Comment by no1youknowz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by no1youknowz | Hacker News Reader

Patreon will fail and thankfully it will be purely down to the marketplace.

You see the marketplace does not have the same ideology as Patreon.

> More than $1 billion will be paid out to creators since the company's inception in 2013.

Patreon does not pay out (it's own money) to creators, although they act like they do. They are merely a middle man. That's it. However, Patreon sees themselves as some sort of moral compass policing the internet and choosing whether or not to payout to a creator whether or not they have broken their terms of service.

Now that other competitors like bitPatreon and SubscribeStar have come into view and actively taking payments on-behalf of creators that would otherwise not be allowed to under Patreon. This will be seen as the start of a shift for creators overall.

One last thing. Last I heard, Patreon has over 140 employees. Seriously, for what. Fraud should be down to Stripe. Paying out, again to Stripe. Their platform could be built over a week using Vue.

Oh right, those 140 employees. It's for policing the content creators... I gotcha.

Needless to say. I'm not happy about this situation. Maybe I'll do something about it.

The vast majority of Patreon's user base (the artists getting patronage) are not producing anything that would get booted off of Patreon for. In order to compete, bitPatreon and SubscribeStar will have to compete on attracting Patreon's artists off Patreon.

(FTR, I'm mildly certain that many artists on Patreon might even find the policing of the Patreon platform to be a positive, because it means their name isn't associated with the names of people they find reprehensible. I'm concerned that alternatives such as bitPatreon and SubscribeStar will quickly gain the reputation of being a platform for people whose beliefs are considered reprehensible elsewhere, which automatically makes it difficult to market those alternatives.)

"Our service is where we make sure only good guys are, our competition is only used by literal child eating nazis"

No cartel in mankinds history has enjoyed this type of competitive advantage, good job SV :)

But some of those artists are rightly concerned that Patreon has that kind of power. I don't want the phone company to restrict who I can call, even if I never would call the "criminals" they block me from calling. There are others who are supporters of the banned topic even though their particular bit of art doesn't actually have anything to do with the banned topic.

I don't know how many will leave, but I don't like the idea of a company choosing morality and so I won't support anyone on patreon. If an artists wants my support they won't get it on Patreon (fair notice, so far I have not supported any artists in other ways - who knwos if this will change)

I'm not arguing for or against censorship in any particular manner. Merely that if SubscribeStar/bitPatreon want to compete with Patreon they will have to appeal to more than freedom of speech moral stance, since the majority of Patreon's artists are already either within Patreon's moral stance, benefit from the moral stance, or do not apply to this matter entirely.

I'm not sure the comparison to the phone company is very applicable. This would be the case if Patreon would be a pure payments proessor, like Mastercard or Visa (or maybe Stripe). But Patreon provides pages on their own website within their own brand identity for these creators, stores their digital media, promotes them through their search interface etc.

In my opinion, Patreon is more akin to a newspaper deciding which ads to show next to their articles or to a shopping mall deciding which shops to rent space to. And of course every newspaper will reject ads that would infuriate their readers (or journalists) and shopping malls will not rent to businesses that might damage their reputation (depending on how "upscale" it is this might be everything from soup kitchens over gambling outfits and payday lenders to brothels).

Now, you might disagree with them whether they have drawn the right line there and consequently take your business elsewhere (just as you might not want to visit a shopping mall with the wrong mix of shops), but I find it a bit of a stretch to frame this as a "free speech" issue.

> Patreon provides pages on their own website within their own brand identity for these creators, stores their digital media, promotes them through their search interface etc

Which is exactly the kind of useless functionality that they don't need. Most of the creators I've seen either migrate away from Patreon or diversify themselves end up using payment processing services like Stripe or Paypal.

> Which is exactly the kind of useless functionality that they don't need.

So says you, yet the vast majority of people I subscribe to on Patreon use it as a delivery platform for advance content to subscribers. One of the major ways it promotes higher donation amounts is by letting those people have gated access to content. How else would this be easily accomplished except for this "useless" functionality? A single password that is handed out? A large list of passwords that the artist needs to manage?

It quickly becomes obvious that this useless functionality has a very real use case, and I think it's in fact one of the drivers of high donation rates in some cases.

Interestingly, I've found this doesn't work equally well for all media. Digital artists, webcomic people, etc. can often use patreon as a way to give fans access to unsellable WIPs. Similarly, writers will use patreon as a way to display trunk stories (although in this case patreon is a draw through its network effects more than it is the genuine best place to do this).

How is it not comparable... When it comes down to money transfer, imagine if you are the one blacklisted by Visa and Mastercard... now you suddenly cannot make online payments, oops, you also can't even have a bank account at a major bank.

Things like this are in fact happening. From people who've used a bitcoin exchange connected to their Chase bank account to people that are a bit too right leaning for those at Patreon, regardless of where those opinions are expressed. While they allow similar language with a different bent on their actual platform.

When the gatekeepers of money start acting as censors, is that really not as bad or worse than the telephone company doing the same?

> bitPatreon and SubscribeStar will have to compete on attracting Patreon's artists off Patreon

They won't have to when Patreon actively tries to shove them away themselves.

