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Their UX for viewing creations is absolutely atrocious. If you're going to write a site like a JavaScript SPA, at least do it well.

Scrolling down the stream of a large creator brings down my i7 Macbook Pro to its knees. That should not be happening at all.

Finally, Patreon's 'no refund whatsoever' policy is acceptable for donation jars, but with the growth of creators offering $100-$250+ tiers, it is only going to hurt Patreon and its brand, and possibly in contravention of consumer protection laws in many countries (including Australia). When there is an explicit promise to provide XYZ in exchange for $$$, you need to fulfil that promise.

Yes, sellers hate PayPal disputes and chargebacks, but there's a reason why buyers overwhelmingly prefer PayPal and most businesses see a substantial uplift when integrating it: customers feel more confident!

The reality is that small artists and creators are often unreliable, and if patrons feel like they're scammed or unreliable (e.g. pledge $50 for a t-shirt, do not get t-shirt, patreon support tells them there's nothing they can do), that's only going turn away patrons for life.

The word you're looking for regarding PayPal is trust. Buyers trust PayPal, with good reasons. And in a sad way, PayPal didn't have to offer much for that, merely ensure that you got what you paid for or your money back.

It says a lot about the universe of web sites, sellers and payment processors that offering that put them well above every one else.

The problem is that the payment processor has no capacity to really investigate fraud, so their main choice is between defaulting to enabling seller fraud or buyer fraud. This means it makes sense to use different payment processors with different defaults for different payment types, because some payment types have disproportionately more buyer fraud than seller fraud.

The problem for Patreon is that they're trying to provide something useful -- a service for transactions which are more likely to be dominated by buyer fraud -- but are stuck building it on top of credit card infrastructure that the law requires to default to defending against seller fraud. Then they get stuck in the middle, because buyers can still commit fraud by purchasing thousands of dollars worth of material and then disputing the charge with their credit card company after they already have it.

What's needed is a version of credit cards that themselves do what Patreon is trying to do (no chargebacks) with relatively low monthly charge limits (limiting the buyer's exposure to card theft risk), so that this use case can be met with a system that isn't a garbage fire.

You say "merely", but minimizing fraud from buyers and sellers is a very difficult problem.

> In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.

They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low.

I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.

Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort of thing would help put a stop to it...

A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the footer of every page.

That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.

> charging for this sort of thing

If there are zero hacked accounts ever, sure.

But charging someone $500 for actions a hacker took with their account would be.... very unusual.

Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.

Netflix's UI is total shit. It is as if they are purposefully trying to keep it that way to hide the fact that most of the movies they have are garbage and the only way to get people to watch those is to give them some odd "compatibility" with your taste rating.

I totally agree that they're anti-user. But they have a dilemma.

Imagine a nicely formatted table of Netflix movies and shows available in your country. New, potential users can quickly find out if it's worth signing up. Existing users can quickly realize that maybe the service is not worth it.

I also have a theory that if you're stuck looking for something to watch and you've already spent enough time on their platform, you might just settle on something.

They're trying to stay as the "first stop" of when you want to watch something, and the only way they can keep that position is purposefully being murky with their offerings because, yes, it's a 90% shitty collection.

Netflix's UI, more specifically, is anti-Search.

Search is a binary proposition. Netflix either has the content you're searching for, or it does not. Because Netflix is optimizing for total time spent on platform, this is a bad proposition, from their perspective.

That's why the Netflix home screen has become a circus of autoplaying videos, "recommended for you" queues, and "watch it again." The goal, from a UX perspective, is to stimulate you into watching something you didn't come there wanting to watch.

You say its anti-search, but its like three button presses on my Roku to get to the search menu which seems pretty fast and accurate. Its one click to get to the search box in the Windows app. I've never had a hard time trying to search for a specific title.

My family uses Netflix via Chromecast, so our UI is a phone or tablet app. Search is literally the second button after Home and works fine.

One consideration, maybe your TV app is the problem. Personally, this is why I don't use TV apps.

