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I use Patreon (albeit in a pledge capacity) sparingly. Many years ago they dropped Naomi Wu[1][2][3]. This situation was particularly scary: she was making a decent chunk of her living through Patreon pledges, but because of the limited size of her audience, and marginalized position she had no recourse.

While I agree that they're not currently cancerous I do think they illustrate part of the broader problem with modern society: over-dependence on central infrastructure-like sources that are private and can change on a whim. It's great that people can make a living on Patreon, but this should be tempered by the inherent risk of being on a platform you don't control.

[1]: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu [3]: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18216256

She doxxed a Vice editor when she felt they failed to maintain a privacy agreement.

What happened exactly? As you wrote it, your comment might also be read as "She failed to maintain a privacy agreement when a Vice editor doxxed her".

[edit] the third link above describes what happened

> She doxxed a Vice editor when she felt they failed to maintain a privacy agreement.

Why is it that you choose to use "failed to maintain a privacy agreement" to describe the Vice editors publishing her personal information without consent, while using the much more loaded term "doxxed" when she did the same to them?

Do you understand the difference in likely consequences for each party here?

Is there any rational argument that can be made to exonerate the totally shitty behaviour of Vice and it's writers/editors in choosing to invade her privacy after having agreed not to?

Vice shouldn't be exonerated but do we live in an "eye for an eye" rule of law?

(According to Wikipedia) she published Vice's editor-in-chief's home address. I assume she did that to "explain" how she felt threatened physically by ensuring that the editor in chief feels physically threatened as well?

She could have acted differently. She could have taken legal means; perhaps asking for help to her patrons. Supporters can support in many ways and not only with money.

Can somebody who knows more about the details explain why her behaviour should have been tolerated by Patreon?

Obviously her doxxing was a poor choice. However, she didn't have much legal recourse. She lives in China, and viewed herself as being at risk of retaliation from the CCP due to some of the personal details Vice choose to release. (Despite knowing (from her) the danger it would put her in.) Many (most?) people feel that the doxxing was her only means of retaliation given the circumstances.

Both actions are bad. But if I have to pick one to be "more" bad, I'd pick Vice's.

Those two points are probably what's at the root of the calls against Patreon here.

We don't live under eye-for-eye law. (Maybe China has some laws like that?) But people often view things in that light socially.

I think the problem for Patreon is that they have a policy and it’s best to enforce it consistently, rather than apply it based on some judgement of moral right.

She was interrogated by the police not so long after. She posted that she was going with them when event happened, I recall. But afterwards the Twitter history was scrubbed... Unknown if it had any relation to the Vice case.

If she has no recourse than the only form of justice she has available is an eye of an eye. She's a single person against a huge conglomerate like vice. Sadly, legal means are not relevant in that situation.

If you don't want to live in an eye for an eye rule of law, attack the causes, not the victims.

It's a shame we live in a society where most of the discourse has to be polarized. If you're a victim you can either be blameless or else it's victim blaming.

From the information I could find it appears vice engaged in immoral behavior and she responded in kind.

Furthermore she didn't so that in order to protect herself but in order to retaliate.

While I don't agree with the morality if her retaliation, that doesn't automatically make Vice's position any better. They are still much worse. For one they are a company with legal department etc and should know better.

As for whether she has legal recourse or not… a honest question:

According to Wikipedia she had an agreement with Vice which they broke. What kind of agreement is an agreement that cannot be upheld in court. Can an american company just do what they please anywhere in the world?

Retaliating is a legitimate form of protection. Of course, it doesn't help retroactively, but a realistic risk of retaliation keeps people honest. It's a key part of game theory in the tit-for-tat strategy to the prisoner's dilemma: https://ncase.me/trust/

Sure, after having tried other approaches. She has a fan base that can exert pressure.

People have personality. If her personality is to say "fuck you, I'll fight you back using your same weapon" then my personality can be "I don't like that, I prefer a society where people don't react to force with force and being jerks to jerks"

EDIT: just to be clear; she's free to choose her strategy, but here we were talking about whether patreon should side with her and exempt her from their policies. They are not in a position where they can fully judge who's right

This hopefully taught her an important lesson: NEVER, NEVER trust journalists. However, her reaction was pretty inmature and is not acceptable IMO.

> Supporters can support in many ways and not only with money

I don't think a witch-hunt would have been a better option. Honestly it was an ugly affair, but Patreon shouldn't have gotten involved. Much like MasterCard or Visa didn't get involved in Vice.

> Vice shouldn't be exonerated but do we live in an "eye for an eye" rule of law?

