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To be clear: A PBC just means they have some value that they will not sacrifice for profit. It doesn't mean they aren't for profit, and it doesn't mean they ar

To be clear: A PBC just means they have some value that they will not sacrifice for profit. It doesn't mean they aren't for profit, and it doesn't mean they are democratic or anything. It's still a good thing. Not being a PBC is basically unethical always (there's NO ethical excuse for ANY for-profit to NOT be a PBC). But it's a low standard, not comparable to being a co-op or non-profit. Also, even with Patreon being not a PBC, it's horrendous to compare them to Facebook. Facebook is an evil corporation that spends tons of resources promoting surveillance, advertising, and manipulation (and gaining power to dramatically influence politics etc). Facebook is exploitive and actively malicious. For all the real complaints about Patreon, they are doing stuff that is largely positive at least and is in direct opposition to the surveillance-capitalism of Facebook. There is NO COMPARISON. Facebook is plainly awful. Patreon is a good concept run by good people with some real problems that make it worth looking at the competition.

zanny 9y ago
Facebook only turned into such a hostile entity because it got big enough to exert real political influence. I'm not a fan of putting the future of content creation into the hands of the founders or eventual investors when Patreon inevitably goes public because they are just as likely to turn just as evil as Facebook if you gave them the same colossal war chest Facebook has, and Patreon has a much more reliable revenue stream to fund such endeavors - their whole platform is about transferring money and they just take a cut. By comparison Twitter could easily have turned out as hostile to personal privacy as Facebook if they had won the advertising lottery that Facebook did to become so valuable. In general you simply don't get ethical corporations. They have no reason to be, and ethics hurts profits and produces vectors for competition to capture your market through predatory behavior. That is why I said I only like this because of the PBC - it is barely better than Patreon, but it is better than Patreon, and we don't have a viable freedom respecting alternative yet and going forward its going to just get harder and harder if Patreon is allowed to amass network effects the way it has in the last few years.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  > Facebook only turned into such a hostile entity because it got big enough to exert real political influence. This evaluation is very shallow. Facebook has been a manipulative and unethical corporation for years, maybe forever. It's true that lots of companies start out fine and then start abusing their power once they get big. But Facebook is that and is unethical in other ways also. By design, Facebook is about collecting deep personal info, capturing attention and then selling your attention to the highest bidder. The very design of Patreon is in opposition to this. Even if Patreon were the most unethical abuser of their power, they would then be the worst in the basically ethical market of funding creative work directly. And Patreon isn't abusing their power dramatically right now and may never get there. Facebook is already being the worst in a fundamentally unethical market based on getting attention and selling it to advertisers. Your points about corporations and ethics are broadly true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't better and worse. We should be skeptical of all for-profit entities, especially VC-backed and stock-based ones. But they aren't all equal. Some are worse than others and some are by-design worse. It's basically impossible for Patreon to turn into something as horrendous as Facebook. Patreon could get pretty bad and that would still be true.
  - zanny 9y ago
    Patreon has been pushing features to publish content on their platform. They already have correlated user data not only between what people like, but what they are willing to pay for, and have mounds of comments and pledge data about all that behavior. Patreon isn't about collecting personal info, but people are giving them personal info by the boatload and Patreon remains a private corporation at the end of the day. If they get big enough they will be presented with an opportunity to exert Facebook class influence, especially if (this is my fear) content creators start using patreon as their only platform, where they don't release their creative endeavors on other sites and services, the same way a lot of people only interact with others online via Facebook. The difference is good content creators are making legitimately valuable information unlike what the vast majority of Facebook is. The crowding out effects of Facebook just limit access to insular echo chambers. The crowding out effects of Patreon, taken to the scale of Facebook, crowd out the market for artists, musicians, animators, game developers, software creators, almost any creative profession that gets so centralized on Patreon that operating in that industry de facto requires using Patreon. We are not nearly there yet, but given Patreons growth curve (and with knowledge of the growth rates of other abusive centralized services like Facebook) it is not something to just ignore the potential of. There is always the possibility Patreon can be using its data already for nefarious purposes. We have no idea, the data is private, and if they are violating their own data collection TOS thats only a problem if users find out about it. Bulk collection by dozens of web properties has been going on for decades without consequences despite bogus terms of service and data privacy agreements, the fundamental problem with all those services is how little people care or are aware of the dangers of giving information freely.

zanny 9y ago

Facebook only turned into such a hostile entity because it got big enough to exert real political influence. I'm not a fan of putting the future of content creation into the hands of the founders or eventual investors when Patreon inevitably goes public because they are just as likely to turn just as evil as Facebook if you gave them the same colossal war chest Facebook has, and Patreon has a much more reliable revenue stream to fund such endeavors - their whole platform is about transferring money and they just take a cut. By comparison Twitter could easily have turned out as hostile to personal privacy as Facebook if they had won the advertising lottery that Facebook did to become so valuable. In general you simply don't get ethical corporations. They have no reason to be, and ethics hurts profits and produces vectors for competition to capture your market through predatory behavior. That is why I said I only like this because of the PBC - it is barely better than Patreon, but it is better than Patreon, and we don't have a viable freedom respecting alternative yet and going forward its going to just get harder and harder if Patreon is allowed to amass network effects the way it has in the last few years.

quadrangle 9y ago
> Facebook only turned into such a hostile entity because it got big enough to exert real political influence. This evaluation is very shallow. Facebook has been a manipulative and unethical corporation for years, maybe forever. It's true that lots of companies start out fine and then start abusing their power once they get big. But Facebook is that and is unethical in other ways also. By design, Facebook is about collecting deep personal info, capturing attention and then selling your attention to the highest bidder. The very design of Patreon is in opposition to this. Even if Patreon were the most unethical abuser of their power, they would then be the worst in the basically ethical market of funding creative work directly. And Patreon isn't abusing their power dramatically right now and may never get there. Facebook is already being the worst in a fundamentally unethical market based on getting attention and selling it to advertisers. Your points about corporations and ethics are broadly true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't better and worse. We should be skeptical of all for-profit entities, especially VC-backed and stock-based ones. But they aren't all equal. Some are worse than others and some are by-design worse. It's basically impossible for Patreon to turn into something as horrendous as Facebook. Patreon could get pretty bad and that would still be true.
- zanny 9y ago
  Patreon has been pushing features to publish content on their platform. They already have correlated user data not only between what people like, but what they are willing to pay for, and have mounds of comments and pledge data about all that behavior. Patreon isn't about collecting personal info, but people are giving them personal info by the boatload and Patreon remains a private corporation at the end of the day. If they get big enough they will be presented with an opportunity to exert Facebook class influence, especially if (this is my fear) content creators start using patreon as their only platform, where they don't release their creative endeavors on other sites and services, the same way a lot of people only interact with others online via Facebook. The difference is good content creators are making legitimately valuable information unlike what the vast majority of Facebook is. The crowding out effects of Facebook just limit access to insular echo chambers. The crowding out effects of Patreon, taken to the scale of Facebook, crowd out the market for artists, musicians, animators, game developers, software creators, almost any creative profession that gets so centralized on Patreon that operating in that industry de facto requires using Patreon. We are not nearly there yet, but given Patreons growth curve (and with knowledge of the growth rates of other abusive centralized services like Facebook) it is not something to just ignore the potential of. There is always the possibility Patreon can be using its data already for nefarious purposes. We have no idea, the data is private, and if they are violating their own data collection TOS thats only a problem if users find out about it. Bulk collection by dozens of web properties has been going on for decades without consequences despite bogus terms of service and data privacy agreements, the fundamental problem with all those services is how little people care or are aware of the dangers of giving information freely.