Sure, but I'm more commenting on the ease of use. I mean we can debate it until heat death of the universe, but the fact is, my less computer-proficient family members ask me to download torrents for them, whereas they have no problem buying/watching films on Amazon/Netflix/etc.

Netflix's UX is better than any other their competitors.

Then pay to support a creator on patreon and consume their content elsewhere. (I don’t think this is ideal, but your summation made it sound like a false dichotomy.)

I'm up for it, I support no (or very short) copyright, but let's be honest here - that's way more friction for end-users.

For what I support and consume, it's actually less. Personally, I'm happy just using Patreon as a way to pay the creators and consume their content elsewhere.

Some of the people I support make videos, and while they release them early on Patreon itself, they always eventually make it to YouTube. No matter what investment Patreon makes, it will never be as good as YouTube for watching videos. I could watch these videos early on Patreon, but I don't. Not because Patreon's video watching is bad (although it is), but because YouTube is the best platform for watching these kinds of videos. The same thing applies to podcasts (but with different apps, of course).

Patreon is a rather subpar product that succeeded by using venture capital to buy growth and is now struggling to find sustainability for something that should've been profitable from day 1.

Also a sizeable portion of creators from Twitch to Patreon produce adult content and much of that has now shifted to other niche sites.

That's the eternal churn:

1) A new payment platform is started, small enough to be fly under the radar

2) It attracts more and more adult content producers who've been turned away by the bigger players

3) It grows big enough to attract attention

4) The Nazgûl lawyers ride from Mastercard / VISA to shut the adult business down

5) Lather, rince, repeat

Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?

Operation Chokepoint

There is a very large amount of chargebacks and fraud happening on adult sites.

Which sounds like an opportunity, doesn't it? Fraud free adult patreon.

But how would you go about implementing insurances for the fraud-free part?

That would be the product, right? Honestly, no idea. But IMHO an adult site that's secod purpose is not to spread malware and defraud people, while simultaniously making sure creators have a stable income should be a viable business.

Just use crypto-currency and you don't need to worry about any chargebacks.

You also don't need to worry about customers since there won't be any.

It's not like every other adult site sells fraud as a feature. It's just really difficult and expensive to prevent. A single chargeback can cost the merchant up to $100 in fees.

I've heard it said that porn tends to have a large amount of chargebacks.

There would also, presumably, be a fear of censorship targeting your entire company for over a subset of content. Back in 2018 Tumblr was blocked from Apple's app store [1] and responded by banning all adult content on the service [2] - and I'm sure there's a similar risk from school/workplace/ISP NSFW blocking services which are of course famous for over-reach.

Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com but for various reasons, a lot of sites seem to take a deniable 'turn-a-blind-eye' approach rather than visibly embracing NSFW content.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-con...

> Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com

Or just kept using their web page?? I'm pretty sure that I can still access NSFW content in Safari.

I never understood what's the point of website-specific apps - like HN app or Reddit app or even Facebook & Twitter app - except of course some middle manager's quest for promotion.

Apps get access to a lot more data than the browser does.

Indeed, it's profitable for the developers (leeching users' data) but not the users.

Agreed. In my experience, the apps usually have a far worse UI than the websites. Often worse performance, too.

much stronger surveillance of the user, thus better surveillance surplus

Their response wasn't really correlated with the ban. They were moving in that direction for months, despite the fact that the problem with their platform wasn't the ecosystem of properly marked porn posted by creators, but the avalanche of untagged porn (some illegal) posted by bots which they were unable or unwilling to do anything about (the illegal stuff is why Apple banned their app). When they started the ban, their filter was awful and basically just pushed all the creators off the site (even those who weren't posting porn). As far as I know the porn bots are still there, because the false positive and false negative rate of their filter is atrocious.

How do the Reddit and Imgur apps get away with distributing porn and serving ads against it on the App Store? Maybe it was just a different time in the Tumblr era?

HBO and Cinemax have had apps on the App Store for about a decade, serving up adult content the entire time, sometimes with prominent editorial placements. The answer is, as always, "app review is a crapshoot".

One thing I thought was interesting: Apple sells access to HBO & Cinemax through their TV app, but that access does not appear to include the adult content (or at least it does not display without an active subscription).