This is not about the rule of law and the issue is not whether Wu was right to do this; rather that presenting Wu's behavior as worse than the Vice editor's is extremely unfair. Furthermore, the consequences of doxxing for some north american influencer type vs those for someone living in an authoritarian dystopia are quite different. Finally, in one case the offense was arguably perpetrated in a state of panic while the other was done in cold blood so to speak.

Vice had not published the story yet, yet Wu believed they might doxx her when questioning details about a reddit controversy. Wu had preemptively doxxed the editor.

I’m very curious why you chose to phrase it that way. It sounds like to me she was doxxed by the editor, but you chose the phrase “failed to maintain a privacy agreement”

Vice had not published the story yet, yet Wu believed they might doxx her when questioning details about a reddit controversy. Wu had preemptively doxxed the editor.

Seems to me a fairer statement would be “she doxxed a vice editor in revenge for them doxxing her”.

Vice had not published the story yet, yet Wu believed they might doxx her when questioning details about a reddit controversy. Wu had preemptively doxxed the editor.

Does she currently receive support on another crowd funding platform?

Regardless of the back and forth accusations with Vice, a no doxing rule seems reasonable. Online mobs can be dangerous and are one of the thornier complexities of managing social networks.

Yeah, Patreon has to maintain their rules for their service. It doesn't matter how someone feels wronged, they don't get a pass. Can you imagine the road they would've been going down if they'd let Wu stay? Every single ToS violation would've been litigated through social media. Whether or not Vice did something wrong is a matter for Wu & Vice to resolve, not Patreon.

> They will turn cancerous very soon, if they haven't already"

Ever since Patreon sided with those fucking shit heels Sarah Jeong and Jason Koebler at Vice Magazine, and took away Naomi Wu's Patreon supporters - I've had Patreon firmly in the "cancerous" category.

I'm still using them where I have to, because some of the people I choose to support want to be supported that way. But I've made sure I have non-Patreon contact details wherever I can so my donations can follow the creators, and Patreon as an organisation can die in a fire for all I care.

Time to go contact all the creators I support, and remind them I'd prefer some other means to send them monthly donations instead of via Patreon - before these new investors put the squeeze on and start ripping me and the people I support off (even further)...

They already are cancerous. From banning people for things happening outside their platform or even not linked from their platform. To trying to prevent people acting according to TOS they themselves forced with legal action. I don't see it to be very stable platform to operate on.

And on other hand I can't see how their model can justify the value. They are only there to to take a small cut from donations. Will this really be so big business? Pretty big changes are needed to something else.

Patreon strikes me as a fantastic lifestyle business, a small company that earns modest profits for the owners, not a viable unicorn.

More like Twitch, less like Facebook

Taking a cut from donations is a unetical business model imho.

"Donation" is not the word the OP should have used, because it implies Patreon is some kind of charity middleman. They are not. Patrons are not donating money to creators, they are paying them to create; creators are not receiving donations, they are receiving income. Patreon is charging a service fee to them, and they know this up front. It is no more or less ethical than any other similar business proposition like setting up an online store with Shopify or selling an ebook on Amazon.

> they are paying them to create

That’s really not true. Subsidising creation maybe, but for most patreon that I’ve seen most of the value produced by the creator is public.

There might be some exotic sideshows (eg access to a discord server, time-limited exclusivity is also common) but I’d see it more as funding creation than paying to create, the latter implies much more direct transaction and benefits / exchange e.g. commissioned work, that is “paying to create”.

>because it implies Patreon is some kind of charity middleman

They're not? I honestly thought they were a utility like PayPal.

Bizarre that people think they can make big money off it.

Paypal also takes a cut.

Paypal is a bank. I think its in the gray zone what Patreon is. Investors are probably buying goodwill.

they are not taking a cut. if anything they are providing a payment structure to relieve the work of credit card handling including fraud work. Very similar to how twitch began selling bits to viewers who could then use them to tip streamers.

Curious, does anyone know of a good (similar) alternative to move to that isn't as profit-crazed?

Subscribestar does not censor creators and is pretty much the same service.

Liberapay but they don't support rewards / exclusives for patronages.

OpenCollective is more organization focused and have plenty of accounting help.

Facebook was valued at $1b around 2006.

On July 17, 2007, Zuckerberg said that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, saying "We're not really looking to sell the company... We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."

I think FB started turning bad around 2015. So if we're comparing Patreon to FB, give it another 10 years before they look like something else. Even Google had to be worth several billions before they dropped the "don't be evil" motto.

