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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Patreon sounds like something relatively easy to replicate. Effectively every utility implements what patron provides. It's essentially just scheduling recurring payments, with a discussion forum attached. More behavior like what we've been seeing Patreon do lately, and I can see larger creators shifting to hosing their own patronage services. Essentially the same reason why EA, Blizzard, and even more niche game publishers like Matrix Games, Slithrine, and X Plane host their own game purchasing and delivery services: greater control and no cut taken away.

Perhaps a more feasible and maybe probable approach is for another service like WordPress or SquareSpace to offer patronage functionality (as in, offering recurring payments and exclusive contents for patrons).

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SubscribeStar tried to do that exact thing, and they succeeded for a little while. Then PayPal decided to freeze their account. My guess is because many people started to contact PayPal and said that SubscribeStar wasn't censoring people with wrong-think like Patreon just started to do.

Sounds like they should have hooked up with a real payment provider. If InfoWars can get one for their store (through First Data even, much cheaper than PayPal), no reason SubscribeStar couldn't.

I'm surprised infowars hasnt created their own patreon clone.

I don't see an issue with InfoWars having a platform or even to be on the same platform as me but I'd have serious reservations about having them as the platform manager, mainly because I'm not trusting them to have sane opinions (it's not like InfoWars strike me as vanguards of free speech in principle).

Lol, apparently the water turned frogs like me gay? I wouldn't trust InfoWars with my supporter's cash, Patreon, Kickstarter & ilk are in a position that demands a high level of trust, seeing as they deal with large quantities of money and the relationships that surround them.

Wasn’t Jordan Peterson gonna launch one before Christmas?

https://amp.businessinsider.com/jordan-peterson-says-hell-la...

I do not remember him ever putting a date on it, business insider has a habit for publishing less than credible info

All I have seen is "coming soon" or "we are working on something" with no exact time table or dates

Too disorganized, its an organization made up of contractors that come and go at a whim, similar to other businesses in Austin (like Apple, where nearly everyone is an easily firable contractor :P).

The tricky part of any Patreon like service is the payment. I guess somebody has to create one with Alipay and many other alternative payment providers to Paypal to have a truly free service. I would even consider some sort of crypto currency use here (this would be an excellent use case).

>Patreon sounds like something relatively easy to replicate.

I think the real problem is upstream: The payment processors.

These companies set the rules and everybody else has to play along or risk being cut off from customers.

Any competitor will face the same issues sooner or later.

> I think the real problem is upstream: The payment processors. In this case, the problem is Patreon itself. They aren't paying out to the creator, and apparently people are still being billed.

Yeah, in this case Patreon is clearly at fault for not notifying Scott about his account's status.

Not if it uses cryptocurrency, right? The middleman disappears in that case.

The middleman just becomes the exchanges (who also have to deal with payment processors).

There are many exchanges though, and their brand is not associated with how people spend the crypto/money received. And assuming that people don't hold money in online wallets, they can freeze the asset either. So quite different from the Mastercard and Patreon case.

Respectfully, I totally disagree.

First, many exchanges (at least in the US) allow you to purchase with bank transfer, not a credit card. That completely changes the context of the risk profile. Credit card companies are much more concerned about fraud since CC's are so much easier to perpetrate fraudulent transactions. Its relevant for any kind of "riskier" transaction, like those on something like Patreon.

More importantly, once you have purchased cryptocurrency, you can easily transfer to a wallet which you control. Install MetaMask, then move currency to your new wallet on your Mac/Windows/PC. If you keep everything in Coinbase, you are right you are subject to their rules when you attempt to transfer money. If you keep funds in your own wallet, you are 100% free to transfer money to ANYONE without restriction. This is what people mean when they say "decentralization."

You are free to transfer bitcoins to anyone, maybe (provided you don't lose your wallet). But once you want to convert BTC to USD, you'd still have to play by the rules set by the banking system. Maybe you could slip under the radar if you deal with small amounts, but once it is serious, there would be checks you'd have to pass.

That's a really good point, agreed.

It seems like, however, you will be more subject to taxation issues (Coinbase is likely going to report big transactions to the government) than to arbitrary evaluations (that lead to frozen accounts) made by payment processors.

Put another way, I think it will be relatively easy to do something like Patreon in cryptocurrency. Ingress will be simple. Converting that into a fiat currency will be hard, as you say.

But, if all of sudden I can start taking trips to Thailand and only need USD to buy the ticket, but can do everything else with crypto, then it will matter a lot less. And, this comment made me think that's more and more possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18530642

> It seems like, however, you will be more subject to taxation issues (Coinbase is likely going to report big transactions to the government) than to arbitrary evaluations (that lead to frozen accounts) made by payment processors.

Definitely both. Banks have tons of "know your client" requirements. And in most cases, you wouldn't be large enough client so they'd bother to even call you before freezing your account on slightest suspicion.

I stand corrected. It does seem like you are constrained in either case. Until you can do everything inside one of the cryptocurrency ecosystems, you will be indeed subject to the whims of the current financial system. That control bleeds into everything it touches.

MasterCard's publicly said they're going to exercise corporate censorship over people they disagree with. So many levels on which a platform can be hurt on, unfortunately.

The most bizarre part, to me, is that it feels like this should just be a part of modern banking.

"Hey if you like my stuff consider adding my <public bank account key> to your monthly payments.

I guess Patreon provides a walled garden of premium content for patrons, but I'm skeptical that's universally desired by creators. The few I know don't do any of that.

They also bring a bunch of small credit card charges into a single charge to save a bit of a fee. Not sure if they pass the savings on or not.