Aside from the credit issue, nobody wants to be associated with a porn site.

Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn?

No.

If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.

I mean, if Patreon provided a good service and the porn was hidden away under the default filter and not visible from my subsite or the homepage, I don't see at all why I wouldn't launch a product on it if I decided the business model was a good fit.

Patreon is relatively safe in that regard: They don't have much focus on discovery, no ad-placement to worry about, ... People interact with it primarily through deep links to invididual creators pages, so the "neighborhood" is less relevant. They've always been far from being a "porn site".

The answer to all 3 responses is 'perception' less so 'what happens on the site' although they are related.

Amazon is not known for porn. I didn't even know you could get porn there. Certainly, it's not 'online porn' which I would imagine would be the primary issue.

Tumblr became a place known for adult content so it was a problem. If Amazon started to do a lot of digital porn, like PornHub, it would be a problem.

If there is no 'search' on Patreon ... maybe they could keep it hidden. But it's a big risk.

There's plenty of adult stuff sold on Amazon yet I still would like to sell my new line of e-books there.

Until only a couple of months ago, the iOS app required you to click through each creator to see their posts only. There was no central news feed like the website and the most obvious way to consume such content.

They -finally- fixed this about two months ago.

Deep linking also often failed for me, i.e. I got a push notificaiton, I click the notification, and I end up on the first creator in my list's news feed rather than what I clicked. That also seems finally fixed now in the same update.

So I'm glad they fixed it but I have no idea what they were doing for the last few years...

I realise they can't/don't want new revenue on iOS due to not being able to use their own billing system for electronic goods and losing a chunk of the revenue but I'm sure they have many people who use the website but want push notifications to work and to read the news there.. it was bonkers.

The world is bad UX which I tend to think is a conspiracy.

For example, the Postmates driver app functions like it was programmed (automated) in a parallel dimension by toddlers in a thousand year future using an analog of Visual Basic. Then ported to iOS and ran via 480 API requests that transverse space, time and logic.

Nothing makes sense, everything’s broken.

Goes to prove again (and again) that product success is weakly correlated with engineering effort / quality

It’s so extra in its absurdism that I’d rather believe in sinister intent than systemic stupidity.

The delivery address is the smallest possible font hidden behind screens. The endless dinging etc makes no sense. I feel like people designing apps have never actually used them. Or maybe it’s all designed to make one so frustrated as to question the nature of reality.

Yep, this is why you should call BS when tech companies claim to make product decisions based on data or customer feedback. Their north star is revenue and as long as that's trending up (because of the secular trend of creators needing better monetization), who cares about UX /s.

> Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.

It has been fixed. The artist can configure an option whether the patron needs to pay up front or after. https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283-How-...

Patreon is at stage 3: https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/09/patreons-future/

Everyone but the people at the top are getting tired of all its problems and the uncertainty, but where else do you go? So far, no one has an integrated replacement. You can build a Patreon in pieces connected by APIs, but Patreon is (unfortunately) the only place you can get everything in one place for the price.

WordPress is a common alternative for membership sites, but it comes with expenses that scale up in proportion to how little you want or are able to do yourself. All the plugins for WordPress that do membership and file access control are in the $100-300/year range. Then there's the cost of hosting: cheap if you don't mind running everything yourself, more than the plugins if you get managed hosting. It's worth it, but you need the money to start, and you lose the ease of everyone already having a Patreon account.

Though for content producer without Patron-exclusive content and which are not using Patreon to distribute their content, instead using Youtube or a blog, it works well. At least that's my experience with the content creators I follow.

I don't think most consumers of content use patreon to get at the creators content eg I use YouTube to watch forgotten weapons.

Many creators use Patreon as a way to paywall their content behind minimum levels of Patreon support. By supporting on Patreon, you gain access to their content.

Of course they don't. Most people are willing to spend their valuable time watching said content, however only superfans pay the monthly subscriber fee to be "the first ones" or get at content that is never going to be distributed anywhere but the patreon channel and on piratebay.