> 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.