I think the core of Patreon's value is tying the payment to exclusive contents and access to patrons-only forums. That's why I think WordPress or SquareSpace would be suited to capturing Patreon's market. Creators can already create web stores in SquareSpace, it shouldn't be too much work on top of it to create recurring payments. It'd be more work, though, to wall off certain portions of the site to different payment schedules. And that's the real value.

One thing that Patreon does have that would be harder to recreate is the gamification of patronage. Like comparing subscriber counts on YouTube, Patreon makes it easy to compare different creators' Patreon income which I think serves as a rough estimate of clout.

Do they? I thought income went private some time in 2018. I did use to enjoy looking at my favourite creators to see that indeed they were getting paid enough.

It's configurable by the user: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000392243-H...

It’s public. Typically someone turning off their income is an indicator that they are being paid more than they know what to do with any more.

If you haven't seen it, check out graphtreon.com for charts, historical data, and categorization that I don't think Patreon makes public.

But what is the interest of the creator to this gamification? I would think the only effect could be to turn off users who wish to contribute then see a large amount of contributions already and think they don’t really need my money.

>"Hey if you like my stuff consider adding my <public bank account key> to your monthly payments....

Banks specifically DON'T want you doing that because they don't want undesirable businesses funneling money in and out of their banks. I'm sure there are different legal liabilities for different places for different undesirable businesses with that kind of thing. It's probably a potential minefield to let anyone do that indiscriminately.

Probably have to track everyone, and then roll back or cancel accounts when you catch the pornographers, or cartels or what have you.

(Of course, that brings you back to the problem of randomly cancelled accounts.)

Really?

My credit union offers free unlimited bill pay to anyone. Certain businesses can do it via a direct deposit, but I can send a set amount of money to ANYONE and they will mail a check on the Nth day of the month.

Banks specifically DON'T want you doing that because they don't want undesirable businesses funneling money in and out of their banks

Not sure I understand this objection - the recipient of such a transfer would already have to have an account at another bank, and that bank would have to do the full AML/KYC checks anyway. There should be no issues with someone with an account at reputable bank A sending a regular payment to an account at reputable bank B for any purpose.

Banks don't necessarily trust each other and "I thought the other guy did KYC/AML" isn't a defense when the Feds show up.

A bank will KYC/AML other banks too. But two people with accounts at high street banks in economically developed countries should never normally encounter an issue, once they had both passed the initial gatekeeping. Which isn't flawless but should cover the majority of use cases - I mean Patreon isn't Silk Road, is it?

It isn't the majority they worry about - any individual on the OFAC list or folks laundering money is an enormous risk.

While Patreon isn't Silk Road, people can and will try to take advantage of any payment system with weak controls.

How is that different from bank transfers or credit card numbers? It just reduces the risk of fraud by only sharing a token that can’t be used for anything else. If anything it cuts the middle man and allows the bank to capture a greater share of the fees.

The problem is that it has to be international.

There are people who love using Patreon as a paywall. Most of them make porn of some kind or another - photographic or drawn.

There’s a lot of people who mostly use it as “automatic tip jar”, too.

> "Hey if you like my stuff consider adding my <public bank account key> to your monthly payments.

Here in Europe a lot of content creators do this. You can simply set up a recurring payment to any IBAN, transaction fees are usually low.

Hopefully someone brings forth a patreon replacement. I'm not keen on how they've been acting in the last month and I kind of want to close my account, but I also want to continue supporting the groups I support.

This has got me thinking, what if someone created a Patreon account to fund the creation of a Patreon replacement? If nothing else, I would appreciate the irony.

I think Gab.ai did, and IIRC it was suspended within an hour.

Numerous ones already exist. Their moat is very thin.

2 of the 3 I was supporting offered alternatives. You might want to check their websites.

What about LiberaPay?

https://hatreon.net/

It's been tried before. You have to play ball to a certain extent or upstream service providers can and will cut you off.

A big problem for these competitors is that the people running them aren’t payment processing experts, which you really need to be if your target market is payment processing for controversial content.

It's pretty trivial to set up a Stripe account and take payments directly. It's simple to set up if you're a beginner dev, and there are lots of plugins for Wordpress, etc. I don't even know why anybody would use something like Patreon. I'd rather give directly than to some 3rd party who's going to take a cut (yes, I'm aware of Stripe processing fees like any other cc processor would charge).

Although not really what you are talking about I think the issue is that stripe and paypal willccut people off also. subscribestar, a competitor to patreon, was banned from paypal and stripe for being allowing some of the 'banned' people on their platform this week.

Even trivial technical requirements are a major hurdle for non-technical creators, and it doesn't include all the community features offered, but the biggest problem is that people want a central place where they can find everything while paying tiny amounts like $1 across many accounts.

Some time ago the Armory 3D game engine also had this problem of suddenly being blocked, without notification or reason. The creator exactly solved it like this, with reoccurring payment, status on the website, and even a one-off donate button: https://armory3d.org/fund.html

Technically it may be easy, but handling money would surely involve contact with banks, regulatory system, etc. and these things are never easy. And they are very intolerant to mistakes, even innocent ones - imagine getting your bank account frozen because you failed to comply with some obscure regulatory filing and then being unable to do anything until some bureaucratic entity (which are known for their agility and excellent customer service) figures out whether or not you are a front for Columbian narcocartel? A startup won't survive such thing.

I'm not saying it's not doable - but I suspect it's harder than it appears, if you don't want to rely on established payment processing infrastructure.

Many people have replicated it. Ko-fi now has a similar offering. Enty is a similar service in Japan. And, there's more that I can't recall off the top of my head.

Building the service is usually much, much easier than building the user base.

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