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Comment by grey_earthling | Hacker News Reader

Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations.

And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.

Liberapay's model seems much more sustainable - donations only, no rewards; Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.

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>Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.

As in they are also funded by donations, or do the creators themselves pay for entry?

They say they are funded by donations:

> How is Liberapay funded? Are there fees?

> Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. However there are payment processing fees.

https://liberapay.com/about/faq

They are funded by donations: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/

Do you suppose their 41 members split the 700 euros evenly each month or have some kind of Ramen group buy system?

No need to guess: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/income/ . Most money goes to the creator of Liberapay, and I would not be surprised if it would mainly cover the costs of running the service.

Patreon also takes VC funding on a regular basis; if you ask Jack Conte what his plan is for when they come back around looking for profit he will just blow a bunch of sunshine up your ass about how all these investors are just totally great people who believe in supporting the arts.

When they raised rates for new creators but grandfathered in existing ones it was pretty much outed as a network effect VC scheme.

> Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations.

Huh? So does Paypal by taking a cut of payments. It does not work by people donating to Paypal. Does that mean Paypal doesnt work? The proposition does not make sense...

> And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.

More than that, I don't think Patreons will ever be able to compete in a world where Netflix/Max/Disney exists just by making content. For example, if you consider the $10 tier of The Command Zone[1], you'd have to weight that in against something like the Disney+ catalog, which I think is even cheaper and definitely has a lot more content?

[1] https://www.patreon.com/commandzone

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