See my other note about bitPatreon and SubscribeStar gaining the reputation as being platform explicitly for people with "reprehensible" viewpoints that Patreon is rejecting. If those platforms gain those reputations, it'll be very hard to compete with Patreon.

Another way to look at it is that Patreon is quickly becoming the platform of "fuck you, got mine" and "I didn't hear nobody getting silenced", joining the ranks of Twitter, Facebook, Google et al. 99 guilty people do not excuse one innocent person being just shrugged off unless you're prepared to get silenced in their place -- and serious artists with serious things to say about serious stuff don't do it. Mass appeal and money are one thing, in my heart of hearts I only care about the judgement of artists I respect. People want to knock themselves off my "artistic roll call" like that, they're absolutely welcome.

> The vast majority of Patreon's user base (the artists getting patronage) are not producing anything that would get booted off of Patreon for.

Impossible to tell since it's decided on a case by case basis, not a set of hard rules that are simply equally applied.

edit: gotta love how this is instantly downvoted, but not challenged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv7hvZee-PQ&t=8m07s

Just like voat cloning reddit. When the main draw is that you wont be censored it ends up drawing only the worst groups who have been censored or legitimately fear it. Pretty soon the clone is just a cesspool that the vast majority of users want nothing to do with.

This is why I think the Mastodon-like federated networks are better for these kinds of things. The majority of Mastodon users are Japanese because lolicon isn't permitted in Twitter, but you can still safely ignore those users because of Mastodon's federated nature.

You also ignore groups of users on reddit, just don't go to the subreddit.

Same thing for creators on Patreon.

If you know how to run a company which raises 1 billion, why not set up your own? :)

Jokes aside, once you become such a big company it is not as easy as we might think, these are investors money, not your company, and you do what they say...

> these are investors money, not your company, and you do what they say...

100% agreed.

It didn't raise 1B, it processed 1B in payments since inception.

I can transfer €10 from my bank account to any European bank account at no cost in real time.

You can't really do that in the US so Patreon has to exist. Like the only alternative is mailing a check. And god only knows when a world wide banking system will be realized.

Then why don't at least people in the EU simply get a bank account for such donations? Outside of charities, I don't recall seeing that on websites or elsewhere, really. Why is that? Did it just not occur to anyone yet, or is it maybe a legally thorny issue? How do banks feel about it? I sometimes wonder about this, and I assume there's gotta be reasons, but I don't actually know.

There's clearly multiple valid reason not to:

- Donations can come from all over the world.

- It's easier to simply subscribe on Patreon while you are already logged in, than doing the 4-5 steps necessaries to do a bank transfer (there's a reason Amazon invested so much into 1 click ordering, the least friction you get, the more transactions you get).

- A subscription is also recurrent, which represent much more money (I'm sure most bank allow recurrent transfer, but it's a choice and not the default one).

- Patreon allow "private" publication to the one that donate, which allow them to offer incentive to donate (mostly it's early access or exclusive content).

How? I am stuck with 3 days for international transfers unless I use a 3rd party service with sketchy terms of use.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

Devs and devops/sysadmin, HR, accounting, marketing & product, cleaning staff maybe, sales, support (international I would guess so more people), managers, headcount can grow fast.

Of course as developers we think that a lot of those other positions are unnecessary :)

So what content creators have been denied service?

There was a big controversy over Sargon being suspended, and this has prompted some other high-profile creators to leave the platform.

https://podnews.net/update/patreon-controversy

Like hanklazard mentioned, Sargon was banned, but this had ripples that effected a lot of non-controversial creators. People closed their accounts due to him being banned, and I remember Tim Pool (independent journalist) complaining that he lost around half of his patreons when this happened. He was pissed.

I think the most recent flashpoint was the deplatforming of Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin). He accused white supremacists of acting like "white niggers" on a youtube livestream. In context, I think he meant this as an ironic insult. According to Patreon, this violated their rules on hate speech and they closed his account.

This caused a backlash; some believed the account closure was politically motivated (Sargon is an anti-feminist, pro gamergate commentator). Some have also found it alarming that Patreon has essentially decided to police their speech in general (e.g. comments made in a youtube video, in a tweet etc.), rather than just on their own site. A number of prominent content creators have closed down their accounts in response, stating they can't trust Patreon to not deplatform them in the future for some perceived infraction. Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson are probably the most prominent of these (13th and 16th highest patron counts respectively). Here's what Sam Harris said:

"As many of you know, the crowdfunding site Patreon has banned several prominent content creators from its platform. While the company insists that each was in violation of its terms of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias. Although I don’t share the politics of the banned members, I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon’s 'Trust and Safety' committee."

And here's a NYT article on the issue: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/technology/patreon-hate-s...

Naomi Wu, who's a really cool maker out of Shenzhen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu

In case folks are wondering why, she doxxed a journalist.

Which was a shitty thing to do. On the other hand, it was right after they sent a crew to China to interview her, and asked questions about her relationships & sexuality after they had explicitly agreed not to. Which is also a shitty thing to do. But guess which of them lost most of their income, and which of them ended up as an editor at the New York Times?

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