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> You cannot do business and be anonymous. The tax man would eat you alive. At least outside of USA. You also need a license as sole proprietor or be incorporated as a company in order to make repetitive sales and not one-offs. So again, no anonymity whatsoever.

There is no anonymity between the creator and Patreon, or between Patreon and patrons. The anonymity is between the creator and the patrons.

I don't see any reason why this would be illegal, especially as Patreon does this in countless jurisdictions.

> "by works" payment model is illegal. You can receive donations or have subscriptions or pay per view but you cannot "maybe deliver", "deliver maybe one work, maybe ten". Again, illegal as fuck.

This is a model that Patreon already supports (again in countless jurisdictions), so unless their legal counsel is completely incompetent it can hardly be "illegal as fuck".

> There is no anonymity between the creator and Patreon, or between Patreon and patrons. The anonymity is between the creator and the patrons.

that is exactly the problem. You have two relationships here: author -> patreon and author -> patrons. The first one is irrelevant, the second on is the problematic one. You cannot be anonymous in one case and not in another. That is not how business, law or taxes work - anywhere. Just because patrons do not want to know the legal identity does not mean it is legal to hide it. You could get sued for tax avoidance like that.

Do you think it was equally illegal for publishers and bookstores to sell novels written by Richard Bachman, without revealing that that was actually a pseudonym for Stephen King?

"publishers" is the keyword here. You have answered your own question.

If you can point me to a law that says it's legal to hide a content creator's identity from customers when the content is ink and paper, but illegal when it's distributed over the internet, I'd love to see it.

As others have pointed out, Patreon does exactly this in many different jurisdictions. I find it hard to believe that they're just brazenly violating the law and absolutely nobody cares.

Patreon is effectively the publisher here? Again, they are already doing it which makes your assertion of illegality questionable. What jurisdiction are you, Germany?

Buddy are you for real? It’s perfectly legal to sell under a fake name (or for instance, as an LLC) as long as you pay your taxes as your real identity!

You need to maybe not try to replace patreon if you’re this clueless.

But can't anyone just look up the owner of the LLC, that info is public?

I believe that if someone with a patreon wants their identity to stay private, making an LLC (depending on the name of it) may backfire?

There are several states where you can form an LLC without making your information public. In New Mexico you don’t even need to tell the state.

I can’t tell if you’re talking about the US though, if you’re referring to other countries it may be much more restrictive, lots of places seem to require ID and registration for basically anything.

Anonymous artists have made money for years in all sorts of jurisdictions, it’s definitely possible to do. e.g. banksy, the residents, the rubber bandits, TISM

Yes, but these are true artists that make one-off sales. It is not a business for them(not legally). Where you have no legal obligation to become a "business". Author on Patreon on the other hand cannot claim to be "opportunistic" seller. They make repeated sales there, therefore it is taxable income and therefore they must become a legal entity of some sort and abide by the legal and tax laws of the consumer tax law in their country of origin.

With two decades of performance and album sales, an 18 year hiatus and a recent reunion you can hardly accuse TISM of "one-off" sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TISM

The key here is that neither Humphrey B. Flaubert nor Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun were filing tax returns via their nom de guerre's.

Just absolutely loving that TISM is popping up here. They’re the first thing I thought of in this thread too.

TISM made me the Amway sales rep that I am today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxoODPQ4CTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijx_tT5lCDY

You make a lot of outlandish claims. I'm confused - are you claiming that Patreon is an organized crime syndicate?

Perhaps it would be clearer to "follow the money" - from my perspective (as a patron) the relationships are "patron → patreon" (I pay a single bill from them, once a month or slightly more, but not once per artist) and then "patreon → artist". (Banks/CC/paypal are more interested in the first one, IRS is more interested in the second one...)

I already don't know any direct "wallet" information about the artist, and that's kind of the point - every direct micropayments approach since at least the mid-1990s has failed, so we have aggregation instead, otherwise we'd be spending more on the transaction than on the artist.

