any actual blowback or just a couple of loud mouths on Twitter that can't afford to rub a few pennies together? You can't make everyone happy, especially in the quest to make money.

There was a substantial blowback from both creators and patrons. The problem wasn't really the switch to having patrons cover overhead, it was that no attempt was made at all to aggregate pledges in order to reduce that overhead. This disproportionately affected patrons who pledge small amounts to a lot of people.

I'm not sure how patreon is supposed to work; i signed up a long time ago, and I haven't seen a red cent from them. In the meantime I've gotten hundreds of dollars from Amazon and add AdWords.

You are not being sarcastic right? I am finding it hard to be charitable here.

Patreon is just a place for your fans to support your work in a structured manner (rather than a free-form donate button).

If you are a content creator, it is up to you to market your patreon account and request your fans to support you there. Did you do that?

Literally have not seen a dollar from them. I get a few dollars every month passively from amazon affiliate links

I've gotten more out of raw PayPal donation links

Here's what worked for me.

1. Make a thing and post it online for free with some degree of regularity.

2. Every post had a small link: "Pssst! Wanna help crowdfund a pagerate for me? Support my comics on Patreon."

3. Every time I made a thing, I'd post it to Patreon; at the end of the month, my backers would get charged based on how many things I made.

4. Over the course of a year, my Patreon went from "paying for my drink at the weekly cartoonist meetup sometimes" to "paying most of my rent on a productive month". And I am doing this by drawing a complicated graphic novel about a lesbian robot with Philip K Dick problems.

I make far more from Patreon than I ever did from ads, and I'm delighted to have been able to turn them off for good.

Yeah, good luck with that. I've never made a dollar with patreon, it's been a huge waste of time.

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