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Comment by billdybas | Hacker News Reader

Strategy-wise, it makes sense that they're cloning Patreon & Twitch features to keep people on the platform, but I think YouTube is going to need to innovate further if they want creators to trust them with their entire monetization strategy (i.e. ads, subscriptions, merch).

Patreon is significantly investing in creators and building tools to help them grow their online businesses. [1] It feels like YouTube wants to be too many things and has lost focus on empowering creators.

Also, $4.99 feels too steep – many people only give $1-2 on Patreon. And we'll have to see if the subscription recurs the same day of the month you subscribed or if it's aggregated to the start of the month like Patreon.

[1]: https://blog.patreon.com/manage-and-track-what-you-deliver-t...

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It makes sense for youtube, but not content creators. Patreon is third-party service generally insulated from content. Patreon wouldn't ban you if Youtube bans you. If youtube controls your finances, they can dictate their terms to you, and if you refuse both your financial revenue channel and content channel are gone.

patreon has banned plenty of people for “content”

They can't just randomly decide to "demonetize" thousands of users. Patreon has to be fair, as it depends on people using their service. Youtube doesn't have this incentive, it relies on advertising money. If the advertisers don't like some videos, they have the leverage to demand their exclusion and demonetization. This is the fundamental difference: youtube is paid by advertisers, patreon is paid by transaction fees.

They can and they have.

They can and have, but it seems happen a lot less. This is an instance where the shades of gray are important.

Furthermore you have to consider the non-binary nature of being demonetized. Youtube may demonetize only 50% of your videos, leaving your channel active but severely impacting the predictability of your income. Patreon provides stability and therefore a sense of security that creators are desperately looking for. You might lose significant income seemingly at random because your neighbor turned up their radio a little bit too loud and triggered ContentID, but so far Patreon isn't taking away creators' income for chickenshit stuff like that.

Not really. Patreon is just as arbitrary and widespread on sudden suspensions of entire accounts (with 100% of a creator's revenue going with it) based on capricious criteria as YouTube is. Patreon has been absolutely burning credibility with creators over the last twelve months.

All these anti-Patreon comments in a row and nobody's given any sort of non-weasel wordy statement.

The only thing I can find is that they removed adult content. Presumably because they use Stripe and Paypal to process payments and both of those are very hair-trigger when it comes to payments for adult content, which are deemed "High Risk" by the underlying payment processors.

So essentially Patreon's bannings (unless anyone has any further information) are a technical and customer service issue. They could probably process adult content through a high risk processor but that would mean adult content creators get less money per pledged dollar due to the higher transaction fees

They banned people, because they were on other end of political spectrum as Patreon management folks are.

Which people? Is it when they banned Lauren Southern for actively interfering in rescue operations in the Mediterranean (i.e., trying to get people killed)? Or is it when they banned a leftist/antifa group (IGD) for doxxing, as well as advocating for and publishing instructions for various acts of sabotage?

"Rescue operation" is a very dishonest label for doing taxi from Libya to Europe for economic migrants. Nowadays, Italy or Malta do the same as Lauren was last year.

wait - does on the other end of the political spectrum mean like 'nazis'? Or were they identified as nazis by Patreon but Patreon was totally misunderstanding the nazi-like identifying traits?

Do you mean "nazis" as "anyone I don't agree with, but I don't have an argument, so let's ad hominem them"?

no - I don't know who's been banned, but people are seeming sort of evasive about who has been banned and well, I was thinking who would be likely to be the opposite of Patreon on the political/opinion spectrum and that have had an upswing in social visibility in the last year or so and 'nazis' came to mind.

I certainly don't think all the people I don't agree with are Nazis, although I do think all of them are to some degree wrong.

If you would like I can expand on my definition of nazi but I think it is likely to be a pretty middle of the road European definition of nazi, in the end.

I'm also an European, and in we have certain laws, wrt nazism, fascism and communism (in short: promoting them is a crime). Therefore, from this point of view, who is a nazi or who is not is up to the courts to decide, based on some evidence. Unless a judge says so, addressing anyone as a nazi is a libel.

For the people who were banned, it was more of digital mob lynch than any appearance of rational thought.

I usually do not put people who do I do not agree with into the being wrong box. Maybe they considered some argument I didn't, and that's how they came to their conclusion. Of course, the opposite is also possible, therefore the discussion, with exchange of the arguments, is the best approach.

Pre-labeling someone with the intent to smear their character damages the discussion. Preventing them to say their argument ("de-platforming") does the same.

well I suppose Patreon is an American company, and they can be sued for libel under American law - unless some of the people banned are European in which case they can be sued also under whatever European law is relevant. At any rate I thought maybe Patreon said they were banning people for being 'nazis' and wondered if that was the case? Or if there is a list that can be provided of the people banned and the reasons given.

The reasons why Patreon banned them are very murky and unclean; they never said exactly why. Saying exactly why gives the opponent a way to argue; being unclear doesn't. Something about "manifest observable behavior", which in short is "whatever we do not like", without explicitly defining what it exactly is.

AFAIK, the people who were banned were Canadians.

It's not that Youtube is any better; they are also banning and demonetizing people without being able to point out objective specifics.

Edit: the brigade is here.

>The reasons why Patreon banned them are very murky and unclean; they never said exactly why.

And yet you're certain the reasons were politically motivated.

> And yet you're certain the reasons were politically motivated.