Well, that presupposes that patreon itself is the publisher and you as patron/payee are doing business with them and not with the author. Which is the same model that youtube uses. I have never been author on patreon, so i have no idea about their setup. If this is the case then obviously that is perfectly legal. The problem then becomes censorship because patreon then is the owner of the license for your work that they are selling themselves and giving you your cut. Quite a different business model but one that "protects" the identity of the author because they are essentially sub-contracotrs.

patrons pay patreon, not the author. patreon pays the creator. how can it be illegal? patrons trust patreon to deliver their money to the authors, but that is irrelevant. the patrons pay directly to patreon.

Isn't Patreon the merchant of record?

The IRS and Patreon need to know who you are. Patrons don't. The article is pretty specific about the distinction. (Looks like the US is 30% of patreon's business, more than any other single country, so I'm reasonably comfortable acting like my US-specific response matters.)

Likewise, are you claiming that the "by works" model that patreon supports today is illegal?

As for the "non quid pro quo" case - as a patron I care about this one in particular - patreon does this (or at least only screws it up in minor ways), the article is just recommending that any alternative handle it too. Maybe your donation management approach handles this?

Finally, "api access to third parties without being able to monetize it" - the request isn't so much for third party access, as first party - primarily for artists, maybe optionally for patrons. (This one is a little less important if you have a broad enough range of artist-CRM options, but really, noone has before, api support for developers is a great way to let other people fail fast so you don't have to...) Also, the API in question is something slightly less sophisticated than "a single google sheet per artist", it's not going to be that expensive.

I'm definitely curious about what you come up with, especially if you get traction with artists - but only about half a dozen of the artists I support through patreon are outside the US anyway, so until you work out US support I'm probably not going to notice. Good luck, though.

> The IRS and Patreon need to know who you are. Patrons don't.

As i commended elsewhere, if Patreon acts as the publisher, then yes. The authors are merely sub-contractors and their relationship with patrons is quite different.

> Likewise, are you claiming that the "by works" model that patreon supports today is illegal?

As I commented elsewhere, I might not have understood what the author has been describing and misinterpreted it.

The API question, based on your take, then needs to be expanded on. Too many variables here. Sound more to me like this is not an API question at all, but rather lack of functionality/forms/pages/lists on the front-end side?

> I'm definitely curious about what you come up with, especially if you get traction with artists - but only about half a dozen of the artists I support through patreon are outside the US anyway, so until you work out US support I'm probably not going to notice. Good luck, though.

It will have no geo-restriction so who ever comes will be welcome. Frankly, I am not looking to get millions of users. I will be satisfied if it pays for itself and people's salaries and author get alternative means of communicating with their fans, or the world, in this modern era of censorship and political correctness. My setup if very different from the one bigtech uses, so I hope that will be what will attract people there. I have been working on this for a year with about 5 month break. It will be out next year.

"by works is illegal"

I've been using Patreon this way since it launched in 2013, and I am pretty sure they have grown to the point where it is impossible for the only reason they get away with it is that they are too small for anyone to say "hey this is illegal, you have x months to stop doing this before we come down on you".

"why would I give API access without being able to monetize it"

It is worth noting that Patreon was created by a musician with the intent of being a service for artists/musicians/etc, and still occasionally acts like this instead of a purely profit-driven corporate entity whose primary duty is making its shareholders rich. The CEO is still that musician, though I think his musical output has fallen off a lot as "running a system of money pipes" took over his life. Patreon makes a lot of choices that look weird from a purely monetary viewpoint because of this.

> I think his musical output has fallen off a lot as "running a system of money pipes" took over his life

Does not appear to be the case? Jack is pumping out music at an insane rate.

If you mean quality wise, that is a lot harder to judge objectively. Subjectively I like his new stuff, and his new band the Scary Pockets is doing well popularity wise.

Oh he is? I just got as far as looking at his Bandcamp page, which hasn't been updated in years. I'm not into his music, just a happy client of the company he started to try and make more money than Youtube was willing to trickle down to him.

> "by works" payment model is illegal. You can receive donations or have subscriptions or pay per view but you cannot "maybe deliver", "deliver maybe one work, maybe ten". Again, illegal as fuck.

How can Patreon allow it then? It's a real, existing thing. If you don't deliver, you don't get paid.