Interesting theory. Hopefully you're right -- it'd give someone else time to come up with a viable competitor. Ideally, competitors, plural, of course. (Kickstarter had been working on one, but evidently decided the numbers didn't add up.)

> To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation, they're going to need to start competing with not just YouTube and Twitch, but major music labels and indie-friendly TV/film studios. They're going to need to recruit the new Taylor Swift, the new Lady Gaga. Hell, they may need to recruit the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

No one that can be Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga needs Patreon because they can already monetize their content through mainstream channels. There is no to little value Patreon can add on top of that. Patreon exists to enable monetization for the long tail of creatives, which means they need to increase breadth, not depth, and not lose the current growth in demand for these channels to competition.

I love the idealism, but the problem with most long tails is that in practice they are way more weighted to the head than we tend to think they are. I found what seem to be slightly more concrete numbers than I had in my original post: less than 4% of Patreon's total number of creators make $1K or more a month, but they account for about 70% of Patreon's revenue. Their single top-grossing creator accounts for a full percentage point of revenue.[1] The bottom half or so is probably alarmingly close to a rounding error.

I could certainly imagine Patreon making a pitch to bigger creators about taking control of their own destiny and keeping more of their money. Would it work? I don't know. But a single creator who averages $1M a month is twice as valuable as a thousand creators who average "only" $500 a month. If you're idealistic, you may still prioritize the thousand, but if you've taken multiple rounds of VC money at a multi-billion dollar valuation, you're gonna look real hard at what you can do to bring in that one.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/patreon-business/

I don’t see this from an idealism perspective at all. Patreon is just a payment processor platform that made it easy for the long tail to have subscriptions, that was their unexploited profit opportunity. That opportunity diminishes as the monthly revenue numbers increase, because if people are making enough, they will just have other, custom channels available to them.

In other words, no one who can average $1M a month has anything more to gain from moving to Patreon’s platform, or any other payment processing platform for that matter.

> less than 4% of Patreon's total number of creators make $1K or more a month, but they account for about 70% of Patreon's revenue.

That describes the shape of the curve, but doesn’t describe the total volume. If the overall market size is increasing, which it does, regardless of the thin long tail, their aggregate revenue will increase. It doesn’t need to do anything special, it just needs to make sure it is not going to lose its share of the ever growing pie.

I'm predicting they turn cancerous.

And I would like to invite all Hacker News participants to call me out and make fun of me if it turns out I'm wrong. Come back in 2-4 years and respond to this comment calling me an idiot if I'm wrong.

After all, what's the point of making a prediction if people can't call you out for being wrong when it doesn't come true?

It's more likely that Patreon will turn into YouTube than it turn cancerous. They have the creators and they have the eyeballs; there is no need for those creators to be on YT to "reach wider audience" because those freeloaders aren't paying them. If Patreon could become the YT of paid content, it could be huge.

Then again, YT can turn Patreon functionality on in a blink, offer everything for free and then some, offer features to subscribers that Patreon doesn't have, and over time, slowly, erode a big chunk of their users.

Even though Snap has not completely died yet, Instagram was able to suck out their oxygen pretty bad by simply offering a wider audience to the creators. YT can't pull the same trick here, but once they found what works, it's only a matter of time.

It will be interesting at the very least.

> To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation [...]

Revenue doesn't earn a valuation, profit does. Hundreds of million in revenue is worthless on its own – unless you can dump your shares on the next Greater Fool.

Does this mean cum town is about to get a netflix show?

The race is on to develop the open alternative to Patreon before Patreon becomes the monster and squeezes creators out of necessity.

I put forth that Wordpress, Peertube, Substack, and ActivityPub are all inspiration for what comes next (with Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle support for patron payments/subscriptions). The primitives already exist.

I'm still hoping (but well past holding my breath waiting for) GNU's Taler project to deliver us from this mess.

https://taler.net/en/news/index.html

Having an external audit and a response plan is, helpful for finally solving the payment processor / money transmitter issue.

Though the real solution for Patreon, and so many other issues, is some kind of automated escrow service built on top of that, with a best case outcome of seller and buyer agreeing and a contested case of review by other registered entities in the service deciding the outcome of the contract.

Unfortunately if you want to reach critical mass you need popular appeal, and a large part of that means a snappy name for your project. It's shallow but it's true.

GNU is pathologically incapable of coming up with appealing names.

The one I know of is Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/) The most true to concept part? They don't take a cut on transactions, but instead have their own page on the site (https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/)

I think there’s research to be done around how to better improve the Liberapay experience to reach parity with Patreon, so whatever changes can be made that stoke a significant amount of migration of creators from the latter to the former are made.

