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Comment by runj__ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

But the size of the change matters. No matter how much warning they gave there's no way I would tolerate a flat $0.35 fee plus a percentage on a dollar donation.

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.

Their user base includes both patrons and creators. Obviously patrons would say they don't want a price increase, all other things being equal, but they might be okay with it knowing that increase goes to creators. And asking a handful of high earning creators could have given them good feedback on why it's a bad idea.

But the increase was going to the company Patreon not the creators. That was mostly the point - they need/want to make more money.

It didn’t really seem like Patreon was making significantly more money from the new model, fees were higher because they chose to no longer batch charges. The fact that this belief is so widespread is a major testament to Patreon’s failed messaging.

Not batching charges would be so needlessly wasteful that I refuse to believe that was really their intent.

Fair. It's true that they didn't announce the unbundling until after the initial wave of complaints.

"fees were higher because they chose to no longer batch charges. "

Why did they decide that?? (sorry did not read all blogpost in case it is there)

Scroll way down on this page https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure ... apparently people were getting confused by the batched charges

I feel like Patreon is trying to please everyone, which in the end pleases no one.

If Patreon came out and said hey, we've built a platform for years, this is incredibly expensive, we need to show a profit or shut this entire thing down. We're going to start charging a bit more, AND give you this thing you've been asking for in return.

Then everyone would be happy. They need to follow the shit sandwich strategy of good, shit news, some more good stuff for you guys.

Instead they dropped the shit on the community, arrogantly hoping they'll simply eat it.

The original post about this change pitched it entirely in terms of "more money going to creators".

I am a creator and my immediate response was to think about the math for a few seconds and go OH HELL NO.

Creators need to treat it like business income and realize that whatever fees patreon takes is just the cost of business.

No better business than forcing your supplier to reduce prices (or preventing them from increasing them).

That's not true. I'm completely fine with the idea of paying processing fees!

Once per month.

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."

It'd have been dangerous to say even that if they didn't know they could fix the problem in a satisfactory way, or they'd get blasted even more. But yes, they should have handled this far, far better.

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