By work is common. For example sales people are paid on comission. If they do 10 deals they get 10x the money. Similarly, lawyers can and do work on comission in fields like collection and tort. Farm workers are paid by piece when it comes to harvesting or planting. In tech, pen testers are often paid by exploit.

in that case, maybe i did not properly understood how the author describes that model.

I don't know how to write this without sounding snarky, which is not my intention but: maybe if you are intending to build a Patreon competitor, you should look into how this model works.

It's probably not a big source of their profit, and certainly a competitor can live without it. But as both a consumer and creator it's the only model I'm interested in. It really aligns everyone's incentives.

I am not trying to copy Patreon. I am merely implementing the general idea of selling your digital content online. That's all. If people like Patreon and their monetization channels, I am not here to try and steal them away. Not my intention whatsoever. I am doing a lot of things very differently to Patreon.

> I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon. And the author is quite naive in his complaints.

> I am not trying to copy Patreon. I am merely implementing the general idea of selling your digital content online. That's all.

You should stop posting, honestly. Either you tried to gather interest for your project by posting in a Patreon thread, or you've realized how little you actually know and you are backtracking.

Best to cut your losses, revisit what you are working on, make sure you have a clear path and you've verified it's what customers want, and build something you can show before talking about it.

> I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon.

This was you in the original post. If you consider Patreon a competitor, then you need to understand their business model far better than you apparently do. You don't need to copy them, but you do need to understand them. You cannot compete with an established company that you have given zero effort to understand.

No, you don't. That would be simply copying them and going head to head against them. I am doing neither. Just because I am taking the general idea of selling digital content does not mean I have to know what exactly patreon does or or how it does it or that I have to do the same thing. It is like complaining that Yahoo mail isn't exactly the same as gmail. Or Office365 is not the same as google docs. The general idea is the same, but the implementation is nothing alike. If you cannot grasp that concept, I have nothing else to say to you.

I'm explicitly not saying that you should copy them, I'm saying you should understand them. What makes them tick? Why did people choose them? What do they do well? What do they do poorly?

The fact that you're having such a hard time understanding the difference between researching your competition and copying them is further proof that you aren't ready to be running a startup—you have a lot to learn about business before you're going to get anywhere. If you're dead set on continuing, it would be a good idea to learn a bit of humility and consider that maybe, just maybe, the dozen-or-so people on a startup forum telling you that you're wrong might know something you don't.

One note, I don’t think the author is saying that the person should be anonymous but rather the way they talk to their audience should be. In the backend they will be known but for the audience they have a specific name that doesn’t have to be their full government name.

I get that but you cannot be selling anonymously as long as it is a way for you to make a living, fully or partially, and it is not a one time thing(like selling some used items on ebay or similar website). I cannot speak for all countries but I would say most have a law that requires you to get a sole proprietor license or incorporate as company when you are getting income from repeated transactions. Customers have various protections so they must know the identity of the seller. Not that they want to, mostly they don't, but by law they must be able to get that information, possible even receive an invoice that lists this information. Not to mention that if you are buying works for business purposes, VAT might get involved and other legal and tax complexities.

If you are making a platform you must make it universally usable. Just because one creator does not like or is missing some thing, you just cannot bend the platform to suit his needs. It just does not work like that.

Personally, I have solved the anonymity issue. It's not hard to do but it requires legal layering, which sounds way more complex than it actually is, but i don't want to get out my solution in here.

I think part of Patreon’s value-add is solving these issues. And it’s not like this is unprecedented. In the music world there are artists who are anonymous but when you buy a record you’re buying it from retailer which is where you go if there are issues and a record label, who presumably knows the legal identity of the artist.

If someone thinks they can have a competitive edge against existing market leader by 1) have an API 2) make UI faster, they probably lived in an echo chamber for too long and really need to spend more time with non-developer people.

Perhaps their other points are valid. Admittedly I don't know enough to tell.

You are confusing anonymity and pseudonymity. The author never mentioned anonymity, it wouldn't make any sense for a creator trying to develop a fanbase. (Which could be anonymous.)

Hosting video, even yourself, has been a solved problem for years now :

https://framablog.org/2022/12/13/peertube-v5-the-result-of-5...