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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

Many of the most successful Patreon profiles use the platform only as a way to provide a paid addition to their free podcast feed. You start supporting them, grab the private RSS feed and add it to your podcast app, then never visit Patreon again.

You turn off Patreon emails and push notifications because the episodes just show up in your podcatcher like any other podcast. Patreon isn't offering anything in the relationship beyond recurring monthly payment processing. RSS + your parasocial friendship with the podcast hosts are what builds the relationship.

I'd love it if a podcast-focused company stepped in to fill the same role. They could provide the same custom features that ATP and Dithering/Stratechery have added recently to their paid feeds. The UX of having "Free" and "Paid" feeds for the same podcast really sucks.

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Another thing Patreon offers is a central place to support many creators (of various types) with a single profile. I mostly support youtubers, some web comic makers, and some podcasts. Ans already having the profile makes it very low friction to support new creators (if only I had money for that). So it's a bit hard to see podcast creators trying out a new platform - network effects at play and all.

This. My niche is web serials with some “youtubers” thrown in, but despite having considered individual donations of old I never actually did it until I git access to a platform where I can readily and relatively safely provide support for multiple creators easily.

This seems like a feature to me. Patreon helps me support my creators, takes their fee and gets out of my way. That's how things are supposed to work IMO.

I suppose I like it as well... but the point being that in the case of these podcasts Patreon is only rent-seeking and not actually "building a community of fans" or hosting/delivering/surfacing the content. (And those aspirations are I'm sure what underpin the $90M investment and entire company growth strategy.)

Podcasters could save ~10% on Patreon fees and maybe even gain some useful dedicated RSS tools and membership perks that would work inside a podcast app.

Why would they save money on fees? Would the podcast-focused company build and maintain this app for free?

Patreon is trying to be a YouTube/Facebook-like community platform that controls the relationship between creators and paying fans. There's no reason to pay an extra 12% on top of credit card fees if you already control your own distribution and membership list, as all RSS podcasts do.

I'd like to see the podcatchers build this in. I'd push a "support me on Patreon" button. All it has to do is open up my web browser.

Some podcasts put that info in the episode descriptions, but I usually end up finding it via Google.

Bonus points if it could automatically switch me to an ad-free feed for paid supporters, but that would require some infrastructure. Just putting a "pay" button prominently on the app would nudge people. It really is one of those things where $1/month times 5,000 people could make a going concern.

How do you "grab the private RSS feed"?

After supporting the creator your get the RSS feed in an email:

https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/213557023-Enab...

It is also listed on the Patreon page for that creator, if you have the patience to wait five years for the page to load.

Thank you!

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