15 ms·

I've seen Patreon kicking people off their platform for political reasons, so it is not decentralized, though certainly more so than alternatives existing befor

by PKop 9y ago

I've seen Patreon kicking people off their platform for political reasons, so it is not decentralized, though certainly more so than alternatives existing before Patreon. The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them. Something more along the lines of https://lbry.io/ https://lbry.io/ and similar.. Currently BTC and the like are push vs pull payment systems, so until smart contracts are widely used to enable subscription payments, this will be a blocker.

ouid 9y ago
Yes, clearly Bitcoin is the only way Patreon can become a "good thing".
- arcticfox 9y ago
  Was this serious or sarcastic? I agree with the sarcastic version, but I could also see the serious version being posted so I'm genuinely curious.
  - ouid 9y ago
    very sarcastic, but I'd still like to attract upvotes from people on both sides giving me the benefit of the doubt.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
They kicked off 8chan but kept The Sarkeesian Effect so in my opinion they've got it exactly right. They keep up pretty nasty stuff in the name of free speech, but don't let you cross the line into doxing and the like. I much prefer having sensible humans at the helm than have something purely anonymous.
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  There is no "getting it right" in free speech. Either you allow free speech or you don't, if you are keeping one controversial thing but kick out the other you gave up on free speech. You can't kick someone out because you think its right and claim allowing free spech.
  - quxbar 9y ago
    "People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, a theater in New York's Harlem neighborhood in 1884,[1] and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead. In the Shiloh Baptist Church disaster of 1902, over 100 people died when "fight" was misheard as "fire" in a crowded church causing a panic and stampede."
    - rexpop 9y ago
      And yet, no one has ever died from reading "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
    - problems 9y ago
      And that has absolutely nothing to do with political speech. You should probably read into the history on that one too... https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
    - adventured 9y ago
      The classic example of shouting "Fire!" is in fact not a matter of free speech at all. It's an intentional attempt at physical harm, which falls entirely outside the realm of free of speech. It's identical conceptually to walking up to someone and blasting an airhorn in their ear. That too is an act of physical violence, not free speech, and you're responsible for the consequences (such as hearing damage) just as with the act of shouting "Fire!".
    - PKop 9y ago
      The interesting point to think about is not restrictions on telling lies to incite panic & possible injury... but rather, restrictions on telling the truth, such as outlawing shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there's actually a fire. This is what defining "right think" means, where you have to confine your discourse to what is socially acceptable, whether or not what you're saying is true. This is the real problem, and vague corporate or government policies outlawing "hate speech" are vague, subjective, Orwellian, and don't event attempt to assess truthiness or falsiness.. they appeal to hurt feelings. Which are always and forever in the eye of the beholder. A hecklers veto to ideas one disagrees with. It's beyond scary that so many smart people here and around the country & world are perfectly fine to go down this road...
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  What happens when sensible humans are no longer at the helm?
  - burkaman 9y ago
    This question applies to every organization in the history of the world. It's logically impossible to design any kind of social system that can't be ruined by people.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      Benevolent AI maybe? More Iain Banks "Culture", that's the universe I'd choose out of all sci-fi to live in I think.
      - burkaman 9y ago