Liberapay is missing subscription tiers. But the main disadvantage seems to be network effects/lack of adoption. Creators who have accounts on Liberapay and Patreon make far less on Liberapay, which means that people are willing to ignore the extra fees because Patreon is convenient.

Nature of network effects in internet unicorns.

Patreon is indeed a billion dollar unicorn not because it's immediately going to funnel money to shareholders… did Amazon?

Patreon is clearly the PayPal of… being Patreon. The network effects and defining of the brand have already kicked in. I'm pretty happy about it (but then I would be as I'm one of the more successful people on it) but, like I personally told Jack Conte and Sam Yam, I am also happy about what Patreon means TO that 'long tail', because some of the qualities that benefit me also benefit the small fry.

You can't live off a steady and ever-so-slightly growing $50 a month. That's the long tail: people not being discovered, who have only their little crews of supporters. There is no plan to make them all earn thousands of dollars a month because practically, that can't happen to all of them.

BUT, if you have a predictable slowly growing $50 a month (because it's not tightly tied to new product releases of yours, there isn't the feast-or-famine cycle of being entreprenurial in the traditional sense, which I have also done) that becomes a small supplemental income that you can depend on. The value of that is incalculable… certainly worth a billion VC dollars that Patreon means THAT to people.

An extra $50 can mean life and death to someone who is really on the edge. The example I used to Jack and Sam is a single mom with just a cell phone, who can livestream telling bedtime stories to her child. And other moms tune in, and support her and her stories for $50 a month: they can spare it, and that is now food for her child. It doesn't HAVE to make her J. K. Rowling, to count. It matters at all scales.

Bryan Lunduke heavily pushed locals.com as an alternative. His arguement, rightfully so, is that Patreon is painfully slow to use. Sadly he now seems to be mostly focused on moving people to locals, and not producing the same quality content as previously.

The creators I want to support are all on Patreon, so that’s the platform where I have account, but beyond setting up the subscription I new use the site. It’s a sad experience, slower than the Reddit redesign, it’s pointless to try to do anything meaningful on Patreon.

They need to invest in their site, but the valuation seem high for what they provide.

This is where I see crypto moving us forward.

With crypto, there is no gate keeper. No Stripe or Patreon or Paypal in the way. I love Stripe by the way, but they too could in theory block me for whatever reason. Also on the other side of the coin, you have the buyer who can cancel their subscription at any time. You could even have a smart contract for 30 day refunds - which allows the refund for any reason but at least the buyer has committed by having their funds held in that contract for the 30. Stable coins can take the speculation out of it and are ideal for small amounts of "cash" for these kinds of transactions.

I think this problem is a great example of where crypto can shine where normal finance is held back. You can have the idealistic platform - Wordpress on your own server and some PHP code or something to check for payments - no one "owning it" on your behalf. Someone can wrap that as a SaaS, but anyone can, there is no need to go with the big unicorn provider.

That leaves the question of how to market your little market stall on the internet? Well like anything else, just use the right tool for the job. You don't need the payment platform to be the way people find you.

I doubt it.

The limitation isn’t moving money, there are tons of ways for consumers to pay creators money, it’s all the services around payment that Patreon provides to both producer and consumer. Things like recurring charges, places for premium content, charging structure tied to content release, fraud protection, support, and marketing. A decent chunk of that is outside the scope of what crypto can solve.

I think the idea that creators should cobble together Wordpress websites kind of weird. Most of these creators are artists, not engineers. They probably don’t have the inclination nor the skills to build a DIY patreon. If they’re going to move, someone needs to provide a turnkey solution for them.

Yeah you are right about wordpress. Bad example. Something like substack or even blogger might be better. But anything like that should run through their own domain "just in case".

Wordpress can be turnkey - someone needs to set that up? I mean wordpress.com is kind of that. Or another company could set up an instant install and make it look good and make it fast wordpress service. They probably exist.

Maybe they could do it for free and then charge a take from Stripe.

Crypto solves some problems beyond this, but I am not sure it will be adopted because walled gardens and central corporations seem to win for the obvious reasons. Crypto gives the buyer more control and the seller more freedom. The seller can have zero fear of getting their funds cut off by the platform.

Recurring payments are not possible from the PULL side, but I like that. If something is valuable the customer will keep on paying. A smart contract could allow for subscriptions from the customer side by pushing the money until the contract is stopped. This solves the "remembering to do it" part.