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Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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