        I don't think AI really solves the problem. The question "What happens when sensible humans are no longer at the helm?" really means "What happens when people with different priorities are at the helm?" It's totally possible for a sane being, artificial or not, to take over Patreon and prioritize profit, or enforce their own values, or even shut down the site. The core problem is that you're interacting with entities you can't control. It's almost tautological; if you can't control them, by definition they can do things you don't like. I've only read the first Culture book, but I'm pretty sure the Idirans didn't feel like the Culture AIs were "sensible".
      - erikpukinskis 9y ago
        An AI would need to live a human life in a human body in order to understand what "benevolence to humans" means, and such an experience would make it functionally equivalent to a human with a cloud prosthesis.
        _puk 9y ago
        I'm thinking Breq in ancillary justice.. A large scale ship's AI reduced to a single ancillary, having to deal with humans on their level
- jorvi 9y ago
  Sarkeesian uses Mortal Kombat as example of a game that 'promotes violence against women' (despite being known and marketed as a brutal fighting game) so one would have to wonder if she is such a noble venture to support..
  - cholantesh 9y ago
    The Sarkeesian Effect is a (terrible) documentary that is critical of her, but anyway, do you have a link to her criticism of MK? To my knowledge her beef was with the sexualization of the female combatants.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    I am not a fan of Sarkeesian by any means (to be honest, I just try and avoid that entire part of the internet, on both sides), but there's a difference between "noble venture" and "inciting violence or other harmful behavior".
falcolas 9y ago
Until crypto currency can be regularly used to buy everyday essentials like food and housing, I don't see this being a reasonable way to pay creators. And currently, Patreon can only stop you from using their platform; they can not stop you from being paid. I can see an argument eventually being able to be formed behind "people effectively only use Patreon, so not being on it is a death knell" (like YouTube), but it's nowhere near that point yet.
- PKop 9y ago
  It can easily be exchanged for fiat currency, and what isn’t spent will appreciate. I see only positives in getting paid with it.
  - guelo 9y ago
    Bitcoin round trip fees are too high, cash to BTC back to cash probably averages 10-15%, plus the volatility risk. Patreon is not cheap, probably averaging 8-10%, but it is cheaper and obviously much more convenient.
    - hwillis 9y ago
      And not very likely to get significantly cheaper than Patreon. Bitcoins etc still require a backbone of infrastructure to process payments through mining. Those people still need to be paid, and the computational overhead with bitcoins/alternatives is billions of times higher than raw financial transactions. The cost will never go to zero. Even if it was as low as patreon dollars would be superior for 99% of people. When you need dinner on the table, dollars getting direct deposited into your account > worrying about bitcoin prices and selling coins. The only people who have any reason to switch are those who are producing content that is seen as intolerable, people trying to avoid taxes or the law, and people making moral stands.
    - mahyarm 9y ago
      10-15%!? Even coinbase with it's high fees is %3 + $0.50 round trip, which is pretty much equivalent to paypal. I would also think a crypto solution would probably take barely anything in management fees, unlike kickstarter and patreon. If your smart about it, you can use limit orders on something like GDAX and make it %0-%0.5. Despite all of that, I don't think you need crypto for this. Patreon dropping people out of distaste is giving money to competitors who don't care. What would stop that is credit card companies refusing processing to these companies.
hwillis 9y ago
