Rubbish. For any given "new patron" relationship, most content is past content. I wrote up how horrible the experience is in a comment on a past thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691168

As far as I can tell, Patreon's most compelling attribute is a clever name. If some other company nailed the discovery and "new connection" experience, they'd own the niche. There's a small network effect but I doubt it's terribly compelling since creators can easily exist on multiple networks.