Ideological. Between the point of view that these banned were arguing for, ideological leaning of Patreon management and the shifty argument for the ban, it doesn't take much brainpower to figure it out. In other words: it it wasn't ideologically motivated, they wouldn't have a problem with giving a straight answer.

To shorten my previous comment

Who was banned?

Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy on one side.

It's Going Down on the other. This one was due to pressure after banning Lauren Southern and "don't be hypocrites, if you are going to invent new rules on the spot, at least apply them consistently".

Sidestepping the issue of whether or not those two women deserved to be banned: that's just two women. As I said earlier, the shades of gray are important here. A handful of people being banned from Patreon versus a great many people getting randomly demonetized on youtube.

Whether or not you've got a political grudge against Patreon, the simple fact of the matter is that Patreon does currently provide a sense of security for creators who feel very insecure on the capricious youtube platform.

I never claimed that Youtube is any better in this regard. Only that the same risk exists, even if the chance of it happening is different for each platform.

The lower chance of it happening on Patreon is important. It's the reason why youtube creators are using Patreon to provide themselves with relative stability in light of Youtube's capriciousness.

Source?

Frankly I think that's a load of shit. I've not seen or hear of patreon cracking down on anything except for fringe (in an objective sense) political content or pornography.

I'm sure creators of such content are much aggrieved, but compared to the scope of the demonetization on youtube, it amounts to approximately jack shit. How many times has Patreon kicked CodysLab or TheReportOfTheWeek off for non-political non-sexual content? I've not heard of anybody kicked off Patreon for profanity or any similarly chickenshit reasons youtube regularly demonetizes people for.

any source/information on this? news to me would love to know more

examples? I'm just curious.

Sure, but then you can post a new video on YouTube that says "hey everyone Patreon banned me, please start supporting me on patreon rival". If YouTube bans you, you lose your whole audience.

no, not really, then you will get deplatformed by Stripe like Freestartr, Bitchute, or MakerSupport

https://freestartr.com/stripe-apartheid-freestartr-temporari...

I wouldn't post such a biased account except that there's no statement from Stripe on their side of the story.

> Also, $4.99 feels too steep – many people only give $1-2 on Patreon.

It's a copy of Twitch's subscription model, which is also $4.99 a month per channel and gives similar perks like emoticons.

A lot of content creators migrated to Twitch because a reliable fan-base giving you (a part of) $5/month/person is very attractive in comparison to Youtube's fickle advertising CPM and algorithm which determines who gets which videos in his feed.

It makes a LOT more sense on Twitch where everything is live interaction and you can reuse the 'stickers' anywhere on the site. (which is actually a good thing given that allowing ANY images from anywhere would be rampantly abused)

From what I've gathered, a great deal of the money flowing through Twitch is from "whales", to whom $5 seems like a pittance because they drop 100x that a day in tips. Maybe replicating that phenomena on youtube will work.

Yup, that's what I've seen too. There are a few people who seem to gift hundreds of people $5 one-month subscriptions every month.

Patreon's fee is about 5% plus 2-3% for payment processing (7-8% total). This is a fraction of YouTube's 30% cut.

Plenty of people spend $20 or even $50 a month on Patreon channels. Some also have $200 tiers for custom videos, etc.

Doesn't really matter if people earn more money on youtube, they will switch. On Android, not a lot of people are sideloading most prefer the App Store even if they also take a steep cut.

> "On Android, not a lot of people are sideloading most prefer the App Store even if they also take a steep cut."

I don't think that's comparable at all. Patreon is an entrenched 1:N (one website for many creators) method for giving money to your favorite youtube creators; youtube's new system is late to the game. Youtube is late to the game here in the same way that Amazon's Appstore was late to the game on Android (which I think maps better to this scenario than generic sideloading, since both Play Store and Amazon Appstore are both 1:N app distribution methods, just as Patreon and youtube are now.)

My argument was more about "discovery". Discovering Content via Play Store or Youtube search is much more convenient.

You also get "stickers" that highlight your comments/chat which is also a value only the native platform can give you.

Conversely Patreon gives you a low signal:noise forum away from the din of the youtube comment section. This is something both users and creators enjoy. Many creators I'm subscribed to have reported that their patreon discussions are more fruitful and interesting because only serious people are taking part. They don't have to filter out, even visually, the rabble from the informed and passionate. Youtube can highlight member comments in some attempt to replicate this, but I think being off-site is part of the value here.

As for discoverability, you discover patreon accounts by viewing the videos of creators on youtube. Unless youtube starts banning links to Patreon (this would be evil, but I wouldn't put it past them), there isn't a discoverability problem.

I think Youtube gets 45% if I’m not mistaken.

45% of advertising revenue.

30% of sponsorships, super chats, donations, memberships.

Youtube will have to gain trust first. Kids of 13 years old start their first video with "Subscribe to my Twitter in case Youtube deletes my channel". So kids of 13 years old worry about censorship and implement schemes to get around it, and use external platform to ensure business continuity, so I doubt moving from Patreon to Youtube can be wise for anyone, from a pure business standpoint that ecen kids understand...

They could just stop blaming their inaction on awry algorithms. It's frankly pathetic. Then, maybe stop building features no one asked for and instead fix the broken notification system? Lastly, stop lying to their creators and and hiding behind completely vague legalese.

I've been a HEAVY youtube user since around 06/07 and I'd still love to see them knocked off their perch.

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