>The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them. The pressure will always be to the biggest platforms, and those are conventional ones. Creators will be easier to discover on the bigger platform- if you already support someone on patreon, you can find similar creators, incentivizing creators to join patreon. Bigger platforms also have economies of scale and head starts on making beautiful, convenient interfaces. The pressure towards established platforms will always be greater than the pressure towards permissive, decentralized platforms. Patreon just has to not fuck up too bad and they will still have the monetary advantage on 99% of creators (well... unless they kick off all of the camgirls). A more interesting question is whether Patreon would ever switch to bitcoin. They could take a much bigger percentage. They could leverage their size to provide more stable prices, or even just force creators to accept bitcoin's volatility. The platform would still be central and moderated, and if someone managed to create a decentralized alternative with good bitcoin pricing, Patreon would be able to outprice them. There would be basically no path towards a decentralized alternative at that point. The risk/reward is still too low for Patreon, I think. As is, a patron decides how much money the creator gets and is basically blind to how much they pay unless they check their statements. Neither party would really see an advantage to switching to bitcoin, since Patreon and the creators would still get the same amount of money, and the Patrons mostly aren't aware of the potential extra 30 cents. They're also very unlikely to care.
chrisoverzero 9y ago
> I've seen Patreon kicking people off their platform for political reasons […] Have you? Are you thinking of Lauren Southern? Or maybe It's Going Down? The explanation from Patreon is very reasonable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmcK6GvgVPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmcK6GvgVPs
- vetinari 9y ago
  Sorry, but "we don't need evidence, our imagination is enough" is not anywhere near "very reasonable". The free speech is not necessary for the speech you agree with. It is for the speech, you don't agree with. Just because Patreon guys are fans of Antifa does not mean, they should bring their ideology to the business.
  - jerf 9y ago
    Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, it won't matter for much longer. Once Patreon demonstrates the viability of the business, which I think it pretty much has, making a clone won't be that difficult. There's not a lot of technical moat here. (Having to deal with real money means it's certainly more than the HN-mythical "I could do that in a weekend!", but, still, it's definitely in the range of "hobby programmer in under a year with enough dedication" to get a fully functional site up and running to start.) Speaking as a decently-large Patreon user and one that has advocated for it to the point of probably sounding almost like a shill on HN despite not being connected to them other than as customer... I don't use Patreon to use Patreon qua Patreon, nor do I do use any of their site discovery mechanisms to discover anyone. YMMV. I support the artists. If and when the artists I follow move around, I will follow them; I've already got a couple of recurring Paypal payments for people who work that way. Ultimately Patreon's political preferences won't matter for much. It may superficially resemble the debate about Facebook/Google news filtering algorithms, but the situation is actually entirely different and the question isn't all that relevant in the long term. I think the fact that we're not talking about "free" here helps a lot.
  - chrisoverzero 9y ago
    > Sorry, but "we don't need evidence, our imagination is enough" is not anywhere near "very reasonable". The video literally shows clips of behavior. The common theme of the video is “manifest observable behavior”. The video explains how actions, not speech, are what broke the terms of service. I really recommend you watch it. (Odd use of quotation marks – you directly quoted me, but completely made up what Patreon said.) > Just because the Patreon guys are fans of Antifa […] If they were such fans, I'm not sure they'd have removed IGD.
mirimir 9y ago
I'd love to write on Patreon. But there's no option for payouts via Bitcoin. Patrons could pay via credit/debit cards, and Patreon could payout in Bitcoin via Stripe. But they've specifically blocked Stripe's Bitcoin option. To "fight against fraud", whatever that means.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
Can we get a list of which sites Patreon has kicked off their platform? The only one I've seen mentioned so far is 8chan, which was posting kiddie porn and SWATting people. If that's the line, I'm 100% okay with it.
smcnally 9y ago
> The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them. http://steemit.com http://steemit.com is an example of precisely this. Will check out lbry.io.

by PKop 9y ago

ouid 9y ago

Yes, clearly Bitcoin is the only way Patreon can become a "good thing".

arcticfox 9y ago
Was this serious or sarcastic? I agree with the sarcastic version, but I could also see the serious version being posted so I'm genuinely curious.
- ouid 9y ago
  very sarcastic, but I'd still like to attract upvotes from people on both sides giving me the benefit of the doubt.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

They kicked off 8chan but kept The Sarkeesian Effect so in my opinion they've got it exactly right. They keep up pretty nasty stuff in the name of free speech, but don't let you cross the line into doxing and the like. I much prefer having sensible humans at the helm than have something purely anonymous.

dna_polymerase 9y ago
There is no "getting it right" in free speech. Either you allow free speech or you don't, if you are keeping one controversial thing but kick out the other you gave up on free speech. You can't kick someone out because you think its right and claim allowing free spech.
- quxbar 9y ago
  "People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, a theater in New York's Harlem neighborhood in 1884,[1] and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead. In the Shiloh Baptist Church disaster of 1902, over 100 people died when "fight" was misheard as "fire" in a crowded church causing a panic and stampede."
  - rexpop 9y ago
    And yet, no one has ever died from reading "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
  - problems 9y ago
    And that has absolutely nothing to do with political speech. You should probably read into the history on that one too... https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
  - adventured 9y ago
    The classic example of shouting "Fire!" is in fact not a matter of free speech at all. It's an intentional attempt at physical harm, which falls entirely outside the realm of free of speech. It's identical conceptually to walking up to someone and blasting an airhorn in their ear. That too is an act of physical violence, not free speech, and you're responsible for the consequences (such as hearing damage) just as with the act of shouting "Fire!".
  - PKop 9y ago
    The interesting point to think about is not restrictions on telling lies to incite panic & possible injury... but rather, restrictions on telling the truth, such as outlawing shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there's actually a fire. This is what defining "right think" means, where you have to confine your discourse to what is socially acceptable, whether or not what you're saying is true. This is the real problem, and vague corporate or government policies outlawing "hate speech" are vague, subjective, Orwellian, and don't event attempt to assess truthiness or falsiness.. they appeal to hurt feelings. Which are always and forever in the eye of the beholder. A hecklers veto to ideas one disagrees with. It's beyond scary that so many smart people here and around the country & world are perfectly fine to go down this road...
EddieRingle 9y ago
What happens when sensible humans are no longer at the helm?
- burkaman 9y ago
  This question applies to every organization in the history of the world. It's logically impossible to design any kind of social system that can't be ruined by people.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Benevolent AI maybe? More Iain Banks "Culture", that's the universe I'd choose out of all sci-fi to live in I think.
    - burkaman 9y ago
      I don't think AI really solves the problem. The question "What happens when sensible humans are no longer at the helm?" really means "What happens when people with different priorities are at the helm?" It's totally possible for a sane being, artificial or not, to take over Patreon and prioritize profit, or enforce their own values, or even shut down the site. The core problem is that you're interacting with entities you can't control. It's almost tautological; if you can't control them, by definition they can do things you don't like. I've only read the first Culture book, but I'm pretty sure the Idirans didn't feel like the Culture AIs were "sensible".
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      An AI would need to live a human life in a human body in order to understand what "benevolence to humans" means, and such an experience would make it functionally equivalent to a human with a cloud prosthesis.
      - _puk 9y ago
        I'm thinking Breq in ancillary justice.. A large scale ship's AI reduced to a single ancillary, having to deal with humans on their level
jorvi 9y ago
Sarkeesian uses Mortal Kombat as example of a game that 'promotes violence against women' (despite being known and marketed as a brutal fighting game) so one would have to wonder if she is such a noble venture to support..
- cholantesh 9y ago
  The Sarkeesian Effect is a (terrible) documentary that is critical of her, but anyway, do you have a link to her criticism of MK? To my knowledge her beef was with the sexualization of the female combatants.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  I am not a fan of Sarkeesian by any means (to be honest, I just try and avoid that entire part of the internet, on both sides), but there's a difference between "noble venture" and "inciting violence or other harmful behavior".

falcolas 9y ago

Until crypto currency can be regularly used to buy everyday essentials like food and housing, I don't see this being a reasonable way to pay creators. And currently, Patreon can only stop you from using their platform; they can not stop you from being paid. I can see an argument eventually being able to be formed behind "people effectively only use Patreon, so not being on it is a death knell" (like YouTube), but it's nowhere near that point yet.

PKop 9y ago
It can easily be exchanged for fiat currency, and what isn’t spent will appreciate. I see only positives in getting paid with it.
- guelo 9y ago
  Bitcoin round trip fees are too high, cash to BTC back to cash probably averages 10-15%, plus the volatility risk. Patreon is not cheap, probably averaging 8-10%, but it is cheaper and obviously much more convenient.
  - hwillis 9y ago
    And not very likely to get significantly cheaper than Patreon. Bitcoins etc still require a backbone of infrastructure to process payments through mining. Those people still need to be paid, and the computational overhead with bitcoins/alternatives is billions of times higher than raw financial transactions. The cost will never go to zero. Even if it was as low as patreon dollars would be superior for 99% of people. When you need dinner on the table, dollars getting direct deposited into your account > worrying about bitcoin prices and selling coins. The only people who have any reason to switch are those who are producing content that is seen as intolerable, people trying to avoid taxes or the law, and people making moral stands.
  - mahyarm 9y ago
    10-15%!? Even coinbase with it's high fees is %3 + $0.50 round trip, which is pretty much equivalent to paypal. I would also think a crypto solution would probably take barely anything in management fees, unlike kickstarter and patreon. If your smart about it, you can use limit orders on something like GDAX and make it %0-%0.5. Despite all of that, I don't think you need crypto for this. Patreon dropping people out of distaste is giving money to competitors who don't care. What would stop that is credit card companies refusing processing to these companies.

hwillis 9y ago

>The evolution will converge towards content creators being funded through decentralized crypto currency platforms so that the money cannot be prevented from getting to creators if someone wants to pay them. The pressure will always be to the biggest platforms, and those are conventional ones. Creators will be easier to discover on the bigger platform- if you already support someone on patreon, you can find similar creators, incentivizing creators to join patreon. Bigger platforms also have economies of scale and head starts on making beautiful, convenient interfaces. The pressure towards established platforms will always be greater than the pressure towards permissive, decentralized platforms. Patreon just has to not fuck up too bad and they will still have the monetary advantage on 99% of creators (well... unless they kick off all of the camgirls). A more interesting question is whether Patreon would ever switch to bitcoin. They could take a much bigger percentage. They could leverage their size to provide more stable prices, or even just force creators to accept bitcoin's volatility. The platform would still be central and moderated, and if someone managed to create a decentralized alternative with good bitcoin pricing, Patreon would be able to outprice them. There would be basically no path towards a decentralized alternative at that point. The risk/reward is still too low for Patreon, I think. As is, a patron decides how much money the creator gets and is basically blind to how much they pay unless they check their statements. Neither party would really see an advantage to switching to bitcoin, since Patreon and the creators would still get the same amount of money, and the Patrons mostly aren't aware of the potential extra 30 cents. They're also very unlikely to care.

chrisoverzero 9y ago

> I've seen Patreon kicking people off their platform for political reasons […] Have you? Are you thinking of Lauren Southern? Or maybe It's Going Down? The explanation from Patreon is very reasonable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmcK6GvgVPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmcK6GvgVPs

vetinari 9y ago
Sorry, but "we don't need evidence, our imagination is enough" is not anywhere near "very reasonable". The free speech is not necessary for the speech you agree with. It is for the speech, you don't agree with. Just because Patreon guys are fans of Antifa does not mean, they should bring their ideology to the business.
- jerf 9y ago
  Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, it won't matter for much longer. Once Patreon demonstrates the viability of the business, which I think it pretty much has, making a clone won't be that difficult. There's not a lot of technical moat here. (Having to deal with real money means it's certainly more than the HN-mythical "I could do that in a weekend!", but, still, it's definitely in the range of "hobby programmer in under a year with enough dedication" to get a fully functional site up and running to start.) Speaking as a decently-large Patreon user and one that has advocated for it to the point of probably sounding almost like a shill on HN despite not being connected to them other than as customer... I don't use Patreon to use Patreon qua Patreon, nor do I do use any of their site discovery mechanisms to discover anyone. YMMV. I support the artists. If and when the artists I follow move around, I will follow them; I've already got a couple of recurring Paypal payments for people who work that way. Ultimately Patreon's political preferences won't matter for much. It may superficially resemble the debate about Facebook/Google news filtering algorithms, but the situation is actually entirely different and the question isn't all that relevant in the long term. I think the fact that we're not talking about "free" here helps a lot.
- chrisoverzero 9y ago
  > Sorry, but "we don't need evidence, our imagination is enough" is not anywhere near "very reasonable". The video literally shows clips of behavior. The common theme of the video is “manifest observable behavior”. The video explains how actions, not speech, are what broke the terms of service. I really recommend you watch it. (Odd use of quotation marks – you directly quoted me, but completely made up what Patreon said.) > Just because the Patreon guys are fans of Antifa […] If they were such fans, I'm not sure they'd have removed IGD.

mirimir 9y ago

I'd love to write on Patreon. But there's no option for payouts via Bitcoin. Patrons could pay via credit/debit cards, and Patreon could payout in Bitcoin via Stripe. But they've specifically blocked Stripe's Bitcoin option. To "fight against fraud", whatever that means.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

Can we get a list of which sites Patreon has kicked off their platform? The only one I've seen mentioned so far is 8chan, which was posting kiddie porn and SWATting people. If that's the line, I'm 100% okay with it.

smcnally 9y ago